Brickstar begins!
- Adam House
- May 19
- 5 min read
Type: Practise project.
Genre: NA Engine: Unity.
Key Roles: Animation, rigging, programming character control mechanics.
Released:|19/5/2026.
Last updated: 19/5/2026.
Learned from: Blender 2.8 Game Character Creation.
Made by: Only myself.
Meet Brick "Brickster" Stirling, a little Lego minifigure and Aussie legend. He survived in the outback inhabited by giant Lego creatures (especially big bugs) for weeks. He is fearless, he is handsome, and so strong he can shatter a giant Lego spider in pieces with only one punch. Don't underestimate him.
One of the simple and unique tutorials I learned at the start of the year. I wanted to learn how to animate my future characters' faces in 2D style for my future games to give a simple and expressive look without spending so much time making 3D realistic animated expressions like in modern games which could be stressful and time consuming.
While the tutorial covers making a Lego character, I decided to use my creative freedom to create a Crocodile Dundee inspired character named “Brickstar”.
Not only I animated the characters' facial expressions with sprites in blender, but I also combined the sprites into a sprite sheet each for Idle, run, and jump in a Texture packer app.
After I completed the character mesh, animations and sprites, I then tested it out on the Unity game engine with a custom movement script and a Unity third party Camera prefab, I also made a duplicate of my character testing the “Ethan” third party animations to see how accurately it works with Brickstar. The results were fascinating.
I made a “bonus animation” of Brickstar posing heroically at the end, I decided to animate without help except what I learnt from experience from the tutorial.
WHAT WENT WELL?:
• With animations, I manage to animate them smoothly as possible, including the bonus animation: Pose.
WHAT I LEARNED:
• The Texture packer program makes sprite sheets for each of characters facial animations in seconds rather than mins.
–Blender–
• K key: opens keyframe menu.
• I learned to use a Grease pencil tool for the first time drawing facial expressions and animating them for my character.
• / numpad allows you to zoom in and show only the 3D mesh you selected.
• When modelling your character…
- Shift + C: sets the camera perspective to view everything in the scene back to default position.
- You can press E or F to re-straighten cuts during edge loops.
- The bevel tool is affected by the geometry's scale. Be sure to reset the geometry to 1,1,1 scale which tells Blender it's a default scaled object.
- You can press ctrl + M to mirror objects.
- Alt+z allows you to see a transparent mesh without using the standard z-hold selection key.
• When making UVs for your character…
- Make sure you reset the scale on the mesh (1,1,1) before you unwrap UV maps.
- You want to reduce stretching UV texture maps and hide seems as best you can.
- Shift + H Only shows selected faces.
- Alt + H to redo Shift + H.
- UV> Average Island scale: unwraps all UV maps to its approx 3D mesh size.
- UV> Pack islands> Unwraps all UV maps and places them apart.
• When rigging your character…
- It's always good to check on the role of the bone to see where the limb will rotate. Roll seems to be the angle the bone rotates.
- Blender will take a look at the mesh vertices around each of the bone and set its position around them when selected "with automatic weights" with ctrl +P.
- Shift + right click to select bone while weight painting.
- The foot roll is the most complicated of the rig. This is important since it adds believability to walking animations. - When using the Inverse kinematics for the rig such as the foot bone, it needs to be curved to make the IK work easily with other bones. - When rigging, don't forget to duplicate the bone to make an IK bone of the, it should be parented with Alt-P. - With weight panting the character rig, remember red is the strongest influence. Blue has no influence at all. - Make pivot shapes to easily control the rig while animating. - Make foot rolls with several bones to easily control leg movements. - Alt+R clears rotation for bones and resets to default T-pose in pose mode.
• When texturing your character…
- Shift + S turns on/off stroke.
- F to change brush size. F+Shift to change brush strength.
• When animating your character…
- Shift+ left arrow: reset keyframe back to 1st frame.
- 24 frames per seconds is usually "fine" for animation.
–Animation control in Unity–
• If you get "loop match" in Animation import settings, you will get the animation to loop perfectly.
• For setting up your character in Unity, it's always good to test non-generic and humanoid skeletons with Ethan the third person controller before testing with other animations.
• Using anim set integer by value to play one animation at a time when the character either runs, walks, or idle.
• Generic type animation is for not quite humanoid specifically (e.g dragon with a tail or dragon with 2 heads, or even a Lego character with claw-like hands). Once selected, there are no green lights because it did not try to figure out if it's a cycling animation loop or not.
• Using a third party script from Unity to animate sprites in a material.
WHAT WENT WRONG, COULD I HAVE DONE BETTER?:
• In Unity, I could have made the controls for the character easier to control like in Super Mario Sunshine or Galaxy rather than use tank controls, but I decided to let it go since it's not an important mechanic I want to use for my future fps games.
• The bonus animation “Pose” is still a bit stiff and rigid; I may need to rig the character and practise animating by hand better to make the animation more flexible and bouncier.
• With animating keyframes in Blender, I will need to make sure they are consistent, snapped together, and lined up properly to reduce animation mistakes of them happening. • I could have made the character move faster in Unity, but I decided not too since it wasn't that important, but I need to keep in mind that for commercial games movement needs to be faster.
• I had the pose animation at 101 frames in Blender, but when exported to Unity, it was shortened down to 100 frames, I should probably stick to 100 frames or less for each animation. It might explain why the facial animations were not in sync with the pose physical animation, I'm letting it go for now since it's not an important animation to make, but a bonus one instead. This is something to keep in mind for next time.
• For the pose animation, I got the characters hands clipping through his torso, I didn't realise it before, next time I will need to animate with textures on instead of a generic grey material so I can see errors easily and fix them before they go in a game engine. • Unfortunately, I couldn't upload the character to Sketchfab because I did not prepare in advance for the character to be viewed there properly, next time I need to plan ahead.
OVERALL:
It was a fun and exciting lesson; this has helped me to give my game characters more dynamic expressions and animating experience for Blender.
I may not be animating dragons, characters, zombies, or cyborgs yet, but I'm getting there!
I could just animate face sprites in Unity by hand to be consistent with the character animations. Especially when I was working on the pose animation which the sprites were not consistent with the animation.
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