Topic: Make a Simple Animated Character in Blender (beginner)

[kat]

Support and any questions arising from the "Make a Simple Animated Character in Blender" tutorials post below.

Comprehensive eBook on learning the latest version of Blender 3D through the making of a simple rigged and animated Snowman CHARACTER model. Seven chapters take the reader through the use of concepts, initial setting up, meshing, materials, UVW mapping, texture baking, rigging and finally animation.

[Ian Burnette]

Hi there! Excellent tutorial. It took me forever to get through (seriously, multiple days), but all the problems I had inevitably stemmed from me simply not reading the directions closely enough.

Now that I've come to the next step in the process for me, importing the snowman I made into Unity, I'm having a small but frustrating problem with light and shading. Obviously this isn't within the scope of the tutorial, but I thought someone might be able to help with the issue.

I exported the model as a .fbx, and imported into Unity. At first, the entire model was inside out (that is, the textures were only rendering on the inside of the model, giving it a weird concave look). After some looking around, I discovered that the normals of the mesh needed to be reversed. I did this in Blender and reimported it into Unity ... problem solved!

Except, the lighting was wrong. The model is showing light on the opposite side from where the light source is. As I move the directional light in Unity around, the problem persists - horizontally and vertically.

I've searched around quite a bit for solutions to this online, and I've not found a solution. I have made sure to play with the model import settings in Unity, setting the normals and tangents to import, but no luck so far.

Any help is appreciated! Thank you!

[kat]

Inverted faces: yep those can be checked during construction by activating Face Normals. Or if you're in "Game Render" you can also disable "Backface Culling" so surfaces only render one sided. Or in "Blender Render" deactivate "Backface Culling" in "Shading" Properties ("N").

Shading issue: that is probably happening because the whole model is/has been assigned one single smooth-group - that odd back-to-front effect is often a symptom of that, the engine can't quite figure out what it should be doing because all the surfaces are uniformly lit.

So... you'll need to check that;

• the mesh has one or more smoothing groups,
• that they are being exported - remember to apply any Modifiers beforehand or the correct export option is flagged,
• that the particular FBX format being used supports vertex splits (which is what smoothing actually is - it should do),
• alternatively it is possible to set a (Shading? Smoothing? - don't recall what it's called off the top of my head) property in Unity that automatically assesses and assigns smoothing based on an angle value (similar to the way it can be done in Blender - however not this may not smooth the mesh as desired).

Try #4 first as a quick way to make sure the mesh is OK (or not as the case may be), else you might end up doing more back-and-forth trying to get it to work properly - basically if the mesh can be assessed beforehand, all the better.

Well done getting the character into Unity by the way.