Creating 3D Game Art for the iPhone with Unity Part 7 pps

FIG 6.45 In This Image, the Highlighted Areas Are the Keyframes that Were Created by Duplicating the Previous Keyframe.

Make Sure Frame Range Is Set Correctly

Number one and the most obvious is that you’ll need to make sure that you

set the End Range for the animation. If your animation is 27 frames long, then

be sure that the End Range is 27. For cyclic animations, you can set the clips

to loop in the FBX Import Settings as shown in Fig. 6.46. If you leave extra

frames in the loop, the animation will appear to pause before the loop cycles

effectively breaking the loop.

FIG 6.46 You Can Set the Loop Mode for Animations in the FBX Import Settings.

Baking Keys

When exporting animation data from a 3D program such as Blender into

Unity iOS, you may need to bake the keyframes so that the animation is

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Creating 3D Game Art for the iPhone with Unity

FIG 6.47 By Sampling the Keyframes, You Will Bake the Curve, Which Puts a Keyframed Value on Each Frame.

interpolated correctly. If you find that your animation data doesn’t seem to

be translating correctly in Unity iOS and this will typically happen when using

IK, you can choose to bake the animation values to a key on each frame.

Essentially, this is taking the interpolation out of the animation curve by plac￾ing an exact keyed value at each frame in the animation. If you’re using native

formats from 3D applications such as .ma, .c4d, and .max, you can actually

bake animations in Unity iOS by checking the Bake Animations options in the

Importer Settings. An animation bake step happens during export from your

3D tool to the FBX format. When importing objects into Unity iOS using a 3D

tool’s native format, Unity iOS is actually opening the application behind the

scenes and exporting an FBX file. However, the FBX exporter in Blender doesn’t

have an option for baking animation, so you can bake the F-Curves in Blender

before exporting the FBX file. The quickest way is from the DopeSheet Editor.

First, hit the A key to select all of the keyframes and then choose Sample

Keyframes from the Key menu or press Shift + O. Sampling the keyframes will

bake the curves and place a key on each frame as shown in Fig. 6.47.

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Animation Using Blender