Mecanim Motionbuilder fbx import problem.

[kanga]

Hi
I was very relieved to see a thread in the developers section regarding mechanim. I thought I was the only one having trouble with it. This is an extract from a post I found, its a couple of months old.

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I’m using Mixamo-purchased animations fine with Mecanim. The way it works for me is to download the animations from Mixamo in “FBX for Unity (.fbx)” format with the “Skeleton Only” option selected. Then I import those into my project using the Model@animation.fbx naming convention. Then in the import settings Animations tab for that FBX I set Muscle Definition to “Copy From Other Avatar” and set that to the muscle definition I set up earlier for my model. Then (and this bit took a bit of random clicking around to figure out) in the Clips section below I click the + and then that expands controls where you can rename the clip (mine were all named “mixamo.com”) and set the Mecanim import options for that clip. Hope that helps; let me know if anything is unclear.

Ok, I am using a combination of BVH mocap and altered fbx files from the animation starters pack on a custom character. My character is humanoid enough to work with motionbuilder and be characterized in there. I can apply imported mocap to the model successfully. Also my character works seamlessly with the mechanim stock animations only my character has broad shoulders so the animations are unusable in that state. I thought that is what the muscle section was for but not being able to use it I decided to try motionbuilder itself.

I can import motionbuilder fbx files (Mobu 2013) but the animation only files come in with meshes even though I specify hierarchy only. Those clips behave very badly indeed. Clips or takes embedded in a fbx character file behave better but not well enough to be useful. I read the above post which took a long time to find, and thought that being able to use the muscle clip facility could help. Hitting the open button by the import settings at the top of the characters animation area opens Motionbuilder 2012 (although I have specified 2013 to handle my fbx files) and crashes it.

I am having a really hard time getting this to work. Will’s tutorial video is great but it glosses over importing your own clips and has no instruction on muscle clipsl. I have read the manual and it sort of says what the clips do except I think there is a discrepancy between what the author knows and what I hope the functions are. Where are those areas where I can set muscle definition? So far I can only fiddle with the sliders that wiggle my character in his prayer position. Is there any information on this? There is a video in the developers section but it is private. Any links suggestions or information very gratefully received.

Thanks in advance.

[kanga]

It is a lot tougher to implement this than it is to import a cat rig into UDK. Why dont I use UDK then?, we I do but there isnt the same community of warm hearted indy individuals there is here at Unity 4!

[UnLogick]

We’re currently revising the Animation Starter Pack, the animations in it was set up incorrectly and I’m sure this has been the main source of your problems! I went through them last week and it looked quite bad. But as soon as it was configured correctly it looked and behaved beautiful!

I believe the updated pack should be on the asset store now. You can recognize the correct pack by having only 1 avatar, all the clips in the Animation Starter Pack uses the “dude.fbx” skeleton setup and as soon as you import the animations with this avatar as reference everything will just work! If its not yet on the asset store using multi-edit it should only take 10 minutes to select all models in the pack and set them up to use the dude avatar. But the new Animation Starter Pack should also include a sample state locomotion state machine, so keep a look out for that one too.