I often find myself wanting to create a new animation clip based off multiple animation clips using a mask.
Example: I have a walking animation, and lots of different weapon animations. Since I can’t split the entire animator controller using a mask (since some weapon animations do need the legs, like swinging or aiming), I have to make individual walk / crouch walk animations for each weapon, when the leg part of that is always the same.
It would be fantastic if we could mix animation clips using masks, which would generate a animation clip that could be used as a normal clip, if that makes sense.
Is this something that is doable somehow?
Josh
Doable in theory most likely, but I don’t know of any tools to actually help do it.
But can’t you just put any weapon animations that need the legs on the base layer and fade out the upper body layer when you play them?
My issue is that sometimes certain hand animations need to control both the legs and arms, but most of the time splitting it up on two layers (body as base, arms with mask) is good.
Currently, I have no way to do the former. My idea is to completely drop the layer thing, and just have each weapon fully control the body. Of course doing this by hand would be insane, since most animations would be identical walking / crouching / crouch walking animations.
Since I currently have 9 different weapon animations, that just wouldn’t work. (Well, it’s possible just way too much work if I say want to tweak the walk animation)
Oh btw on a unrelated note I love your animancer tool, it’s a lifesaver <3
That messiness is one of the main reasons I made Animancer 
But I don’t really see why this would make the script-controller interaction any more messy than usual. The controller itself would be a bit more messy because weapon animations would be split across multiple layers, but the way you refer to them in scripts would still be the same wouldn’t it? I’m not sure because I’ve never actually used layers in an Animator Controller.
Have you considered just using Animancer for it? Controlling everything in scripts tends to be much cleaner than anything an Animator Controller can do.
In theory you should even be able to change which layer an animation is on. I’ve never actually tried it, but I did implement the ability to change the parent of a state at runtime. I’m planning on trying it out in one of the example scenes I’m making for the upcoming v3.0 release (hopefully only a couple of weeks away now). Play an Attack animation while Idle and it does it on the base layer so you get the expected feet movement. But if you Attack while Running, it moves it to layer 1 which uses an upper body only mask so your feet are still running during the attack.
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I’m planning on rebuilding my animation system from scratch soon, built on top of animancer. I’ll have to think about how I’ll do this Thank you
Just thought I’d let you know that Animancer v3.0 is now up on the store.
The layers example actually demonstrates how to change an animation’s layer on the fly: Animancer - 07 Layers
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ooo huzzah!!! I’m so excited to try out v3!!