Game Art and Machinima: Dope Sheets and Cameras in Unity

Me and Stuart, before thinking about adding any cameras first made a dope sheet so that we could see what was going to happen and when. We made dope sheets firstly from the anamatic and the Maya animation so we knew what had to happen where. We then made one using the Maya animation to help with the position of Cameras and these are our following notes:

Anamatic to Unity DopeSheet

Frame = Action

1-96 = He gets out of the water

169-6748 = He walks to middle of boxes

649-696 = He jumps of four legs

697-1008 = Sniffing around in circles

(104 frames each rotation)

697-801 = First circle

802-906 = Second circle

907-1008 = Walks to next point

1009-1089 = Needs to see raccoon

1090-1176 = Raccoon looks up

1176-1210 = Platypus walks toward Raccoon

1211-1248 = Cut to lying on back

1249-1440 = On their back snoring.


The next Dope Sheet was for the Cameras and what they need to be looking at. We did this by counting the shots in the anamatic and writing down what the shot needs to be concentrating on.

Cam 1 = gets out of Water

Cam 2 = Beak (PANNING)

Cam 3 = Shocked face walking to midddle

Cam 4 = Shot of Camp fire

Cam 5 = Shot of Fishbone

Cam 6 = Shot of Applecore

Cam 7 = Shot of knocked over barrel

Cam 8 = Shot of knocked over create

Cam 9 = Confused  face with question marks

Cam 10 = Magnify glass shot

Cam 11 = Shot of foot prints

Cam 12 = Dino thought bubble 1

Cam 13 = Shot of scratch marks

Cam 14 = Dino thought bubble 2

Cam 15 =  Shot of fur

Cam 16 =  Dino thought bubble 3

Cam 17 = tracking run and jump

Cam 18 = Side shot as he crawls and sniffs

Cam 19 = Shot of his bill from front

Cam 20 = Shot of his tail from above

Cam 21 = Shot of Platypus walking (PANNING)

Cam 22 = Birds eye view as he sniffs round the camp fire

Cam 23 = Platypus sees Raccoon

Cam 24 = Shot of Raccoon (ZOOM IN)

Cam 25 = Platypus stands up and walks toward Raccoon

Cam 26 = Birds eye shot of them snoring in the floor (ZOOM OUT)


We then married these up to the former Dope sheet while working to we knew which camera was looking where and for how long for.

By Meg Sugden
I then took the final animation of it and exported it into Unity as an FBX and we found that all of the animation was working great. We then just had to line up the animation with the terrain which was fairly easy and then put a few of the textures back on. At this point the only thing that we had issues with was the planes of the exclamation points, question marks and the dinosaur pictures come up as they didn't turn invisible during the animation. We fixed this fairly easily by going back into Maya and instead of making them invisible we just made them pop up from under the ground within a frame and then pop back down again, making it work. So we took it back into Unity and started working out where we wanted the cameras. We thought first about how we were going to do this and we could either use around 5 cameras and then move them around to get the different shots or we could a different camera for each shot. In the end we decided that this was a better way to do it as we only had 26 shots so it wasn't that many cameras to move around and this way we could concentrate first abut getting them static and then working on the movement after, if necessary.

I then looked at the camera timings and this is where our dope sheet really came in useful. We were easily able to key in the timings of the camera switches in the Unity animator, after I had made the relevant script for the switch which is featured below, and easily able to adjust them so they were happening at the right point on the time line. After that was done I then moved the cameras so that they were in the right place. This again was fairly easy as we had all of the camera angles written down we just had to check that they aligned correctly with the animation. Once this was done all that was left was to add sound which Callum was sorting out and we were finished.