UMotion is a powerful Animation Editor for animating any type of 3D model right inside Unity. Reduce development time by fine tuning animations even while being in play mode.
Important: Don’t use this forum for technical support. Please use UMotion Question&Answer (no account required, all questions are answered by myself and the community).
Key Features
► [PRO] Import Mocap and 3rd Party Animations(from the Asset Store or any modeling application) ►[PRO] Export Animations to *.FBX ►[PRO] Animation Layers
► [PRO] Constraint System(Inverse Kinematics, Child-Of and Custom Property) ►[PRO] Convert Animations to IK
► Bone Animations(useful for characters, creatures,…)
►Transform Animations(useful for not rigged models like most guns on the Asset Store)
► Animate in Play Mode(play the game, pause to edit the animation and continue playing)
► Humanoid, Generic and Legacy Animations
► Root Motion
► Animation Events
► Detailed Documentation
► Video Tutorials
► …
Tutorials
UMotion has detailed video tutorials in a similar style to Unity’s. The videos are organized in several chapters, spoken in English and have English subtitles (in case you can’t understand me well enough). I recommend watching the videos from within the UMotion Manual (chapter “Video Tutorials”) as it links to the appropriate pages in the manual.
“UMotion Tutorials” - Covers all general features of UMotion Community and UMotion Professional.
Lol I forgot about that one, didn’t realize it was the same! I’m mostly refereing as to what it does differently, what are the differenciation, what is the added value, not just what’s best lol. Ie what’s the unique selling point?
There isn’t something like THE unique selling point. UMotion is a complete animation editor supporting all common animation editing features known from your favorite modeling application integrated right inside Unity. It supports every Unity animation type (humanoid included) and animating during edit and play mode thus greatly reducing development time by eliminating the need of any back-and-forth switching between Unity and your modeling application. That is something, yet not available on the Asset Store.
Comparing UMotion with e.g. Skele by their feature list wouldn’t make much sense as it is not a specific feature that makes UMotion unique, it is it’s completeness in terms of workflow that makes it such a great product.
Hi
I have a question: Basically I want to make a realistic 1st person game where the player character model has a camera mount which is a child of the head bone. Then I can simply make the camera a child of the camera mount.
The problem is the camera mount shakes too much when the character is walking or running
So I want to animate the camera mount for each frame of the walk cycle to reduce the camera shake.
My question is: Does my Camera Mount have to be a bone for me to animate it with Umotion?
or can I animate an empty game object that is child of a bone?
Hi Roy,
in UMotion you can animate the position, rotation and scale of any object also if it is an empty GameObject. UMotion will visualize the current position of the empty GameObject with a cube and a cross hair in the center.
The following screenshot was taken from the UMotion Community Trailer. The gun has no bones but I’m animating it by just modifying the transforms of the separate gun parts:
You can do all this with the free UMotion Community edition so just give it a try
If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to ask a question on the UMotion Question&Answer page.
can you convert back and forth from generic to humanoid at no loss?
How easy it is to add a keyframe for the whole skeleton without moving a bone?
do you allow to to save “pose” for reuse (partial and complete)
animation driver or equivalent? That’s a big need, at least to interpolate between pose, for example between an open hand and a close hand or handling facial animation.
Can I temporary pin some bone for use with a IK while I adjust (for example pinning contact point) with specific constrain (pin translation but allow rotation along one axis).
Can I have gizmo for easy selection of bone or IK target for easy manipulation?
One thing I’m using for testing is a good complex animation where I’m having the character lay down on a bed, or wake up, relative to static a root node (use as an entry point for the interaction). It has multiple temporary contacts that challenge animation.
Yes. When you have one UMotion project for the generic version of your character and one UMotion project for the humanoid version of your character, you can use the “Import Clips” feature to import a clip from the humanoid project to the generic or the other way around. I think this is not described in the manual, I will add this in a future version.
If I understood you correctly it’s as easy as pressing CTRL + A and then “Key Selected → Key All” or just use the shortcut “S”. This will create keys for everything. See it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2JUiD2k3FU
You can just copy and paste the keys of a pose from one clip to another. A pose library or something like that is currently not implemented.
UMotion has the “Custom Property” constraint which can do basic things that go into this direction. Learn more from the appropriate video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJIQSnqJyd8
I’m sorry I’m not 100% sure what kind of use case you tried to explain. If the IK target is set to be a child of the root game object, it won’t move even when you move the whole rig of the character. It thus acts as if it was pinned.
You can use the Child-Of constraint to dynamically change the parent of the IK target so you could enable and disable this behavior during an animation.
Currently this is not implemented but may come in the future. The solid bone rendering is similar to how Blender is rendering the bones and I think (from a personal perspective) selecting bones is quite easy in this rendering mode.
Version 1.00p02 submitted to the Asset Store for review
I have just submitted a patch release for UMotion Community and Professional to the Asset Store. Find the release notes below:
Release Notes V1.00p02
UMotion V1.00p02 New or Changed Features
None
Bug Fixes
Fixed an exception that appeared when editing the frame of a key in the “edit key window” that can be opened in the curves view when right click → edit key.
Fixed an exception that appeared when models with no bones or “Optimize GameObjects” enabled in the model import settings have been applied to the Pose Editor for the first time. Added a warning dialog that is shown when a model with “Optimize GameObjects” enabled is applied to the Pose Editor for the first time.
Fixed inconsistent naming of the “Ik Fk Blend” channel in the custom property constraint by renaming it to “Fk Ik Blend”.
Fixed that the Pose Editor wasn’t repainted immediately after the tool mode was changed from/to the scale tool.
Fixed that deselecting a selected bone via CTRL + left mouse click doesn’t work.
Fixed an error log message when a humanoid animation was imported with animation events not found at the current animated GameObject.
Fixed current values of a modified rotation property not being converted to the new rotation mode when the rotation mode is changed.
Fixed an exception that appeared when importing an animation clip with an animated rotation property configured as “quaternion” but in the clip already existing in the project the same property is configured as “euler”.
Fixed an exception that appeared when importing an animation clip of a umotion project that wasn’t selected in the imported umotion project when it was last opened.
Fixed an exception that appeared when importing more thann one animation clip of a umotion project.
Fixed that an imported project was not garbage collected.
Fixed that GUI intput fields suddenly don’t accept input anymore (seen mostly in 2017.1).
Fixed the instruction text in the example scene to make the first steps more easier to understand.
Fixed that an error dialog was shown in an endless loop when the animation preview mode of the Unity Timeline window was enabled while an animated GameObject was applied to the UMotion Pose Editor.
Manual Changes
Added work around suggestion to Known Issue 06.
Added sentense to Child-Of constraint that hints that scaling is not supported.
Mentioned that the video tutorials have subtitles in the “Video Tutorials” chapter.
Split the “Video Tutorials” chapter into one sub chapter per video. Moved “Video Tutorials” to a higher position in the table of content.
Added chapter “How to create better animations”.
Added a question to the FAQ.
What’s next?
I’m currently working on a new video tutorial that is the first of a new series called “UMotion In Practice”. It’s all about using UMotion in practical situations. In the first episode we will combine first person hands with a pistol and create a shooting animation from ground up. At the end we will use the created animation in an example scene together with the first person controller. ( @xxhaissamxx as far as I remember you have requested an FPS tutorial in the past. This will be it.)
When? I need to record one scene again due to low framerate while recording → very soon but not today.
While 1.00p02 was under review I’ve submitted V1.00p03 which just got released on the Asset Store. Upgrading to V1.00p03 is highly recommended as there have been quite a few major bugs.
Release Notes V1.00p03
UMotion V1.00p03 New or Changed Features
None
Bug Fixes
Fixed a bug in the IK plane math that caused the reference vector (i.e. the vector that defines the orientation of the plane when the angle is 0) to have a magnitude of zero. If your IK chain is bending into the wrong direction after you’ve updated to V1.00p03, switch to config mode and correct the IK plane orientation as it might have changed.
Manual Changes
Added the first episode of the new tutorial series UMotion “In Practice” to the video tutorials chapter.
Thanks for all the great feedback, feature requests and bug reports that I have received so far. They are helping a lot!
I’m very proud to show you the first episode of my new tutorial series UMotion “In Practice”. While the existing tutorials highlight all the great features of UMotion, this new format is all about showing them in action. In the first episode we are creating a “shooting” animation for a first person shooter. We will go through all the basics of animating so even if you’re not working on an FPS game, this still might be very interesting for you.
Let me know if you found the tutorial helpful and what tutorials you want to see in the future.
I am seriously thinking of getting this. I love how you can animate inside of Unity. What really really need is a tool that we can use to modify or fix animations that we already have. Sometimes, we find an animation we have purchased has a little glitch that needs to be fixed, like a weird foot, or we need to change the animation to make it work as an animation for a specific skill, such as sewing, fishing, etc.
I would love to see some videos that do that. Fix broken animations and allow us to modify existing animations.
With UMotion Professional importing existing animations is really easy. Here is the tutorial on how you can import an existing animation: Pro 1) Importing Animations
You can fix an existing animation by deleting the keys that are wrong and replace them with new keys like in “Episode 1 - Our First Animation” seen above. Or maybe you just have to correct some of the animation curves. It really depends on the problem the animation has.
After you’re done with correcting the animation, you can export it and use the resulting *.anim file in your game.
Along those lines, it would be nice if the system could automatically eliminate redundant key frames. For example, if key frames 6 through 19 on the right thigh were all the same it would be nice for the system to automatically delete key frames 7 through 18.
I’d also like the ability to hide parts of the clip editor. For example, I’d like to hide all of the fingers until that point in time when I need to edit them.
Great! But I was responding to your request to tell you what sort of tutorial videos we would like to see. I would like to see you take an existing animation and change it or fix it from start to finish. It would help me to see if this is something I can use. It looks fabulous but I have had bad luck with tools that look better than they really are. Probably not the case here, but those sorts of tutorials would help me to know for sure.
@lundon : Thanks for your feature requests. I like both of your ideas.
Do you mean something like this: You select all keys in the clip editor then press a button “Remove Redundant Keys” (or shortcut) and it will automatically clean your animation? Or do you just want this to be applied on the exported animation?
You are speaking about hiding the property and all it’s keys in the clip editor correct? Or are you also refereeing to the bone visibility in the scene view?
Ok I got your point. I would need a good example for such a tutorial. What are common problems you have with existing animations that you would like to be covered in this tutorial? Is there any existing free animation on the Asset Store that has such a problem that I could use in this tutorial?
