Understandable that it will be around. Would it be possible to have an option to hide the legacy stuff in the editor. As it clutters things and looks ugly. I guess it would require a preprocess directive that gets added or something. But it sure would be nice not to have to see it if you don’t plan on using it.
YAY! Looking good!
I would hope there’s potential for porting rigs from software like blender/maya to Unity!
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Any plans to have support for 2D animation using sprite renderers?
We’re heavy users of Mecanim and beyond excited for this new system, even if it still seems at least a year away from production-readiness.
Question: you mention under retargeting that this works now for all character/rig types. Does this mean that the new graph-based system does away with the Humanoid/Generic distinction? (I sure hope so, it’s so constraining and outdated.)
Okay this does look properly exciting! (my initial reaction to seeing “new animation system” was along hte lines of “oh no, now it will be yet another new system that can’t properly replace the other ones, and everything will be even more complicated”) But the details you wrote about here are good. Yay! Finish and ship it! 
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I would say yes. Some of the Maya rigging used on the FPS Sample characters was replicated in the animation system, using a mix of inbuilt high level constraints, constraints built with subgraphs (consisting of lower level math nodes) and finally custom high level constraint nodes implemented with C#.
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Nice! Animating in the engine is the future to me. Both in editor and runtime. Coupled with everything else there’s a ton of potential here.
Just need to see people making Import/Exporters designed to do it! XD
I dunno if any formats natively port these sorts of things, maybe that’s a pipedream. But since stuff like OpenPBR is a thing, maybe we’ll see rigging get standardized a bit too lol.
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Heh heh, very good question which actually has a lot of implications. Nothing has been decided 100%, but let me lay out some of the discussions. I did hint at this in a post last year
Yes it will properly replace Mecanim (The Animator).
However we are also aware we can’t just yank out Mecanim as some productions will absolutely still need it.
So that raises a few more questions:
- If we have both systems available, which is the default? There are valid opinions on both sides.
- Can we migrate old projects to the new system? Well their being vastly different (most notably the approach in the new State Machine) it is almost impossible to do so. We actually had a separate internal team go through this exercise, and a major learning was that they brought all their bad habits and Mecanim workarounds into the new system. So did not take advantage of all the new tools available to them. I took this as a major lesson, that we MUST provide a “concept migration guide” when we get closer to release. IE You used to do it like this, now you can do it like this
- Can we support a mixed environment then? In theory both can exist at the same time, but there will be major challenges with that. Even right off the bat at import time. Then, as the new system is so vastly different none of the new tooling will work with Mecanim, which will cause issues. If you find a bug, diagnosing it will be a nightmare. From a support issue, I think it will be reasonable to not support a mixed environment.
- Okay then, how do we stop a mixed environment from happening? Do we hide one or the other (as MechaWolf99 is proposing for Legacy). Again, there are arguments for each approach.
For existing games which must use Mecanim (even Legacy), that will of course be an option.
But there should be no good reason for any new project to use anything except the new system.
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Something we are discussing. But there are good arguments for not hiding as well. Nothing has been set in stone on this yet.
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We do not expect to add any new 2D work for the first version.
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Yep 
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Will the new DataFlowGraph v2(or whatever its called) be usable outside of animation?
Also is there be a new successor to “humanoid” rigs/muscle clips retargeting or will they be reused for the new system?
Yes, that is the plan
That is probably the only thing we won’t have in the new system compared to Mecanim/Humanoid. However, the retargeting capability will be there to be coded, or made as a custom node. We are trying to be as generic as possible in the first version, whereas Humanoid is bound to a fixed definition, which is why we focused on remapping first.
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Whenever adopting a new system, I find it infinitely more useful if there are tiered examples in the engine that work that we can tinker and poke at.
Just an idea, but maybe you guys could create some super light weight sample package that we could download from the package manager and literally just copy paste a biped or some other animation system demonstrating best practices. It’s just nice to be in an engine, looking at something that works and you are sure is properly set up and learn in that environment.
WAY less daunting than opening a blank canvas and kinda following along and hoping you don’t mess up the instructions or miss a setting somewhere
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Yes, I wholeheartedly concur! 
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Yeah totally, I meant an option a user can toggle on to hide them. But, maybe not worth the effort. Just an idea. I will say, even if they are not hidden, I like when the menu items at least are in a “Legacy” section or have their names appended with “(Legacy)” so it becomes clearer what is recommended to be used.
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The comments are coming thick and fast and I missed this.
Yeah, this was a key learning for us which I alluded to in previous posts. We can’t (and won’t) ship half finished features. So when it came to an entire animation system, we did not want to fall into that trap again.
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Thank you for the detailed answer. My preference would be for the new system to be the default going forward. And Mecanim would be hidden under some checkbox for people unwilling or unable to leave the old ways behind. Perhaps there could be a check upon first time project import - if any mecanim related objects exist → enable Mecanim, if not then default to the new system.
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Yeah, I am in the same camp as you. Perhaps during the beta we can do a poll, to solve the issue once and for all.
Will we see any vestiges of this in Unity 6?
Also i think many people would be happy with a clean cut lol.
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