Week 16: Duck Animation, Beaver Rigging & Animation, Narration, Subtitle

After the rigging of the duck that I did in week 14, I have proceeded to animate the duck for the Unity project.

To start the animation, I did one cycle of the walk cycle from frame 1 to 20.

Frame 1 and frame 20 is the same animation frame while frame 10 is the animation that shows the other leg in front.

Afterward, I duplicated frames 4 to 20 and continue to paste it until the last frame is on frame 100. There is a total of 5 cycles for 100 frames of animation.

This is the final duck animation, which shows the duck walk cycle.

Once I completed the duck, I moved on to the beaver rigging since I have not rigged the beaver at all. The very first step is naturally to make the skeleton of our beaver. In this picture, I have turned on the Local Rotation Axis for all joints and oriented all the joints by selecting all joints and clicking Skeleton > Orient Joints.

Then, I added IK handlers to some joints like the head, leg and tail joints. The tail and head joints have Single-Chained Solver IK handlers while the leg joints have both Single-Chained Solver and Rotation-Plane Solver IK handlers attached to it. Controllers were added to almost all of the joints and IK handlers through either parent or pole vector constraints.

After adding the controllers, I have decided to bind the skin and edit the skin weight. I used both component editor for smooth skin and painting skin weights to edit the skin weights on the beaver, just like what I did for the two other characters before the beaver.

After the entire lengthy rigging process for the beaver, I did the animation for the beaver. For the duckling and platypus, I did the walk cycle animation while for the beaver is the idle animation since my group mate mentioned that beaver walk animation is hard even for expert animators.

For the beaver, 1 cycle is 40 frames and it is intended to be on loop.

This is how the beaver idle animation looks like.

I fixed all the textures from standard shader to Universal Render Pipeline/Lit shader so that the entire project will not have any bright pink textures for our characters.

When I import my fbx file into my project, I am able to see a dropdown of stuff under it. What I would want to click on here is the animation labelled "Take 001" so that I can ensure the animation is looped by first going to the edit button, then toggling the checklist for loop time.

After that, I drag this animation into my beaver fbx that I have already dragged in the Unity scene and it automatically creates a controller for me.

You can find the controller in the same folder of your animation. Mine is titled "beaverIdle"

I did all these steps for all the 3d characters and this is what I ended up with.

I updated the narration intended for the end scene with animal sounds using Adobe Audition and my group mate, Shiyu taught me how to use it. The voices are from Amazon Polly with some coding involved and the sounds are from freesound.com.

EndingNarration_mixdown.mp3.zip

Download ZIP • 326KB

To work on one of our app's feature, I added subtitles to aid children's learning of vocabulary and words recognition along with the narration. I followed a tutorial I found on youtube which taught me how to do subtitle animation in Unity using C# script. I had to figure out myself all the timings for the C# script for the subtitles and match it to the narration.

In the end, this was how the subtitle turned out as I added some other UI along with the subtitle.

I am still planning to work on it and add the speech recognition feature to the same AR marker.