Direction Based Hit Reaction feature - Jack McLantern

So my enemies were lacking some reactions to getting hit by weapons among other things that would make things more juicy, I decided to use the morning to implement a simple hit reaction system.

My first stop was to add a hit animation in a way that would layer over the rest of the enemy systems, so I created a simple 10 frame animation with one pose to see how it looked, I added this to a separate layer on-top of every other layer. Created an upper body mask so that they could still walk and then I just triggered it upon getting hit:

That worked fine, so then I had to figure out a way of establishing the direction the weapon or projectile was coming through, luckily Unity has a dot product function as well as a working sample in the SDK that recognized forward and behind. I extended this to recognize left and right. I also gave it some tolerance to allow for centered directions, so 8 directions in total and a centered one just to cover all possibilities.

I first tested this using a cube and a sphere:

So now that this was working I went back into 3dsmax and made the 8 directional hit poses, roughly, then brought them back in to Unity and named the accordingly. I then added them all to the hit layer I created and placed them according to direction,

finished up the transition setup and triggers and voila:

Optimization note: I found this Forum.unity.com about setting triggers with strings and will update my code when I am polishing things up, but for now I just wanted to make sure everything is working as expected

Thanks for reading!