Does anybody has experience witha nimated characters using the Unitiy engine ? We plan to use the Unity engine and question is if an iPhone game has been done using this engine and animated characters (skinned...) adif there are any problems on that --- I saw some other apps like Monster Track done with the engine, but there are not animated characters.
Skinned meshes are fine, so long as you don't have too many, and the poly count is low... usual restrictions for such a low powered device. Unity iPhone v1.1 will have more skinned mesh speed improvements but as it is now, there are dev's on the Unity forum that have multiple skinned meshed characters running fine.
I am using Shiva and multiple skinned chars, in my games CastleGuard and CastleGuard2. As he said, you need to be frugal with your poly and bone counts but it can work fine. Texture usage (dimensions) can also be lower than you might think.
Shiva also looks interesting, can you access low level functions also ? I need direct access to the accellerometer for example.
Slippy Feet (in review currently) has a single animated simple character (a penguin). You can see him in action here: http://www.studioliddell.com/slippy_feet Working in Unity with characters is pretty straightforward - follow the Unity character animation guide and you won't go far wrong.
Slippy is a boned mesh in 3DS Max, rigged and skinned with only a few bones. I shall have to go and look to find out the details, but stay tuned today I will try to put the information here later. He has about 8 animations in all, including some idles which run when the player stops interacting for a short while. This is the first character we have put on the iPhone so we kept him very 'slimeline' in terms of everything. He has a couple of textures for the blinking effect too, they work out really nicely and add quite a lot of life to him.
yes very funny game, some nice effects like explosion etc. Of course I like the cannon shooter very much (martime topic are always my favorite). -- the engine is pretty straight forward. Have to check if mroe polys are possible (for the fingers for example), but most I assume can be done with texture. The game Assasin's shows really whats possible, but thats another engine.
You can basically do almost anything you want as far as complexity in Unity iPhone but you are then limited by what the iPhone can handle. A base line is that you should have no more than 7,000 vertices in frame at one time to get around 30fps. You can of course have more off camera in your scene but this is about what is rendered in the camera view at one time. This is not a hard number, just a ball park. You will need to consider everything in your scene to get it to run well on the phone because all affects performance: textures, vertices, bones, animation etc... For example, a character that has bones and animation is going to take up more resources than on one which is static. You would probably not want to create a character with such detail that it has individually articulated boned fingers unless say that was the major and one of the only elements in your scene. I have created boned animated characters in Maya and brought them into unity with great success. It's fairly easy once you sort it out, but great optimization will always be a variable for each game.
yes sounds good, thats helpful just to get a start number. I am also using Maya, so that sounds good. Maybe some animated textures can help to fake for example the facial expressions or so.
