Assignment 4 made me realize that animation is crucial for an experience to feel immersive. Animations make characters feel real. Despite their importance, applying animations is the trickiest Unity process that I have encountered so far.

One of the reasons why adding animation is so complicated is because there are so many external programs involved. Mixamo and Fuse are incredible resources, and I cannot believe that they are currently free. The Mixamo library of animations is massive, and they work with all humanoid characters. I also created my own character using Fuse, and being able to use Mixamo's animations with my own characters means that the possibilities are nearly endless.

I used Unity's Animator Controller to set my Fuse character to wave and point. The Animator Controller was confusing to use, but watching video tutorials did help. It feels similar to Playmaker, but transitions between events must be scripted instead of the drop down menu of transition events provided in Playmaker. With some tinkering, I was able to loop the animations in the Animator Controller, but there was definitely a steep learning curve. I do feel better having some experience with this Unity tool because I am worried that as a third party plugin, Playmaker could become obsolete at any time.

While I used the Animator Controller for the Fuse character, I used Playmaker to trigger the dancing animation of the policeman. I used Playmaker to trigger the animation and play music from the speaker when a button is pushed, and to pause the animation and stop the music when the button is pushed again. This was complicated because there are so many different parts of the sequence found in different places. For example, I needed to add a Play Sound action in Playmaker, but the speaker needed to be assigned a sound in the Inspector, outside of Playmaker. I think the most difficult part about using Unity is that its user interface sometimes makes it difficult to know where to be adjusting settings.

This assignment was a good introduction to using animations. I am glad that I was able to animate characters using both Playmaker and the Animator. As I continue, I'd like to explore more scripting in the Animator so that I can start using it instead of Playmaker.