How can I get my player collider to match the player/mesh rotation of animations?

Unity Engine
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1

I’ve been using the standard character controller for some time now without a rigidbody or additional collider, and I have basic animations like idle, walk, run, jump, and I made my own blend tree to get these to work along with strafing, and I tweaked them all a lot and am very happy with the results, and I have learnt quite a bit about how to adjust animation settings, etc.

But I have run into a problem that I can’t seem to find much info on. When I have more complicated animations like crouching, or if I have a simple swimming feature and I add a swim animation, the player mesh becomes horizontal as expected while swimming, but when I go from idle → swim, the controller collider remains in its default vertical rotation. I cannot think of how I would make the collider rotate horizontally to consistently match the swimming animation.

My only idea is to use smooth rotating like Quaternion.Slerp() to rotate the collider at the same time/speed, etc as the animation. Are there better methods or any kind of information out there? But then at the same time I would probably need more colliders for the arms since they would be stretched out beyond the collider which is a capsule. I have no idea where to go from there, I’ve kind of been doing all this on my own so far with a few short tutorials here and there.

2

Smoothly changing collider size when crouching or swimming is reasonable option, there is no automatic solution and nobody is trying to automate this to my knowledge.

Using additional colliders for hands during swimming is not a good option, unless you are doing physical ragdoll movement (e.g. Gang Beasts, Human Fall Flat). Depending on animation, it will fill weird if hands are blocking movement or something.

Most indie games just allow hands and other body parts to pass throw walls.
AAA games use a lot of IK for such things. They just adjust hands, very similar to how they adjust feet on stairs - they certainly don’t use additional colliders for that, just a couple of raycasts and math.