It’s really not a specific question, but i’ve looked around and i’m still just very confused.
I’ll start by saying that i just wanted to animate a character so that i can have him walk around and pick stuff up.
My problem is that you can find lots of explanations on what is what, but not on how to do stuff.
So please, help me clear my dobts so that i can at least start to learn animation…
When should and should not use avatars?
Unity has an integrated tool that can be used to create new clips.
Using this, should i animate using the “muscles” of the avatar (like “Animator.Head Turn Left-Right”) instead of editing the transforms?
Is it true that i can’t use it to animate humanoid characters? Is that why this Character clips into the ground whe using avatar's animations happens?
Is the tool used only for simple inanimate object animations then?
Let’s say that i just want to animate the “Robot Kyle” character, provided for free by Unity (Robot Kyle | URP | 3D Robots | Unity Asset Store), and for now just make him do somethig simple like walk or nod his head.
How do i do it? How would you do it?
I really can’t wrap my head around this… any help is appriciated, really
Thanks for reading this
The reason you don’t see anyone trying to use the Animator stuff to design big creatures or humanoids is just the scale of the problem; there’s dozens of bones in a humanoid and they’d all need to be tweaked by hand, arduously.
So, just like Unity is not the best replacement for Photoshop, Unity is also not the best replacement for a full-featured character animation studio tool like Blender. There are some third-party assets on the Asset Store that give a no-frills stripped-down version of these tools, allowing for some simplistic animation of characters and simplified interfaces, but many games go straight for dedicated third-party standalone animation tools.
In those tools, you work with your character mesh and bone structure, and animate one or more recordings of their motion through an activity. The recording for walking has the whole set of bone movements for the whole humanoid doing a full right-left-right-left sequence of walking. Some activities like walking are meant to be played repeatedly. Unity can import those recordings in the FBX file format, which luckily third-party tools like Blender can export.
An alternative to doing this work yourself, at least for humanoids, is to find animation sets (basically FBX or other recordings) that other people have done. Again, the third-party assets on the Asset Store will have helpful shortcuts, and Unity has a pretty nice way of helping you match up your character’s bone names with the animation recording’s bone names so that everything works pretty well, assuming your humanoid really is pretty typical in the overall length and number of limbs. If you download Kyle, also download any of the free sample “Mechanim” animation recordings, such as RPG Character Mecanim Animation Pack FREE | 3D Animations | Unity Asset Store to name one popular one. Study what they include, and see how you can replace their stand-in character with your desired character (such as Kyle).
You can also use Unity IK for procedural animations for a Unity avatar (the one you asked for Robot Kyle). It allows you to use IK for main bones like hands, head, feet. But it is two bone ik system. For fullbody animations you can try Animation Rigging package.
Edit: Oh I read the title as Procedural. So my suggestion wasn’t for regular animations.