Blender 2.8 to Unity - Armature, Weight Painting, Animation, & Blend Trees

penguin_armature_blendtree.jpg

#PenguinParty

I wanted to make a fun tutorial series leading up to my next Unity ML-Agents tutorial. Rather than just give you a fully rigged character, I thought it would be cool to teach you how to rig a character. Hopefully you don’t mind… I skipped over the 3d model part, since there seem to be a ton of tutorials for basic 3d modeling and not many for the rigging, weight painting, and animating.

Downloadable Resources

Looking for the these…? 💁‍♂️🐧 You can download all files from here 👉 https://immersivelimit.page.link/penguin 👈

  • Simple Armature for a Penguin starts with: “penguin.blend”

If you’d need a clean start for the following videos, use these files.

  • Weight Painting starts with: "penguin_fullArmature_unpainted.blend"

  • Animations (Idle, Forward, Left, Right) starts with: "penguin_fullArmature.blend"

  • Blend Tree starts with: "penguin_fullArmature_animated.fbx"

Tutorials

Blender 2.8 Armature, Blender 2.8 Bones, Blender 2.8 Rigging, Blender 2.8 Skeleton

(Hopefully that will help the Googlers find what they’re looking for 🙂) Whatever you want to call it, creating an armature in Blender 2.8 hasn’t changed much from previous versions, but the UI is definitely different, so tutorials from older versions will probably be frustrating for newcomers. In this video, you’ll learn how to create an armature for a simple penguin. Download links above.

Weight Painting in Blender 2.8

Weight painting is the process of assigning influence of a bone to vertices. This is what makes your vertices move when you pose and animate your armature. In this video, you’ll do weight painting for all of the vertices on the penguin. Download links above.

Armature Animations in Blender 2.8

Let’s bring these penguins to life! Don’t get too excited, they’re not gonna act like the penguins from the Madagascar movie, but hey, we have to start somewhere. We’ll do Idle, Forward, Left, and Right so that we can use these animations in Unity. Download links above.

Blend Tree Movement in Unity

Unity Blend Trees are great for blending animations together. In this video we’ll import our mesh and animations and hook up the W, A, S, and D keys to control our penguin. Download links above.


3D, Blender, UnityAdam Kellyunity, blender, penguin, armature