Question about mocap packs / Asset Store models.

Unity Engine
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I’m new to Unity but not new to programming. My experience mainly revolves around the web but I feel C# is pretty similar to AS3 do I have very few issues adapting to Unity in terms of code. I am a decent enough modeller for my purposes (which is learning things, mostly) but in terms of animation I am pretty inexperienced.

I know the terminology but I don’t have the skills so to speak. Not the ones required for humanoid characters. Best I can do is a stiff robot or a deformed human that walks like it has the cramps. And I’m not trying to remake Silent Hill.

I’ve been raiding the Store for free Assets and came upon a bunch of mocap packs. To my surprise they worked great when I hooked them up to a decent model I found somewhere else. Within no-time I had an Animator running albeit with simple Triggers / no blending. But it looked surprisingly good for my expectations. I get that not every model / mocap animation mix will work properly (like clipping issues) but is this an acceptable workflow? It works, but I have no clue on what issues I’d run into.

Just looking for pointers and pitfalls here. Thanks for reading and doubly so for your input!

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Mixamo is another great place to look for humanoid animations. In theory, you can adjust the muscle settings in the avatar configuration when you import a humanoid animation into Unity to resolve simple clipping issues, though I’ve never really touched those setting myself.

As for problems you are likely to encounter, I’ve written about some of the main ones in the documentation of Animancer which is a more flexible code based approach that lets you avoid the need for Animator Controllers. It also has lots of detailed Examples that explain how to use it and I’m about to release a massive v4.0 update in the next few days.

1 Like
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Thanks for those resources! I wasn’t sure what I was doing is legit… as it almost feels like a mix of magic and cheating. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with what I could accomplish using just a free model from the store, a mocap pack, and a Blend Tree.

Once I have a better grasp of NavMesh I’ll take a look at Animancer. Replacing Animation Controllers with a bit of code sounds like it would be my cup of tea in the long run :slight_smile: