This has been torturing my team for the past month and a half and we’re all very lost.
My team and I are using Unity 2020.3.27f1 LTS. We had setup many characters across the game. Of course, when we designed them and place them in the world in the Unity Editor, they are in their default T-Pose and animating once the game plays. This has been how the project’s been for the past year.
Then about a month and a half ago I did a bunch of edits related to character animation and performances in a scene and pushed it. From there, all characters across the project broke in some way. I have no idea why as I only edited a few animations for select characters and their triggers. I didn’t touch any code.
When I say they all broke, it’s in various ways. Some characters stopped working entirely or partially; an example being a character with a long coat but now the coat itself no longer animated at all with the rest of the body. Some had parts of their rig that started to bend, distort, and move oddly in ways they never did before on animation, most prominently their hands in most cases. Some contorted into random positions for no reason…
However, the biggest problem is that almost every character model now holds a pose in the Unity editor. We have no idea why. It’s like Unity saved their last posed position and has made it their default pose forever. They hold that pose no matter what. You can remove all their animation components and it will still hold that pose instead of a T-Pose. It could be a sitting position. It could be an idle pose. Sometimes it’s in a cringing position that models go into when their rigs are broken… But almost all of them will animate properly on Play Mode… With some animation errors as mentioned above. And this is on EVERY character. You can see some examples in the images below.
We’ve been scrambling to figure out why such a problem has occurred and it has been a huge setback. There’s no logical reason why such a project-wide problem just suddenly happened. I went back into the commit history to find where it started and it began with my commit… But I did nothing that should have caused something like this. I was tweaking animation performances in one scene which doesn’t even feature most of the characters or anything related to them. Now it suddenly damns the whole project and every character has been affected even if I hadn’t touched them in a long time.
The weird thing is that the animation errors at least have an odd fix mostly. For some, but not all of the characters, if I delete their rig in the prefab and then put a rig back in the prefab fresh from the project files, their animation issues are mostly solved… But there’s nothing actually different about the rig at all. It makes zero sense. This does not fix the posing issue though.
So far, I have no clue what is happening or why. Even putting in the fresh rig does not save the character from becoming affected by the posing issue eventually. The only clue I’ve been able to find is that in Prefab Mode, it T-Poses as it should, but if I click the Show Overrides checkbox it goes back into that pose. This leads me to believe that there is an Override issue, but I couldn’t have triggered anything like that project-wide, I never even knew Overrides like this were a thing until I looked into this clue.
This leads me to believe this is an editor problem because nothing me or any of my team could have done should have caused all this mess to happen. Now we have to redo weeks of work to try and fix some of these issues and we still don’t know how to fully stop these problem or why it’s happening. At least one of these characters are still even more distorted than the images below on animation and we don’t know why. It has forced a crash when I was looking more deeply into the animations at one point. The project/unity seems much more unstable since this began. One of my teammates sent a version to Unity via the Report a Bug function, but whenever I tried doing so myself as well, it never worked. We have yet to hear anything.
Anyone have any idea what is going on?!
Notes
This is Prefab Mode, so it T-Poses as usual. This is how it looks as I edit the prefab directly.
Now back in Regular Editor Mode, it’s holding its idle pose. Note that I am NOT IN PLAY MODE. This happens for just about every model in the game now all of a sudden. This will stick even if you remove its animation and other components. There’s nothing I can do to change this. While it usually will animate mostly fine in Play Mode, there are several minor and major animation errors that seem to be tied to this on pretty much every character (eg. Hands not moving properly or model becoming distorted jelly on animation)
These models are background NPCs. They are ALL messed up by this issue. They either hold a pose or are in a cringe position… Or mess up entirely. This will occur regardless of if you remove all its extra components or not.
A few questions that might help:
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