Can I use the same armature for all my humanoid characters in my game?

Unity Engine
1

I’m using Blender. The animations for the armature would be re-usable on all my humanoid characters?

2

Yes

3

Only problem I ever have with that is that characters of different sizes always have their bones repositioned to match the animation’s original skeleton. Not simply rotational despite the keyframes being set up as only rotational.

4

Animations adapting to characters of different proportions is not currently possible in Unity. The thing that makes that possible is called “animation retargeting”.

Its possible in Blender, but that means you have to create different versions of your animations, for every new variant of your skeleton. On the other hand, the process is largely automated once you get things running.

With the new Unity video shown on GDC 2012, on-the-fly animation retargeting could come in, but that’s only my speculation.

5

It really shouldn’t be too hard for someone with some experience to script it. Just have to hold the original transforms in a list, and reposition them at LateUpdate. No idea how the performance would be on that, but it’s an option.
If I end up making something like this sometime soon (however unlikely it might be), I’ll post it on the asset store.

6

I faced same problem. I was hoping to prepare only one set of animation and then I was looking to how use them on all models of same bones set.

You have 2 choices:

  • in Blender you can use “Actions” to automaticly get same animation for each Armature you use with same bones ( please watch this tutorial:
    Blender 2.6 Tutorial - Creating and Editing Actions for Re-use in Animations and Games, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb152Qncn2s )
  • other option is to remove all transform position curves from animation you imported from Blender except rotations ( seems to work fine on simple armatures with simple animation ).