My client wants to modify this asset:
so that it can use Humanoid Mecanim, and also potentially UMA.
The anatomy doesn’t match human anatomy, so I don’t know how I could accomplish this. It seems to me even if Unity recognized it as corresponding with the Humanoid format, human animations then applied to it would produce very strange, unusable motion. Any thoughts?
It’s really not that far off of a classic human rig than you think. Of course, some animations aren’t going to look great on it, but most won’t look bad. Yeah, costume rigs and animations would be the right way to do this, but maybe they don’t want to spend that money at this stage, or whatever. Plus, if your client includes IK into the character too, then that IK should correct most of the issues the rig will have.
Two problems I see.
It looks like the legs have 3 bones which is the show stopper. I don’t think this can be matched to the humanoid rig successfully unless there is a workflow process I’m unaware of.
The second issue is the hips. I think very few if any animations would work on this robot how the pelvis/hip/upper leg are setup.
It may be possible to edit the rig outside Unity, or create a new rig that matched close enough to the humanoid rig, but I still think most humanoid animations, which are organic, would look wrong on this model.
I’d give it your best effort, but not spend more than half a day on it. If it doesn’t work as intended there isn’t a lot of modifying you can do to fix the rig in Unity.
I just don’t see organic animations looking acceptable on that robot, unless it was avatar masked to only upper body.
Update if you take the plunge and get it working.