Ok, guys: for the last couple of days I have been trying to get little pieces of the puzzle how to get animations right, but I’m gonna need some help. I got my model running, jumping, idling, all that, but when I want to make small tweaks to the position, I get totally lost.
Is it that mecanim just assumes everybody has a motion capturing equipment at home to create tailor made animations??
Animation is new to me, I will have to ask beginner questions. I tried to do my homework but I just don’t find what I’m looking for. So far in learning Unity I have been amazed how the Unity community provides so many perfect answers.
Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish: working with a layer and an avatar mask, I want to grab a position from one animation, tweak it, rotate the head, bend the arm, stuff like that. That stance should be my new animation. Really it shouldn’t even animate, just put the limbs in the right position.
How do you do this?
This is what I did: I made the shortest clip of the stance I like, and put that in my animator. Select the model so that I can bring up the animation, which is just one keyframe. I can actually add some new keyframes and it sort of works to create a new stance. Then I must have closed it down or something because all of a sudden it’s read only. When I click on the shoulder for instance, it does that thing where it wants me to create a new animation just for the shoulder. Not what I want. I just want to move and rotate the limbs and joints to put the model into the desired position.
This is taking so much time, with such poor results and no understanding. I really appreciate any help understanding this!
For small pose adjustement over an Animation you should use IK if you have a pro version. You may also find some free IK plugin on the asset store.
If you don’t have a pro version and can’t find any plugin on Asset Store you could write your own script.
If you have to write your own script to do this, you should do it MonoBehaviour.LateUpdate() call. This will be the last update called right after Mecanim has finish processing the animation and write the final pose into transform and properties.
The Asset Store has some great products that are very useful for things like this. Skele is an easy way to create poses and animations in Unity. Final IK does procedural animation. Watch some of the Skele video tutorials to see how he creates some good-looking animations in Unity without mocap.
Hi Sonny, Tony - thanks, these are interesting replies, worth browsing the asset store and googling for info once more! There are many (paid) options, but at this point, I think just buying the solution is not solving the problem which is me being clueless on animations…
In the end I went back to what I was trying yesterday, and I was now actually able to create a single keyframe animation, positioning just the head and the arm which is the only thing I need at this point. The empty clip sets the model into a weird postition, it’s halfway burried in the ground, and you have to add curves for each transform for each limb separately so I guess it’s crazy even to initialize a normal position, let alone creating full animation clips, but for me this is enough to do the trick!