I work a lot with procedural animation blended with keyframe (ie. spider auto legs then attack front legs with ik target). Also hand and fingers contact with objects in VR.
Can you show examples of what the new graph can do in those areas?
Also, even if graph are nice for artists, they’re also a pain in the ass because they’re not searchable and LLM can’t handle them, so i hope that you add solid search and that the file is human readable.
There’s tons of ik stuff in roadmap video. Idk what was you looking at
When should ACL be considered as a solution for animation compression? Basically, the first thing every team that can modify the engine source code does is to integrate ACL(GitHub - nfrechette/acl: Animation Compression Library).
With ECS baking and Burst native plugin support, you don’t even need to integrate it into the engine to get amazing performance with it. GitHub - Dreaming381/AclUnity: Unity Native Plugin for ACL Latios-Framework-Documentation/Kinemation Animation and Rendering/README.md at main · Dreaming381/Latios-Framework-Documentation · GitHub
So unless they make their solution very inextensible, I think integrating it without engine source should be doable.
You could build that yourself. The input script version is just some C# code that reads the input system asset and generates a bit of C#. You could do that for the animator.
Tangent about the input script version:
The input system C# version actually has a deep flaw. The inputs asset you create in the project is an asset, which means all places that reference it use the same instance of the inputs asset. If you enable/disable and rebind keys in that asset, it’s all uses of that.
The c# version creates a completely new instance in memory, so if you use the C# version in a character controller and the inputs-asset in the UI, those are not the same and it needs a little workaround. I would prefer the C# version being a wrapper around the existing asset.
This looks fantastic! The animation pipeline has been quite a pain for everyone new to unity as far as I can remember (also known as unity3 :P).
It also looks quite a bit similar to how unreal structures their animation import, preview, graph stuff but just… better, cleaner, less overwhelming - nice.
Really really really looking forward to test this out.
Hello,
First of all i am glad to hear this new changes, they will be a huge game changer, congrats on that.
My question is, with the new graphs and tooling system will it be easier to refresh the character mesh itself? Like there are a bunch of colliders, components, (sometimes child gameobject too ) here and there on the rig skeleton. Currently if i have a better, more detaild mesh, i had to re-add (or copy) all of them. Will the graph tools + socket system fill this “missing layer”, so i can just import a new mesh into it, and it works?
Ideally, they should provide a new timeline along with any such system. A complete package. Else with 2 years version cycle, you will be retiring by the time the “new” (by that time old) animation system will be fully supported by a Timeline…
I kind of agree with you, but that would require a very broad system change that also requires educational changes. It is hard enough to teach animators to animate for games, (animating for animation is different) imagine now not only telling them they need to change the way they think to loops and quarter loops to be flipped, but also changing their toolset.
Unity has a great animation system, and I use it a lot too for simple animations. i.e. a spider leg or a windmill spinning etc. But in order to do professional high-quality animation, there has to be substantial support for advanced custom rigs, morph targets, IK blending, joint deformers and so much more. Sounds unlikely they are going to provide anything like that. And it would probably take them forever to complete it. It has taken years for 3dsmax and Maya to perfect and enrich their systems, Blender is still playing catch up…
I was referring to the next gen section, which they’ve only showed one thing that’s honestly worthwhile and that’d be stuff for props. Besides that in Next Gen I didn’t see anything related to other IK stuff, as their focus was more on the overhaul compared to Mecanim
Honestly not much of an excuse when other engines already support that, at least in the character rigging department. Timeline seems to be able to help in some manner, but having a few more tools for advance animation for 3D cutscenes is crucial. Unity has a lot of stuff I personally prefer over other engines. If they plan on overhauling the current system, they still have time to make the new system on par with other engines.
I agree with your idea.
Since a more general character skeleton editing has been introduced, should there also be more customized IK Rig settings (I’m not sure whether it’s still using AnimationRigging or an upgraded version of AnimationRigging). Of course, I also noticed that there is a Character tab that hasn’t been displayed yet, maybe there are some surprises there.
At the same time, I also feel that the Remapping part is shown too little, and there are still many doubts. Is the Mapping method also based on the matching of bone chains? Can IK be used for auxiliary correction? And so on.
Looking forward to hearing more revelations 
Not sure where you saw an “excuse” and we probably have a different understanding of what “advanced animation” means and what it entails.
- 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
This new system looks very very ahead of the old. Well it seems that will be a lot of work to migrate if there are no automatic/semi-auto options. A definitive migration guide would be tremendous.
Does it support 2D?
Second this, basic sprite animation or flipbook needs to be supported.
And 2D skeleton, animation, 2d preview and 2d nodes in Anim Graph too 
This guy has some interesting implementation for animation system for Unity ECS
I think it would be worthwhile going through his framework as well 