[thesleeve]

I'm a novice/intermediate coder with very little modeling/animating experience. I'm starting to get some basic prototypes coded up in Unity, but so far all of the Game Objects are cubes, spheres, cylinders, etc... In other words, I'm only working with the most basic primitives that ship with Unity, since I have no animated models to work with. The result is that my games are almost totally animation-free.

I'm looking to change that with the Protopack. The Protopack looks like a great investment to get me started in the world of 3D modeling/animation, but before I buy it, I have a list of questions.

(1) I want to use the Protopack as a learning tool, so I can make my own models/animations in the future, using it as a base. Will it be easy for me to modify the existing models in the protopack? For example, I like the main biped character, but I can't stand the little bump on the top of its head. It makes the head look like an onion. I would want to open the model in some 3D modeling software like Blender and simply smooth out the head so it's closer to a sphere. Is that possible? Easy?

(2) Can I modify the existing animations or add new animations to the model using Unity's built-in animation editor? Does that require any special exporting/conversion, or is it supported out-of-the-box.

(3) Similar to question 1... Could I make more dramatic edits like removing limbs (or at least making those meshes invisible)? Would that "break" the associated animations?

(4) Is it easy to copy-paste a model+animation set so I can create a duplicate of it for editing?

(5) Does Unity see the individual pieces of the character model as separate child objects? For example, will I be able to assign one material to the head and another material to the torso?

Depending on how easy it is to edit/expand the contents of the Protopack, I think I might just drop the $20 for it.

[Canon]

Hi thesleeve,

3D files of the ProtoPack are all fbx files. You can open and edit objects and animations if your 3D software can import fbx files and if you have the necessary skills.


>> Does Unity see the individual pieces of the character model as separate child objects?

No, the character is one single rigged object.

[thesleeve]

Thanks! I actually downloaded Blender last night and went through several training videos. I was able to box-model my first biped character last night and I will start rigging it tonight. It isn't as hard as I thought.

Still, it looks like FBX import is only supported in Blender via a community-made script. Not sure how well it will work, but I'll give it a try later.