There is iClone, Poser, 3dsmax, Makehuman… I missing anything ? Im not great 3d animator so I am interested in a tool that works very smoothly with Unity to get animation and skinned models in and out of Unity.
What is everyone else using for this ?
Also, I have a Kinect v2. Would like to easily animate these bipeds. Only program I know for this is ipiSoft at the moment… iClone 6 it is unclear if there will be a tool for this.
Not quite sure if this is what you want to do, but I have had descent luck with Makehuman (export as .obj). Then import .obj into Blender, edit and save .blend directly into the unity asset directory for your project. Be sure to give the character armature in Makehuman so that Mechanim can find bones for animation. I am new to this also, but hope that helps.
For me the best ever is iClone Animation Pipeline
You need this Bundle with the version 5
You get iC 5 and 3D xchange pipeline . With this you can retargeting the bones to any biped Character. That mean you can use the huge mocap Motion library on any character and it will be also 100% mecanim compatible. Also it is possible to convert any biped BVH File.
For creating bipeds, Mixamo Fuse is very good.
Cinema Mo-Cap is cheaper than iPi Soft and works directly in Unity, but since it only uses one camera you can’t record motions where you rotate more than about 45-60 degrees, or where a limb crosses in front of your body.
You could take a look at Brekel Kinect Body V2 as a potential motion capture solution since you have a Kinect V2 handy. You could try recording and export animation data as .FBX for use inside of Unity as a quick and dirty pipeline but you’ll need another program in order to edit it further.