PROCESS

1. Idea
Since the beginning of the project I wanted to use Argentinean music and make a character dance. I was excited to bring a little bit of my home to this project and share it with my classmates and faculty.

2. Modeling a character in Blender (that I never used)
At first, I thought of creating a alien-related creature using a “poncho” and make him dance. In the end, having clothes in motion + exporting and importing physics into Unity from Blender makes no sense with the time constrains of the project.

3. Hair particles in Blender
I could not export correctly the particle physics to import to Unity. At this point I talked to Brian, and he said that this is usually very hard to do. So I decided to use a character from the website.

4. Final character
Downloaded a free animated model to spend more time at Unity rather than modeling and animating at Blender.

5. Animator controller
In order to make your character move in Unity, you have to duplicate the animation from your asset, create an animator controller, add your animation and attach it as new component to your asset on the scene.

6. Adding music when target is found
Did some research and found out that I could add my sound as an event when the target is found on the prefab settings. It took me some time to figure it out + change settings of the main camera to listen to the music.

7. Modeling
I Modeled an environment with some colored fungi and a lighthouse to set on the scene and provide some extra light.

8. Particle system
Added a particle effect from the lighthouse object, to simulate tiny light particles coming out from the bigger light.

9. Adding a new character
Downloaded a secondary character with new dancing moves to create a more engaging scene.

10. Interaction - triggering new animation when camera is close to target

I added two different state animation for my second character + created two trigger parameters to activate them.

After that, I wrote a script that measures the distance between my object and the camera. When that distance is lower than 1.8 the second character starts dancing, if not it goes back to the first animation.

CODE

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;public class StartDance : MonoBehaviour
{
private Animator animator;
private Camera myCamera;
private GameObject MyMouse; // Start is called before the first frame update
void Start()
{
animator = GetComponent<Animator>();
myCamera = GameObject.FindWithTag("MainCamera").GetComponent<Camera>();
MyMouse = GameObject.FindWithTag("Mouse");
} // Update is called once per frame
void Update()
{
float distance = Vector3.Distance(myCamera.transform.position, MyMouse.transform.position);
Debug.Log(distance);
if (distance < 1.8)
animator.SetTrigger("StartDance");
else
animator.SetTrigger("StopDance");
}
}