need to actually put videos / gifs

About the Process

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Overview

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• Built fully usable animation pipeline and engine agnostic animation system
• Built a Unity Bridge to translate this information to Unity objects / components
• Used the system to make a character controller to move, jump, dance, pick up a box, and look at objects
• Features:
  • Keyframes, Clips, and Controller
  • Loading Skeletons & Animations
  • FK & IK (CCD) & FK/IK Blending
  • Animation blending & blend tree
  • The actual character controller

Structure

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Full Scope UML Diagram
(not all class details are shown)

Flow

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• We convert Unity objects and classes into our own –> then interface with them with the backend system.
• And the program specific way we interface them is controlled by the Unity Program, which includes things like Blending.

Unity Bridge

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• Acts as adapter from Unity’s FBX import (files in resources) to our classes / framework
• Skeleton is the tree structure of transforms in the hierarchy
• Animations are translated into our custom class from Unity’s Animation Clip class

Unity Program

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• Player Controller script handles input and physics. It has and controls Unity Program.
• Unity Program is the driver for our actual animation code using the Animation Player.
• Plus has our program specific information. It builds / holds the Blend Tree, Transitions, and State Machine.
• Animation information is stored in Anim Nodes, then the Animation Player updates those nodes thru the blend tree

Blend Trees

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• Animation player updates the currently used node, then node evaluates the actual pose output, and animation player applies that to skeleton.
• Interface for node types (includes nodes for state machine!)
• Anim state is for the Animation state machine and holds which animation to play and the transitions.
• Then the node itself is a statemachine where that outputs a spatial pose. this is so kool

The End

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This project was kind of a lot and was the culmination of our learning throughout the semester from using C in a different framework. So we got those takeaways and applied it to a different language and engine.