We would like to use Humanoid, but in the year I have used unity I have been unable to find a way to have prop joints. I can’t imagine there is no way to do this, I have worked in AAA Games for 25 years and never seen a full body IK system that doesn’t allow you to have sub-rigs so it doesn’t strip animation off extra joints.
The only solution I have seen is to run 2 animators or layer with a blendmask runnnig the same animation imported 2x for the extra joints. This was a crazy early requirement we had for Audodesk HumanIK when we had it in our engine in 2006 at EA. I am rather astonished you can’t just say “yeah don’t remove this joint” and if it isn’t there in source it would just use the position/orientation from the imported skeleton. Or like HIK create rig extensions that can be shared.
Hey Simon,
Yeah, Humanoid can be a pain…
You may have figured this out already, but the team Im on works with humanoid and props as well. How we work with it is to define the humanoid skeleton like normal… but then we have masks that we use when configuring the animation(s). That mask will have the prop joint(s) and/or any other ‘non humanoid’ joints in. The only real downside to this (from what I can tell) is that those prop joints arent going to retarget like the humanoid skeleton will. This might not be much of a problem if your characters are relatively the same size. Obviously, the closer you are to 1:1 between characters the more accurately everything retargets.
You can still share/retarget those animations with other characters as long as those other characters have the same prop/aux/etc joints in their skeleton. If they don’t exist the humanoid part should still play/retarget fine.
hope that is of some help!
cheers