Mecanim Questions

Unity Engine
1

Few mecanim questions for anyone else trying to build CC’s around this system:

  1. When I use a curve, the initial value for the initial frame is not what is represented in the curve itself. So if I have a curve like this: http://screencast.com/t/mhBThVo0F , @ time index 0 i’d expect to see a value of 0.015 here and NOT 0. Yet the curve, instead of having a specified value at a particular time index, appears to be “lerping” towards the desired value in the curve. I’m at a loss why you’d want this behaviour implicit but this is what i’m seeing: http://screencast.com/t/J0ZLhp5uMB.

An attempt to “warm up” the curve using SetFloat() yields a warning and fails to do anything: http://screencast.com/t/ZOHQhHtVJ9o

So my question here is: how can we ensure a curve returns the absolute value at a particular index instead of some kind of lerped value?

  1. Is there a way to have curves that are not floats? I mean, a bool curve would be quite desirable if you’re wanting to affect a state during the course of an animation. If course this can be hacked as I’ve attempted above with a float + comparison to 0f, but what about int’s or vector3s?

  2. What about the current time in an animation clip vs it’s duration? I get that there may be layers and blending, but we must have some means of knowing where we are in the course of an animation state, otherwise how would ExitTime even be reliable?

  3. Is there a means of knowing when a new animation transition has been made and the new state has just started up?

Thanks!

2

Someone out there must have this mecanim beast tamed? Any good docs on it out there?

3

try this link, Preorder Mechanim Tutorial, and just read the updated reference manual.

4

Where are you seeing the updated reference manual? I don’t see any links off that page to one nor does it seem to exist in the MecanimTut.zip ?

5

See this: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/MecanimAnimationSystem.html , which seems more like a 20,000 ft “welcome to mecanim” intro than a full reference manual. Anyhow, anyone actually know the answers or are we all pretty much in the dark on mecanim right now?

6

Sort of a fail on Unity part going on

No new examples and the same old broken character controllers

Most everything on the internet about Unity is quickly becoming outdated also

7

Ya, well look on the bright side - the Unity3D folks are moving faster than the speed of the interwebs ;). I feel like mecanim is awesome as a tool and subsystem - starting to have concerns on the API side however, it is looking very sparse … like for instance the whole IsName( ? ) vs earlier betas where you could just get the statename … I liked that approach more since it allows for substring matching instead of equality.

8

All that is beyond me right now haha

I have no bad things to say about Mecanim
Just struggling a little right now trying to figure things out since I am basically a beginner with all of this
It has only been since late August of this year I have been doing this stuff