Chip says “Hello!”

I have used mecanim animations for so long. I use https://www.mixamo.com/ to generate them. They are truly great. One of my favorite tricks is to clip the animations to just a few frames and loop them in unity. I can use the base animation to transition from their last clip to the new loop. So it starts with movement and ends in a still loop. It is a quick way to make simple animation systems. But that can only take you so far.

IK (or Inverse Kinematics) is a rigging system that sits on top of your existing “baked in” animation. It has a few quirks and I am still learning so I won’t explain everything I am doing. Instead I will point to the resources I am using to learn.

Intro to IK:

Unity official documentation: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.animation.rigging@1.1/manual/RiggingWorkflow.html

I am just using the “Two Bone IK constraint” on Chip’s arms, legs and head. I feel like it isn’t optimal yet, but it works for the most part.

The one gotcha I came across is moving the ‘hint’ points with the ‘target’ points. I found this to be important and difficult.

Also, today is the first day of the 32 Bit Spring Cleaning game jam! Good luck to everyone participating =D