For this final week we looked into creating an animated sprite using existing assets, we explored using the bone rigging system in Unity to animate a blueninja character.
I opened the Blueninja photoshop file in Unity and clicked the sprite editor, from here i clicked the drop down menu and found the skinning editor which will let me create and edit the sprites bones, the first stage was to add geometry to each of the sprites limbs, setting the subdivide to a higher integer was important as it will allow the sprite to strech and move without too much distortion.
The process for the bones involved clicking where on the sprite you wanted the first bone of the chain to go, for the near leg, i started close to the pelvis and then chained the next bone to the knee and the last to the foot, to make a chain you need to have a minimum of 3 bones together which is important to note later in the process.
I created a bone chain for all the limbs and also created a root bone going from the pelvis to the sternum, with these created i finished off by adding some hand bones.
With bones added i imported the sprite into Unity, here i created an Inverse Kinematics which makes it so if you move the foot bone for example on a characters skeleton it willl manipulate the other bones in the chain to help simulate more realistic movement. I opened the root dropdown hierarchy on my character and found the foot_bone_N which is the right foot since it is Nearer to you on the screen, i aded it to the effector component and then clicked create target, so now the foot bone is being effected.
I followed this process closely for the two hands and the left leg, with all the limbs having IK i started to animae the character, to do this i added an animator component to the character and then created an animator controller, called it BlueController and dropped it into the animator component, from here i opened the animation window and clicked create which gave me this window.
At this point i enabled keyframe recording and then moved each limb of the character to get movement, this process involved dragging around many keyframes on the timeline to get each animation to actually play.
