i have begun the journey… coming from UDK in college, Unity’s implementation of 3D animation pipeline seems light-years ahead of my experience with Unreal, granted this was before Unreal Engine 4.
i thought for my first experience of the pipeline on the Unity platform, the boss model would be perfect. it is about as simple of a rig hierarchy as you can get: one root (or COG) and a joint for each wing/arm.
originally, i had thought to animate everything in Maya and export to Unity, but on second thought, using Unity’s internal animation system Mecanim seemed like it would make it easier to visualize the space relationships of the objects i’m animating… without the need for exporting reference models from Unity or manually blocking out the scene in Maya!
so i went for this approach as my first delve into character animation. surely, i will need Maya’s utilities for more complex rigs and animations in the future? anyway, i created a couple attack animations for the boss and some idle back and forth movement.