How do I do proper melee combat

I'm a total unity noob, how exactly do I use animation for hit detection. I have no clue. I'm trying to make a chivalry/mount and blade type system. I really have no clue at all. Not even sure how to make a rigid body. please help

 

Hi. I recently implemented my own system for combat. I won't go into every detail but I will explain how in a nut shell.

First you place your weapon on the hand object of your character. I put a box collider as trigger, and a rigid body as kinematic on my weapon object. Also whatever you are planning on hitting with your melee like enemies need some kind of colliders to hit.

Using mecanim I placed 2 events on my attack animation AttackBegin and AttackEnd events. Attackbegin simply turns a bool in my player script to true, which tracks when the swing is happening, and AttackEnd turns the bool false.

This will create a system where this bool will only be true when you are swinging your sword.

On the weapon you create a script and do your damaging code in OnTriggerEnter/Stay, but only if that attack bool is true. If a valid hit was detected, set the attacking bool to false, so only 1 hit can happen per swing.

Good luck my friend. There are lots of ways to do this so pick the technique that works for you and your game.

 

Alright I understand what I need to do, i have colliders on my sword and enemy, and the enemy collider is set as a trigger. What line of code do I use? I've tried OnTriggerEnter, but it doesn't work. I'm sure that I just wrote it wrong, but I can't find much online. Thanks for the reply.