i have been using Mixamo animations on my characters and learning Mechanim and frankly I am blown away.
Just have an issue though which is that I am animating scenes for viewing with Vuforia and as such I generally need my characters to be looking up a bit so the viewer can see their faces more- ‘playing to the gods’ to use a theatrical term.
So my characters and animations using Mixamo are spot on if you are viewing things from the ground plane (or ‘stalls’ to continue the metaphor), but generally in a coffee-top AR scenario the camera is alot higher off the ground. So what I want to do is tweak the pose so that if the character is looking ‘forwards’ in the imported animation their head is actually looking up a bit.
I have tried tweaking things in the ‘Muscles’ tab of the Avatar settings, but I just find that while I can modify the extents of the head motion, by setting the lower threshold from -40 to say -20 and the upper from 40 to 60, the central point still stays at 0 rather than +20 as I’d expect.
Does anyone know what I need to do or if its even possible with Mechanim?
Can you insert a forward facing node /empty gameobject between neck and head bones and put a SmoothLookAt script on it? Have another empty parented to character in front and above so the script LooksAt that?
I haven’t tried it yet though as last night I did some fiddling…
I’m not sure if this is the right way but this is what I did…
My characters are imported from Mixamo and dont have any animation on them and my animations are imported separately. When I imported the animations I set the avatar to be the avatar from the character model.
In the Character model I found I could adjust the initial head position so it was tilting up 20 deg by going to the characters prefab and then in the inspector going to the Rig tab and clicking ‘Configure’
Then in there in the ‘Mapping’ tab (I was originally thinking what I wanted to do would be in ‘Muscles’) I could click the ‘Head’ button and then the green dot that was there at the top of the neck/base of the skull.
Then I could set the Transform rotation of that to have an x value of -20.
This made the characters head always look up.
What I also found was that any animations that used that avatar then wanted me to ‘Recalculate’ them (or some similar button in the animations inspector rig tab)
However when I did this it seemed that the animation accounted for my changes to the character rig and made the head look up less, maybe 10deg. So I duplicated the character model, set the duplicated models head transform back to 0 and then used this duplicated avatar as the avatar that was specified in the animations inspector rig.
This seemed to make the animation then play with the characters forward head angle always being tilted 20deg…