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At Unite ‘09 Paulius Liekis and I did a presentation on Character Animation Tips & Tricks. We discussed a range of animation techniques such as realistic foot placement, procedural aiming and head turning, and how to smoothly turn procedural adjustments on and off while reloading. We had prepared a tech demo demonstrating these techniques, and we promised to make the project folder available online shortly after the conference.

Well, the videos from Unite ‘09 ended up not coming out quite as soon as we had originally planned, but the good thing is that we’ve been able to improve the demo in the meantime. I’ve been spending some Fridays improving it from a pure tech demo to a small game with actual gameplay. Shoot the hovering orb repeatedly to make it break and go into a frenzy before finally exploding! Give it a go (click the image to go to the live demo):

Can you take down the Orb at the insane difficulty level?

Besides demonstrating animation techniques, the demo is also a complete game with gameplay, particles, physics, ragdolls, pause game handling, and more.

To learn more about how this demo was done, grab the 3rd Person Shooter example project and watch the video of the Character Animation Tips & Tricks presentation from Unite ‘09.