Animations in Decentraland

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The Mission

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In the process of working with decentraland we found out that animation is one of the most complex things to do.
In this guide I'm going to explain two methods that we learned in order to create simple animations and put them in your land.

Resources

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• Unity 2018.3.6f1
• Decentraland SDK
• Plugin decentraland for unity
• your prefered 3D software

Bones and Rigging

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The good thing about this method, it's that you can do it and don't pass for Unity to put it in Decentraland. However, Unity allows you to check how the model will look in Decentraland, more or less.
In this you rigg your models in your prefered 3D software, and export it, if you decide not to use Unity, you can export the GLTF format using Blender or babylon plugin for Maya.

https://doc.babylonjs.com/resources/maya_to_gltf

If you export it from Unity, there's a few more steps to follow if you want it to work perfectly:

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1. Export you model in .FBX format with the selected keyframes you want export the model with. The recomendable thing is to export all the animations separated (iddle, running...) and them import them into Unity.

2. If it's imported correctly it will appear like the image bellow on the inspector.

3. ​Now we will create an animator, this is what will control that the animation works correctly, it can be configured in several ways and program different clips on one mesh, but in this case we are just going to set one. For that we drag the clip into the animator window.

4. ​Finally, we put the model into the scene and on the parent, then we add the animator we just created and a skinned mesh renderer with the model or one of the parts of the mesh. Everything else has to be a son of this object to work.

Ending Result

Lynx in Decentraland 

Animate on Unity

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The method explained before, I believe it works very well when we want to animate complex models or organic ones to create NPC's or Wild life.
However for simpler objects I prefer to animate them in Unity, with the help of the animation window.

To do that we have to follow these steps:

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1. ​Divide de model in how many parts you want them, and organize them acordingly (parent, sons...).

2. ​Set the model in Unity and click on the animation tab with the parent selected, to create an animator and a clip.

3. ​Once created we can add keys to create the animation, by clicking the red button you activate the recording button and every transform you make to the object will be recorded.

​In this example we added the properties of position of the parent; rotation for the son and scale for grandson. To add a propertie right click on the property and select add key. Later I'm going to remove the key from the parent because if I left it that would completely break the animation and move it to other places in the scene.

4. ​Animate your objects, with this method you can't animate textures, only the position, rotation and scale.

5. ​You can control the flow of the animation with the curves, if you want to make constant select the points, right click and set both tangents in linear.

6. ​Then click the export button and it should appear correctly, like I said I removed the animation from the parent to avoid problems when you upload it to Decentraland.

Precautions and Warnings

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• If you are animating a prefab, it's important to do it in the coordinate (0,0,0), because If not the object may move out of its place.
• Don't animate the parent it will break the animation and move it to other places. even if you don't animate any property

without animating the parent

animating the parent

• Don't put the animator in entitites (the plugin indicates if it's one), the animation won't work in your scene.
• If you want to fix the one stated above, add a mesh filter and a mesh renderer, that way it becomes a GTLF. You can put a model from unity (quad) and add completely transparent material to it, to make it invisible.
• Inside a prefab, there can be a different set of parents each one of them with its animator. But a parent can't have two animators

Conclusion

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Although it's quite a complex process, and can be quite frustrating when you start with it. But if you get to learn how to work with this you can create complex and beautiful animations, such as the ones of the transit system.

elevator on the south transit (/goto -68,-117) 

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Laura Usón

ARTIST

Passionate about videogames, movies and creatures. artist by day and superhero at night.

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