Animating (in Maya) for best results in Unity?

Unity Engine
1

Hi all,
I just downloaded 2.5 a couple days ago and while playing around in the app a little (and being utterly blown away), I’ve spent most of my time reading the documentation and the forum, trying to figure out the best plan of attack for getting some fluid character movements into Unity.

But there’s not that much documentation on animation - or at least not as much as I need! So I’m hoping some folks out there who’ve done this before with Maya can give me some advice before I dive in.

I’ve got the same biped character in two different rigs - FBIK and IK/FK, with animations and poses stored in clips and poses (Maya nodes) and placed in the Trax editor timeline: walkcycle, idle, jump, etc.

My first specific question is if Unity can make use of Maya’s animation clips and poses. Can the nodes just be in the Maya file, or do they need to be laid out in the Trax Editor? From what I’ve read, Unity wouldn’t see the nodes unless they are in the Trax timeline, and then I would need to split the animations according to the frame numbers. Is this correct? Or maybe Unity only sees keys in the main timeline?

My second question is, what is the best rigging setup for use with Unity? What gives the best results? Does FBIK even work? Does floor-contact plane functionality carry over when using FBIK? Is there anyway to edit animations in Maya and have them easily updated in Unity?

Of course, I could go on and on with the questions, but I’ll spare you any more and instead invite you all give me any tips about what Maya character animation workflow yields the best results.

Many thanks!
RW

2

From what I have gathered auto update with Maya and Unity is possible if you have both programs on the same system. Not sure about this because I only have Maya installed. My partner is the unity dude.

As for IK etc, Unity like all other 3d programs does not like IK at all.

Here is what I do. I rig my character normally. I set up a character set and go to town animating. Then I jump out of the character set, select the ROOT joint (or joint group - I usually group my skeleton) and bake the animation.

At this point you can delete all the IKs and control objects. All you should have left are Joints and Mesh. Then Export it to an FBX.

However I should note that the recent outputs Ive done the mesh has completely screwed up in Unity where as the joints seem to be okay.

Hope this helps.

3

I am new to this to and I will be the animator on this new project, Curious to know.

In baking these animations and bringing them in to Unity, is there a way of layering them, so you can control the play of them anytime?
So, if the character is at an idle position(animation) and it needs to do something else (another animation) how do I go about “blending” these in Unity?
I would have a library of animations(fbx), and morphs, can I get these on screen at anytime I want live?

Thanks

4

Hi Media3d,

Yes! You can of course use blending and layering. If you have the animations, you can easily blend them.

Unity also supports additive animation layering, to cut down on the number of animations you are blending. It’s very handy. Read more about it here:

http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Character-Animation.html#AnimBlend

Morphs are not implemented in the Unity API, but it is certainly possible to code. In fact there is a popular c# script up on the unify wiki script section here:

http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=MeshMorpher

There’s also a Javascript version at the bottom :slight_smile:

5

Thanks Caitlyn

I am tackling the animation blend first since it looks a bit simplier than the morph implementation.

I have successfull Cross blend I think. But only on two animations. I am testing 4 animations, they are all brought in as seperates “name@name.fbx” so they become animations to the master model “nameName.fbx” (without the @)
But how do I call these animation so they play, I am only able to call one at a time.
Can I assign a button to each animation. so “t” plays one animation
"p plays another one.
Control animation (static idle figure) with keystrokes.

thanks

Thaks!
I will tackle the morphs a bit later

cesar

6

Just solved the issue thanks to one of the engineers here :slight_smile:

Here is the link the the current thread:
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=148551#148551

Now on to morphing. :slight_smile: