Implementing Animation – Physics and Colliders

VR is an immersive experience that requires realistic and interactive elements to truly captivate its audience. To create these interactive experiences in Unity, it’s essential to have a strong understanding of animation, physics, and colliders. This is the focus of this chapter.

In this chapter, we will dive into the basics of animation in Unity, including animation clips and creating animation clips from keyframes in Unity Timeline. We will learn how to utilize the physics system to complement our animation and create believable interactions in VR. We will also explore the use of colliders and Rigidbodies to give our animations a more realistic look and feel. Ultimately, we will explore ways to make our VR rig and demo scene more representative of the real world. One thing to note is that Unity is a powerful tool that can utilize animations created in other programs, such as Blender and Maya, to provide more detailed...

Technical requirements

The complete source code for this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Enhancing-Virtual-Reality-Experiences-with-Unity-2022/tree/main/EnhancingVRExperiencesFullProject/Assets/_VRProjectAssets/Scenes/Chapter_5.

Introducing Unity’s physics system

In this chapter, we’re going to look at using Unity’s physics system and implementing that into the animation and the components that we can add to our VR objects and our VR rig to give it more of a realistic experience and feeling. The first two things we’re going to look at are two components. One is a Rigidbody and another is a collider. These are crucial for allowing us to add physics to different game objects. We’ve seen a little bit of that in the previous chapters that we added colliders to with our 3D objects, but now we will be adding them to the VR rig and objects.

Using the physics and animation systems in Unity can help you add realism and immersion to your VR projects. Here are some ways to use these systems in your VR projects:

• Rigidbodies and colliders: Unity’s physics engine allows you to add physics-based interactions to your VR objects by using Rigidbodies and colliders. You can...

Introducing Unity’s animation system

The animation system in Unity is a set of tools and components that allow you to create and control animated characters and objects in your game or application. The system is based on the concept of animation clips, which are collections of keyframe data that define the positions, rotations, and other properties of objects over time.

There are several key components of the animation system in Unity:

• The Animation window: This is the main interface for creating, editing, and previewing animation clips. It allows you to create keyframes, adjust the timing of animations, and preview the animations in real time.
• The Animator component: This component is used to control the playback of animations and blend multiple animations together. It also allows you to create complex animation behaviors using state machines and transition conditions.
• The Animation component: This component is used to play back animation clips on GOs. It...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to trigger animations using a Raycast and a gaze interaction in Unity. You set up a Raycast target, created an animation timeline, triggered a function to play the timeline, and triggered an animation function from a gaze interaction. By following the steps, you should now have a working animation trigger interaction framework that you can use in your VR projects.

In the next chapter, we will explore Unity’s lighting system and how lights can be used to alter and enhance our VR scenes.