UMotion - Animation Editor

In response to your questions:

“You select all keys in the clip editor then press a button “Remove Redundant Keys” (or shortcut) and it will automatically clean your animation?”

Yes- that’s exactly what I mean

“You are speaking about hiding the property and all it’s keys in the clip editor correct?”

Yes

Thanks I will have a look on this package. I think this is a good idea. After I finished my work on V1.01 I will create this video :slight_smile:

@lundon : Alright thank you. I will put both on my to-do list.

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Hi @SoxwareInteractive , I’m loving UMotion… well done. :slight_smile:

I’m trying to fix some animations and I’d like to use a prop (rifle) by putting it in the right hand. UMotion wants to add the rile as part of the configuration rig and I can’t add the rifle later since the skeleton is locked.

What’s the right way to use attached props and not have them part of the rig or part of the exported the clips?

[EDIT]
I just found my M4 model transform was imported into the config as locked. Changing it’s visibility type to “Show” allows me to rotate and move it. That has me moving forward.

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Hi @Tryz ,
thanks for your nice words. I’m glad you like UMotion.

I have copied you’re question to the UMotion Question&Answer page and answered it their:
https://support.soxware.com/34/whats-right-attached-props-have-them-part-part-exported-clips

I want to keep all support conversations at the same place as I want to create a knowledge base that others can search for help. Also I think it is better to keep this thread clean and organized as I don’t want to spam people who watched this thread with support messages for others. I hope you apologize :slight_smile:

Please note that you don’t have to create an account to ask questions on the Question&Answer page.

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I don’t know why it tooks so long to sold me your asset lol, I had to beg you! Anyway I’m interested in the pro version but now I have to wait 4 month because of new expenses :frowning: I hope that with Umotion I can finally replace external soft to make all (skeletal/character) animations in unity, I will try to push the asset to its limit.

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@neoshaman : I’m glad that I was able to finally convince you of UMotion :slight_smile:

UMotion V1.01 is currently in beta phase.

So I thought it’s time to share some of the most interesting improvements with you. Nearly all of the improvements have been requested by UMotion users. If the feature you requested isn’t in this release, it might come in the a future update. For this release, small workflow improvements and improvements of existing features had highest priority.

Updated Rotation Tool
It’s now easy to animate things like the tail of this dragon (model by Protofactor, Inc.). Select all bones of the tail (SHIFT + left mouse click to select all child bones), use the rotation tool and see what happens. The rotation is now applied to all child bones to create a smooth rotation along the whole tail:
3244073--249467--giphy.gif

Recently Opened Projects
There is now a “Recently Opened Projects” entry to quickly switch between your projects:
3244073--249459--upload_2017-10-5_14-29-44.png

Improved Import Settings
You can now decide which strategy you want to choose for keyframe reduction when importing humanoid animations. In the previous UMotion versions, keys have been reduced by allowing a small error tolerance (“lossy”). Due to this tolerance a small jitter on the feet or hand could have been noticeable. The new default mode is “lossless” which won’t reduce as much keys, but will also ensure that there is no jitter at all.

UMotion will now automatically disable Unity’s “Animation Compression” (FBX Importer - Animations Tab) if it was enabled for a clip that should be imported into UMotion. This ensures that the animation is imported at highest quality. The setting is restored after UMotion finished the importing process. You can switch this feature off in the import settings.
3244073--249462--upload_2017-10-5_14-48-52.png

And much more smaller features and bug fixes. As soon as I got some feedback from the beta testers, I will submit V1.01 to the Asset Store.

I’m currently working on a road-map to give you a better idea of what features I have planned for the future. Stay tuned :wink:

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I’m really considering to buy it. However, I really want to know if it will support some kind of a timeline integration. For example, it would really help if you could have timeline’s scrubber updating while you move Umotion’s scrubber

Thanks for your interest :slight_smile:

This is not yet supported, but has very high priority on my to-do list. I already started working on this.

That’s nice to hear! Also, will there be some kind of feature to lower editor camera’s speed?

Adjusting the camera speed that is used when moving through WASD is not possible as far as I know (also not via script).

But Unity offers two other ways to control the editor camera that you can use instead. They give you more fine graded control: Holding ALT + left mouse button lets you rotate the camera around what’s currently focused and ALT + right mouse button lets you zoom in/out.

You can also center the current selected bone in UMotion by pressing “C” (you can replace this shortcut with whatever you like).

Well skele at least does this one

I think Skele isn’t really reducing the camera speed, it is scaling the whole scene so that it appears as if the camera speed is slower (in fact only the world is larger now).

I always want to keep the users scene as untouched as possible so this is no option for me.

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Okay I didn’t meant to bring skele one more time, just pointing that someone did it, Since it’s the soft I’m dealing a lot now, it’s in my mind lol. I’ll test to see, because that’s pretty seamless to activate it! I’m amaze it doesn’t mess animation more than that …

Hi, Soxware Interactive.
I bought UMotion - Professional, but it’s a bother to apply Inverse Kinematics each models.
So, is there plan to add Inverse Kinematics automatically when select a gameobject to animate, in future road map ?
Thanks!

Hi @Piahouka_1 ,
thanks for your purchase. Yes this is on the road map. As it has been requested already several times, I will try to get this done in V1.02 (V1.01 is currently in beta phase).

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Hey guys,

I’m constantly working on improvements for UMotion. Your feedback and feature requests help me a lot to shape the future of UMotion. Thanks to the input of each of you I was able to compose a road map filled with lots of awesome features that I believe you will benefit the most of. The road map also lets you track the development progress of each feature.

Please note that the order of the features is does not represent the priority the features have.

The road map is published on my homepage (see link below).

Click here to see the complete Road Map

Timeline Integration
This feature has the highest priority for me. My investigations of the last couple of days showed that this is not possible with the current Unity versions as there is no way to extend the Animation Track of Timeline. Unity has confirmed that this is not possible at the moment, but this might change in the future. So for the time being I have to put this feature on hold and am keeping my fingers crossed for the future.

Please note that it is possible to use animations created with UMotion in Timeline! It is yet not possible to use UMotion and Timeline simultaneous.

Other Features
Another feature that is requested quite commonly is the FBX export. Due to the complexity of this feature, I have to give other features higher priority. As Unity has just announced their FBX related partnership with Autodesk I’m hoping that Unity might offer a way to export to FBX in the future.

Humanoid Full Body IK is also requested very often. This might also come in the future but due to the complexity not yet with high priority thus also not on the road map at the moment.

If you have a feature request feel free to add a request here: https://support.soxware.com/ask

As you’re asking, I did give Daz Animate a quick try at some point (after testing most DCC’s)… It’s not a replacement for a DCC but I wish animation tools could be that simple to use…

If you want an IK effector you just right click on a bone and you can “pin” the transform or rotation, every animation is defined by a “block” in the timeline (you just specify the length of the block and then you can split animations as you wish), these “blocks” can either be morph targets or specific IK chains (like arms etc.).

You can have subtracks with different blocks that blend various IK chains, lets say you want to manipulate legs seperate to arms it’s just a checkbox. Again being able to blend morph targets with these blocks is a major plus on seperate “layers” or tracks, as you can just have a subtrack with nothing but morph targets… Yes I know most DCC’s will do it but it’s never just “simple”…

It has a time line editor for said blocks, it has cheat selectors for humanoid figures like torso bend / hand shapes like fist / chop etc. but it’s more than happy with quadra’s as well…

There are a few problems, hence I’m not using it… For some reason the animations get messed up when using humanoid rigs in Unity and the IK system isn’t great TBH… Although it’s free, so you should check it out.

Maya can pretty much do the same (hence why I love it), it just costs you nearly $2K a year for the privilege… If there was a properly done solution for Unity with said ease of use I’d be very interested (so would many probably)… Then I can prance around in the world of Blender and never complain again (well not about this at least)…

Thank you very much for your input. I watched a few video tutorials just to get an idea of Daz Studio. As soon as I have some spare time, I might take a closer look.

I think UMotion does a decent job when it comes to IK. What I’m trying to improve in the future is to make it easier and faster to set it up. That’s already on the road map and is targeted for the next update (V1.02).

I think there are 2 separate tasks: Creating animation clips and combining/mixing multiple animation clips into a sequence. Daz Studio is offering both. UMotion is designed to “only” create the animation clips as they can be combined by using Unity Timeline or Unity Animator (Mecanim). Both support mixing several clips and layers. Thus mixing existing animation clips in UMotion is not my intended goal as Unity does already a pretty decent job on that one.

What I’m trying to improve is to make it easier to edit existing animation clips (that have been imported into UMotion) without the need to touch a lot of keys. One possible way would be to implement additive animation layers. Another way would be to add a “Key Additive” mode where modifications done on one key are added to multiple existing keys. That leads me straight to this point:

Your feedback regarding updating existing animations
One big point on my road map is to focus on updating the workflow of editing existing animations. I’m also planning to do a video tutorial regarding this topic afterwards. For those who already own UMotion Professional, I would be very interested in your feedback and feature requests:

  • What are common problems in existing animations that you need to edit/fix using UMotion?
  • What part of the workflow could be improved to make this process more efficient?
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I think you’re missing the point, being able to split and control animations into sub tracks / layers allows you to export partial animations but also allows you to visualise the full animation together.

Games that require a lot of animations will have a lot of re-use in different places so I should be able to import a partial animation (like a morph target / face bone rig) and then match it to another body / bone animation then some tweaks… FaceFx etc. will export a partial animation…

Using Unity’s timeline / mecanim requires that the animation be finished, sure you can use blend tree’s to try and match it up after the fact but then how is that workflow any better than Maya? To visualise FPS’s etc. there’s a camera bridge to Stingray that allows you to visualise actions in realtime and once I’ve set it up in Maya / SR it does one to one translate to both Unity and Unreal.

As said the “pinning” function does speed things up quite a bit as a side note…

But ultimatley even Maya LT can do a lot more than Umotion, as much as I’d like an in-buit animator in Unity there has to be a reason… I’m not fussed if the asset cost $50.00 or $150.00 if it makes sense…