I’m currently in the process of authoring a locomotion suite using the Oliver rig for my reel, and I’m planning out a shot that shows all the authored animations and transitions.

Something like:

‘idle’ -> ‘walk’ -> ‘run’ -> ‘sprint’ -> ‘stop’ -> ‘idle’

with nice transition animations in between. The idea came to me as my mentor said that having a character transition well between all the above isn’t something he’s seen much of, and is more impressive than cutting between multiple different locomotion loops.

I also saw a writeup from an animator at Riot Games, in which he mentioned that a suite of animations with clear gameplay focus in mind is something to definitely include in your reel.

I’ve been authoring these animations in their own separate files, of course. I’ve spent the last 3 days trying to figure out the easiest way to hook all these animations up in an easily controllable and flexible way.

My first thought was to try non-linear animation within Maya using the time editor and animation clips. I have no idea if it’s still a feature that’s actively in development, but the headache to get this working was monumental. I’m not sure if it’s because of the rig I’m using (I doubt it - it’s not significantly heavy) but it would take upwards of 3 minutes to bring animation from one file into another, and often it just wouldn’t work.

Some data would come through and other data wouldn’t. There was also the added headache that came with animating with IK arms in my idle, and FK arms in my run, which meant that inbetween these two animations a switch would have to happen somewhere.

After banging my head against this for several days, I decided to just do the above within Unity’s timeline. For this shot, I was planning on mimicing the look and feel of a game-engine anyway. This was far more pleasant for two main reasons:

1. Significantly faster load times. No more 3 minute wait times to see if the animation made it in.
2. Unity doesn’t concern itself with the animation controllers, instead just looking at the joint transforms. This avoided my FK/IK switching problem.

I ran into another error that gave me a headache for a couple of hours, but that had to do with having non-matching namespaces within Maya when exporting. I’ve updated the previous post accordingly to avoid in this in the future.

Anyway - Unity’s timeline works perfectly for my purposes!

Here’s the WIP shot - I still have more bits to do, but the bones are there:

Ended up scrapping the ‘sprint’ anim and went for a more interesting ‘stop’ instead (a trip into a prone state).