Having close to zero experience animation, I wanted to explore both Maya and Unity animator tools and decide which would be the easiest and quickest to build some simple yet functional animations for my bear model. I began with the ‘attack’ animation, since I knew exactly how I wanted this to look, as well as knowing that the head and neck rig were functioning well. 

I was happy with the results, and wanted to see how the animation would look in the Unity game engine. However, when I exported the model, the animation was not present. I tried exporting straight to Unity, exporting as a fbx, rebaking the animation - Nothing would work. The animation was playing fine in Maya but I was not able to access it in Unity. This ultimately made the decision for me to use the animator tools in Unity itself.

I began by recreating the same animation in the Unity engine. I found this was also very easy to use - due largely to the rig I had made in Maya. I was also able to make a simple idle animation to give life to the npc.

Unfortunately, this was the point that I realised that the rear half of the rig was not as functional as the front half. That resulted in a strange (read: bad) walking animation shown below.

So I had 2.5 working animations at this point. I wanted to apply them to the model to ensure they worked well with the script. And yet again I ran into some issues. Namely that the animations were overruling the scripts; which of course is problematic.

Below show 2 of the issues I encountered:

- The first was a loop where the bear would play the idle animation once, then play the attack animation (without being called for), then loop.

- The second happened when I tried to fix the first, where the bear just shook his head around.

Obviously these are less than ideal,  as the game becomes unplayable without the interaction with the Bear. Unfortunately I was unable to fix these bugs before the deadline for the game sketch, but I hope to return to these at a later date.

Overall, I was disappointed that I could not implement the animations in the submitted game build - however I feel as though I learned a lot about the animation process. I understand that Maya has better tools for animation, however I did enjoy the simplicity of Unity’s animation toolkit.