I’ve been spending the last couple weeks learning rigging and animation without Unity in mind in particular. But I decided to bring my character into Unity to try Mecanim only to realize that my rig is not very Mecanim friendly in the slightest.
Mecanim seems to require that every bone is connected to the next in a hierarchical fashion. My current rig is made following Digital Tutors Character Rigging for Production tutorial and no bone chains are connected to each other. The reason for this was flexibility as far as I’ve been taught.
I’m just wondering if this is a general game rig restriction and/or best practice, or just a requirement to make the rig work with the Avatar system? Could I use the legacy system without issues?
Well, no one seems to be responding, so I’ll chime in.
I’m actually looking for some kind of unified list of limitations and best practices for a rig I’m working on myself, but I do happen to know the answer to your question. In general, you want to have the whole body as one hierarchy. Often, groups and constraints between bones will not carry over correctly when you export. Same goes for blendshapes and deformers. There seem to be some plugins for unity that will support other types of deformation, but the most stable solution is a single joint chain skeleton where every joint has a single parent, eventually terminating at the world root (placed at 0,0,0).
IK is usually handled fine in my experience, but if for some reason a set-driven-key or IK animation is not exporting correctly, try exporting an fbx (whatever the newest version is) and make sure to have it bake animations to the bones.
