Rotating a joints transform while it's being controlled by Animator

Questions & Answers
1

Hi, struggling to find a solution to this that works for my use case:

  1. I have an animated model of an eagle, that I want to make talk.
  2. I want to rotate the transform of the jaw joint to make the eagle talk, while the eagle is doing other animations. This rotation needs to happen via script and can not be keyframe animated.
  3. Since the animator controls the joints I can’t seem to affect the rotation of the jaw joint without either using LateUpdate, which yields very strange results as it just overrides the Animators work, or the dedicated OnAnimatorIK function, which doesn’t yield any results at all. I tried putting the script on the same gameobject as the Animator component, and IK is enabled in the animator layer.
  4. I can affect the position of the transform of the joint via script without any issues. However, the talking would look better if the joint also rotated.
  5. I guess these issues might be due to the model not being a humanoid. But surely there must be a way to affect the transform rotations for specific joints in a Generic models as well?

165798-screenshot-2020-08-18-at-200019.png

2

Solution:

  1. Create an Avatar Mask and then uncheck the joints to be affected by other scripts.
  2. Set the Avatar Mask as Mask for the animation layer you are using in the Animator.