Current approach to Skinned Mesh in ECS?

[illinar]

Failed to find any information on how to do a skinned mesh in ECS. I need a ragdoll with ECS physics.

What’s the current recommended approach? I’d like to at least avoid having transforms for bones.

[ajaxlex]

Joachim_Ante made some examples based on the ( Dual Quaternion? ) motion from the Nordeus demo.

GitHub - joeante/Unity.GPUAnimation: Simple but very fast GPU vertex shader based...

Some discussion here:

As-Pure-As-Possible ECS Animation?

So to get rid of the animator dependency, you need to extract the bones and the animation clips into entities and blobs. Joachim's example already shows how to do most of this. Then instead of using animation jobs, you can instead use ECS jobs to drive the bones. To get the animations rendered, you have a couple approaches: Use a material property block pool to write your bone positions and use Graphics.DrawMesh. This gives you the highest quality skinning for a small number of meshes. Writ…

[illinar]

Thanks, but I saw that, and it seems to be just baked animation. I need a ragdoll.

Is there at least a way to set bone positions directly (without transforms) in unity?

[8bitgoose]

Until Unity releases a skinned mesh renderer system for Unity ECS, you are either going to have to write your own or use a hybrid approach where the physics and skinning is done in monobehaviour and everything else is done in ECS.

[illinar]

Yes, I see. I could live with one skinned mesh, but having a bunch of transforms for bones is not that great and they allegedly slow down skinning performance. It’s probably nothing to worry about in my case but I’m curious now if I could update bindposes every frame instead of having bones exposed as transforms…

[snacktime]

The DOTS animation system was supposed to be in preview around the end of the year. And with Unite hitting, well you can take bets on what they might be announcing.