Animation Best Practices - Tiffany

For the animation process after deciding on our idea for our game environment, we had to gather references for our animations. What would someone be doing in an Egyptian Tomb? We decided that they would likely be excavating, and therefore we needed references for things people might do during that process. Videos of archaeologists digging and brushing in the dirt, inspecting artifacts, and moving carefully enough not to harm anything all proved to be very helpful.

Once I had chosen what I wanted to have my character do in the environment, I went ahead and created an animation test for it on a generic character to try to get a feel for what I wanted to do. I chose to go with an animation of the archaeologist brushing some dirt away from what they are trying to look at. In the process of waiting for the final character and rig from other members of our team, I submitted this to our professor to see if he had any feedback.

Once I had a finalized character, I took the proxy animation I made on the placeholder character that I was using and transferred it to the new character. After doing this, I exported the animation file as an .fbx to bring into Unity. At that point, I brought it in and made sure that it would work in the engine, while also creating the meta files for the animation before submitting to Perforce. Once I saw that everything worked in Unity, I submitted it to the team's perforce to be put into the engine!