Unity Character Animation with Mecanim Paperback – September 29, 2015

This book suffers from a whole bunch of errors. I am not sure that it was properly reviewed. Chapter three is so messed up it took me forever to get things to work. The text is very hard to follow and it doesn't do a very good job of explaining what you are doing when you are writing script to create the animation states. And If you are wanting to concentrate on using c# to complete the scripting parts you better know what you are doing because the book's downloaded materials, scripts and assets don't match what is in the pages of the book. On a positive note. If you really want to improve your troubleshooting techniques in building Unity games then this book is for you. I was constantly having to evaluate scripts, content, and transitions to get the examples in chapter 3 to work. Mostly scripting errors.

There's a bunch of valuable information in this book, and the author clearly knows what they're talking about. Mecanim in Unity is a complex subject that is easy to work with on the surface, but gets more and more difficult to parse as you delve deeper into it. As a result, it's great to have a book like this to explain what it's all about; online tutorials, even from Unity themselves, tend toward either end of the experience spectrum, either incomprehensibly hard for experienced programmers, or laughably simple, for folks who have just started learning.So yes, this is a good book, and a valuable resource. The author is clearly familiar with the subject matter.The downside, though, is the amount of mistakes present in this book and/or in the supplementary materials, a problem I've encountered previously with Packt books. I understand, writing a book on a subject that is in the midst of change like Unity is, currently, is tough, and inevitably mistakes will creep in due to the dynamic nature of the product. I don't think that's exclusively the case here-- there have been several instances while I've been working through the book where I've noticed that a comment about a setting or line of code didn't match up with a corresponding screenshot. There have been several other times where an asset in the downloads from Packt's site was either missing or named incorrectly from how it's referred to in the book. And so on. Just like my past experience with Packt, it seems like a combination of typos and poor editing are to blame.So as a result I can't really give the book the most glowing of reviews. At the same time I won't call it terrible and sloppy. I've been able to work my way through most of the worst typos and mistakes, but I'm also a fairly experienced Unity user who can roll with it, mostly. I guess my recommendation is that beginning Unity programmers should avoid this one, at least until they can successfully navigate the process of 'translating' a tutorial written for a slightly earlier version of Unity. At that point they should probably be able to do like I did and get by. But then again Mecanim, despite being surprisingly easy, isn't a subject for a beginner.A small footnote, because it matters to some folks, but the code examples in the book are written using UnityScript/Javascript, but C# versions for all scripts are provided via the downloadable content.

I read this book from a developer’s point of view. When developing a game project I tend to use developer art, which usually lacks the polish of assets created by game artists. This book provides the additional guidance I need to add the professional polish to the games I am working on, especially for 3D animated games using Unity.The book uses a game "Zombie Attacks" to demonstrate many 3D animation techniques that as a developer I was not familiar with. The author demonstrates rigging characters for Unity in 3dsMax and Maya which I have never done before but going through the examples provided a good bases for future development.From start to finish the book demonstrates using Unity to build a complete first person shooter game using sophisticated animation techniques and putting it all together into a Unity scene with scripts to control the AI of the gameThe chapter on using motion sequences was interesting since these bring your characters to life with realistic movements. I also enjoyed the chapter on Ragdoll Physics, that demonstrate how to apply physics to the zombie characters.The sample project the comes with this book (downloaded from the Publisher) provides a good basis for starting a first person shooter and the book provides the information on who it is all put together making it easy to make modifications.