Animating Meshes

Unfolding has a powerful animation system that allows you to animate meshes. The animations can be reused to across multiple meshes as well.

Creating a new animation

Before we begin, we must pull up the timeline in the mesh maker. The timeline is a separate part of the animation system that allows us to modify the rotation and move positions of the mesh in real time, and gives us a visualiation of how the mesh will move in game when the animation is played.

An example of how to pull up the animation system

in the mesh make you should see a bar with timeline on it, hover the mouse over it and pull upwards like in the gif above. This will reveal the timeline.

Its important to note that animations change the positions of the bones. So if you save a mesh file it will retain the last values of the animation as well.

It's a good idea to place the starting position of the animation in the first frame of the animation. That way the starting position will always be starting from that place.

Adding Keyframes

Animations in Unfolding work by having keyframes that tell the mesh to move or rotate the bone name of the mesh to a position at the keyframe it was created in. This means too that bone names across different meshes can still be affected by the animation as long as they share the same bone names.

An example of creating an animation that moves the left portion of the mesh

Going into the move tab, you can rotate and move parts of the bone. When you do this, the bone will save the modification be it a move or a rotate into a keyframe below. The frame the player is set as will determine where the keyframe goes.

You can add more frames by selecting the right of the purple bar and moving it to the right.

The FPS for Unfolding is 60fps (frames per second). Meaning that each keyframe is 1/60th of a second.

Saving and Loading

Animations are stored separately from the mesh they work on. In the timeline tab there is a save and load towards the right of the timeline. There is the load mesh and save mesh button which is the top right but that just controls the mesh. The animation load button opens up the animation database which allows for loading previously made mesh animations.