Making games, should I animate in Blender or Unity?

Question

This is just a more general question to do with making games using blender and unity. I am very new to game design and production in general and have been creating a models and assets for a game. However, I do not know how I should use/organise them.

I was thinking about modelling characters, weapons, cars, objects etc and how I would export them into Unity. When it comes to rigging and animating said objects, should I animate in Blender or Unity? And what would be the process to make walk cycles/run cycles and animations - whilst having game movement - in either scenario?

If anyone is a professional game maker, should I keep anything in mind when working with the two programs? What would be your best tips?

Thanks!

Answer 1

So, let me preface by saying, its been a hot minute since I worked with Unity, and they do update things, so some things might be different. Unity has really good documentation so id recommend checking that out. https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/index.html Unity Learn has tutorials that will get you started and show you how to set up your file structure efficiently. https://learn.unity.com/

Last time I used unity, it had pretty good support for blender, you could choose to import .fbx or just straight up .blend files. I always animated in blender because I was most comfortable with it, but you can animate in unity as well, I think they had some kind of implementation for that, and I know for sure people have done procedural animations in unity. Here's a really cool GDC talk on procedural animation in unity https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE

Rigging can be done "generic" or with Mecanim. Generic is for anything non humanoid, Mecanim, is of course for humanoids, so you need to set up your rig with all the bones Mecanim needs. https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/MecanimFAQ.html You'll want to make sure your walk cycles loop of course, but there's two different ways to approach actual movement. The first is the traditional way, you animate your character looping through their walk/run cycle without actually moving, as though they were on a treadmill. Then you code in their movement and tie the animation to it through an animation controller. The second way is to actually animate your root, so your character changes positions, and then unity has an option to use that root motion as actual character motion. I was never personally able to get this one to work quite right, but the character controller that comes with unity uses it, and handles very nice. The tradeoff between the two is basically greater control and being able to adjust things later, vs (if you animate it correctly) very accurate movement to step ratio.

I would recommend making some very basic stuff in unity before you spend a lot of time on a character and animations. A lot of people try to jump in and make a big RPG like skyrim or something, and then get frustrated and a little angry when they've made all these characters and weapons and armors, and cant figure out how to get all the gameplay actually working.

Anyways, I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best!

Answer 2

There are a list of things you want to keep in mind:

1. Format

Choose FBX or OBJ to export from Blender to Unity, FBX is more complex, have more info, including different animations stages for example, i recommend FBX, but obj works too

2. Modeling

You should do it in a way that you have less objects, geometry, everything well parented, etc, so low poly, join meshes, and VERY IMPORTANT: Check scales, try to aproach to real scales, AND the origin points and Axis are not the same for Blender and/or Unity

3.Animating

There is an Action Editor (Inside Dope Sheet Editor Type), this should be your main area when you are working on different animations, create a new, put the name, for example "jump", animate all the loop, and then create another, for example "crouch" and the same for all the animations

4. Export Settings

(DON`T follow the settings on the screenshot, you need to tweak for your best preset)

This is the last field from blender to unity, but the most important point. You are going to have to tweak it until you get your perfect preset and then export all the meshes, but in the export settings of fbx you will need to have Selected Objects, the trasnform forward axis, geometry checks, apply modifers, and in your case, dont forget the animation tab in the export settings, where for example the check of "all actions" is what you need to heck to have all separated animations when import to Unity

Hope this help to have a better view of all process ;)