Firstly, yet again, name everything in maya. This has consistently let me down through out all my maya endeavors. And still i dont learn. Doing anything in Maya (and unity and i imagine all software) requires organisation and disciplin. A hard lesson learned.
Trying to decipher the issues that have occurred through trying to bring my character animation into Unity is going to be a challenge in itself.
Firstly the issue lied with selecting everything across all the layers in Maya. I had just been selecting the geometry and trying to export that as an .fbx file. This obviously meant that when i imported it in to Unity, there was just a vacant robot. This was fixed by turning on the skeleton layer, geometry layer and the animation/control layer, deleting the history, edit select all, and export the lot as a .fbx file.
Further issues lied in forgetting to toggle the 'bake animation' function in the export window and define the set keys that were required. This meant going back, having importing it into Unity again and finally getting it right.
However, there were several warnings when the fbx file was translated out of maya. The animation working fine, My character was now missing a leg. Where this has gone i don't know. In the preview window in Unity, the model is there, fully formed with all his assets attached. Both me and Annabeth looked over it and really could not understand why this mis translations happened after 4 or 5 different methods were tried. So after 4 hours of trying to get the file to work, we left it. Hopefully tomorrow the issues can be resolved but if not then the character will have to go in as a static model, potentially without animation. However this has been a technical issue that so far has not been resolved.
I had a few problems in unity to. A lot of objects had a 'shimmering' effect. It happened that a lot of the objects had been duplicated for some reason. Due to the previous mishaps i decided just to delete all the spurious objects one by one. This took time but the results are evident in the surfaces and textures of the objects.
I speeded my character up as it felt sluggish and slow in first person mode.
So all in all i feel i still have a lot to do but its definitely manageable with the day at it tomorrow. More Clever thinking about sound and what digital sounds should be attached to, the outcome of which will be written about in my evaluation.
I need a final red to purple plane for the 3d illusion on a 2d plane to complete the Duke Nukem, Doom, futurist, dystopian feel to the level.
It just could be such a shame if the character doesn't end up working, as all the hard work creating the character and the issues importing it to unity would all to a finite degree, be wasted. Obviously i have learned an immense amount over the last 5 weeks. The software is beginning to show its logic to me, despite the issues with this project. It has filled me with confidence and motivation actually getting to grips with Maya and seeing something through that i never thought i would be able to do.
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