There is no Dual Quaternion into Unity. And all our model’s deformation looks bad when animating as you can see in the picture the difference. The mesh is shrinking when moving the bones. Please add Blender’s “Preserve Volume” (Dual Quaternion) feature into Unity.
3 Likes
I don’t know of a single game engine that supports that, it’s probably for performance reasons I’d guess.
You usually fix those issues with better skinning + corrective blendshapes, and/or more bones in those tricky spots. Depends on the case.
CryEngine and Lumberyard support the Dual Quaternion. I want that Unity support this too. They just can add this feature and it depends on developers which they wish to use. They need to be a selection on the editor. And developer will chose the linear or dual quaternion. It is up to developers to choose but they need to add this.
3 Likes
Cool, didn’t know Cryengine supported that, been a while since I used it.
It would indeed be nice if they added it but it’s not some super necessary, urgent feature.
I mean, everyone has been doing just fine with linear blending for decades, there are many ways to solve bad deformations that are more performant than dual quaternion blending. Although a bit more time consuming to do.
Look at the Heretic short from Unity for example, no dual quaternion blending there, still looks amazing. Look at something like FFVII (made in UE4), again no dual quaternion blending, looks amazing.
But anyways, I wouldn’t hold my breath. From what I can tell Unity is already quite swamped with work and adding a feature that already has quite a lot of ways around it probably would not be high on the priority list, if at all.
But it would be nice to have it eventually, at least for HDRP.
Anyways, I’m rambling, sorry.
1 Like
I asked this request to unity support they send this message to me
"Hi there,
Thank you for your kind patience on this ticket.
I’ve talked with our engine support team but they mentioned that it seems to be a feature request but there isn’t much they can do currently. Unfortunately, this feature request is not a priority at this moment, it might take a long time to reflect this request on our Unity engine feature.
I am sorry that we can’t be more help on this, and I hope this is helpful.
Best regards,
Unity AJ_KR
Customer Service Engineer"
I think that they will add this feature, bot not now. It will take a long time add this feature into Unity
1 Like
Any updates regarding volume preservation in Unity? We’re almost 2024 now.
1 Like
I’m afraid that it’s not gonna happen
because it’s not in unity’s benefit to do so
and because it’s not a necessity in terms of character design
when it comes to preserving volumes, it is always advised to learn topology and skinning techniques, not use heavy features like Double Quaternions
That, is nonsensical , you think “preserve volume” and “Corrective smooth” are there in blender because … 3D modellers are lazy or limited in polygons or bad in topology?
(Learn topology : Inaccurate argument, bad topology will make any deformation look bad WITH OR WITHOUT volume preservation; bad topology will only make the problem more obvious).
go down to the math and code of preserve volume (in blender) and see the problems it solves, you can add as many helper deformation bones as you want , as many corrective shape keys as you want, they will minimize the problem but it will ALWAYS BE THERE, like it or not, with perfect topology , planer faces, good edge flow and a billion polygons, it won’t help.
every area around a joint, will have a problem without preserving volume and corrective smooth.
Subjective opinion : I will go beyond that, all the things we have today, RTX, upscaling AI and advances in such field, means NOTHING! reflective shiny floors and mirrors and realistic skin means nothing; if we can’t even get a proper model without breaking body parts and losing weight as soon as a joint is moved; what’s the point of fine rendering? to show how broken the deformable model is?
what exactly IS a high priority or BENEFICIAL task for unity’s team?
not only this is important, i think its more important than most of the stuff (that ain’t bug-fixing) that unity team is currently working on.
agree or disagree, dismissing volume preservation as “Not beneficial”?
then why exactly making games with 3D models if they are just gonna break and look like shit?
I can understand the performance cost, but as mentioned, crytek managed to do it.