Every single asset I see on the store that uses mecanim (Animation assets), their webplayer feels laggy between animations, like enough to make the game feel like crap. Is that just the artist tweaking it to SHOW the animations correctly or does mecanim really work like this. For instance in all of the examples I’ve seen if you move forward it delays for like a millisecond getting out of idle, then starts running, if you stop moving it delays another millisecond and then it takes another one to move again, so like a lot of lag in the input. Whats the deal with this? Has anyone have an example of a really smooth mecanim controller that responds to input instantly? If so I’d like to see it.
Also whats the deal with mecanims API documentation STILL not being filled out? Like look at this Unity - Scripting API: Animator … Nearly EVERY function and var in the rest of unity has example code in C# and JS and Boo. mecanim is still not filled out. Whats the deal ? I cant even remember seeing mecanim even being patched since its come out in the patch notes either.
Your thoughts?
Seems like most asset store examples do have a delay (no clue on why, must have set the mecanim transition time too long). Regularly it woks fine.
Naughty dogs animator told in the making of “Last of us”, that, to have a really responsive player animation, you would have to stop one animation and start the next one, long before the first one ends, otherwise it feels laggy…
Same here, no problems with transitions. I would note that the default settings have the transition time fairly long. I always have to tweak them to get good results.
I would like to see future versions allow the user to set some sort of default value, and improve the transition interface.
As said, probably using full transitions when some animations should just pop, the brain doesn’t even see the difference. I was thinking the same thing Carpe said actually as id just recently watched that for the second time.
I think mecanim is pretty great and you don’t really need a load of examples? The api works as expected, you just get stuck in. The ability to chuck almost any sensible animation onto any sensibly rigged character is great, absolute minimal faff, and features that never seem to get mentioned anywhere that are great are ones like how you can control the way an animation is imported and used. Using those tools you can get useful animation out of any old crap with mecanim doing a great job of showing you where you might get a usable loop and how to pivot, place, orient the imported animation all with instant feedback
Pretty easy, interestingly, to get stuff like the animation in The Last Of Us together, editing transitions and creating complex animation flow is very intuitive I think. Some people moan they didn’t want the legacy animation system replaced, but the legacy system is, to put it kindly even, ridiculously primitive in comparison
It’s crazy that over a year after mecanim was released the docs are still pretty threadbare. Your best bet is still to go looking at the couple of videos they did back at release. Mecanim can play animations fine and do transitions really well but otherwise its a mess. Weird bugs and really inconsistent access from code. It’s so close to being a great system but still so many things holding it back. Maybe sometime in 5.x they’ll clean it up more.
It is pretty great for prototyping though. You can just throw animations in there and with retargeting you can switch everything around easily. It is getting it to behave in a proper project that the issues really start popping up.