Hi, this is my first full update since taking on the Product Manager responsibilities for Animation. I’ll do my best to keep up the level of quality set by my predecessor, @UnityChinny.
The last big update was tied to the Roadmap Presentation at Unite last fall which can be seen here on YouTube. This week’s roadmap presentation at GDC will go into a lot less detail as not much has changed. This roadmap session is available on YouTube and we’re not revealing anything new in terms of features.
The biggest change is that we will be targeting the release of the new Animation System during the Unity 6 release lifecycle. We can’t yet commit to which version but we will provide an update as soon as we’re more certain of when and how we can get it in your hands.
We’d like to focus this update on high level benefits and then get into more detail on the features that provide these benefits. So the two major benefits as we see them would be:
- Workflow Flexibility
- Better Performance
So let’s dive in!
Workflow Flexibility:
When we say workflow flexibility what do we mean? We’re talking about all the ways in which we intend to improve the workflows around animated 3D skeleton assets in Unity with this update. The intent is to let you do more with less. Simpler state machines, the ability to do more with fewer animation clips, less time spent on changes, and more time and focus to bring your assets to life in Unity!
I won’t re-hash everything @UnityChinny posted previously as he went into tremendous detail! I’ll just build off of what he said.
First, at a high level, I want to emphasize that skeletons in this system are not just for humanoid or bipedal characters, but for any animated skeleton. Your base asset can have variants that inherit from the base skeleton. For instance, a humanoid skeleton could be the base and a variant could add additional bones for wings, a tail, or an extra set of arms.
A base quadruped could be some sort of large cat, like a lion. A variant could also have wings or extra legs, who knows? An insect skeleton could start with 6 legs and get built into an 8 legged creature or add a tail and claws like a scorpion or lobster.
You could also have a car or jeep and add more wheels, guns, wings, whatever you have in mind! The same goes for weapons or other attachments. We give you the framework and foundation, you bring your creativity.
Once you create these skeletons, you now get the addition of sockets, previewing, and remapping which were mentioned in more detail last time.
We’re also excited about all the additional benefits of the new graphs, tooling and a hierarchical layered State Machine. We are sharing more details on this new Graph system in another post, here. In particular, we’re very excited about custom nodes in the new state machine. Nodes like: clip sampling and blending, per-bone weight masking, layer blending, and rigging nodes for a more comprehensive system for animation poses. This provides the ability to create more lifelike movements and interactions.
While we can’t make promises that hold true for every character, game, or particular use case, we can help you achieve more impressive animation results than previously possible, and often with fewer animation clips and less data than what was possible in Mecanim. We also believe that your workflows and development timelines will be shorter and require fewer revisions. And less data also leads to faster loading times in the game.
Better Performance:
To dive into further examples of improved performance, the new hierarchical state machine offers improved performance and the ability to use subgraphs. This lets you focus and work on the most complex parts of your graph rather than being forced to view the entire graph with all nodes exposed. Subgraphs also let you reuse your logic across different graphs.
Another area of increased performance has to do with custom properties, events, and animation markups. How? Because, under the hood, the new system leverages the power of the entities components system (ECS) and better multi-core performance. But don’t worry, you don’t have to convert your project to DOTS in order to benefit from this performance; Motion can be used both with Entities and GameObjects.
When you have 10-20 characters or creatures on screen, the events and triggers all get to benefit from entities, jobs, and burst, everything is multithreaded and performant. This is a net improvement on current animation solutions, where the system would need to synchronize with the main thread for each event check and trigger.
So while the example below may be overkill for most games and developers, it’s showcasing 1000 knights, all animating performantly, and 40,000 arrows and impact events that trigger state changes in the most performant manner in Unity. This is made possible from all the other improvements above!
Thank you all for keeping an eye on these posts and for all of your feedback and help over the past few years. Please continue to give us your feedback and help us have productive conversations here. Lastly, this system has been a very long time coming but it’s getting closer to being something every Unity user can experience. We sincerely appreciate all of your patience, support, and passion for using the Unity game engine.
- Eric
and I’m pleased to know we’ll get our hands on it earlier than we thought.