Unity's Animation system not condusive to blend tree? Or is it just me

Unity Engine
1

I started building an animation blend graph and suddenly came to realize that we did not have that much control over the basic animation system. If you wanted to do anything outside the regular play back it would have do be down within the layer system whose documentation and examples i find near laughable.

I am not sure why this path was taken or if it will change since Unity Canada opened. Is the animation system going to get overhauled or are they just going to add new features on top of it?

2

I noticed that too when I first started poking around in Unity. The lack of a blend graph system really hamstrings my animation control. That being said, I asked about a blending system back in 2009 at a GDC in Austin, TX and never heard anything promising such a system.

3

Yeah, having just done some stuff with the Unity Animation tools, I got pretty frustrated with the bare-bones tools.

It did make it marginally easier to animate a title sequence than it would have been if I had to script it, but just barely.
If I had to animate anything more complex, it would have driven me insane.

I guess they want to put the animation burden on the 3D modelling side.
Since Unity is able to import that data easily, I guess there’s not much pressure to improve this part of the Unity SDK…

4

I saw your post, and I thought you might find my latest Unity package interesting. I actually just released a tool for Animation State Machines and Blend Graphs. You can check out the my other thread here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/117978-COMING-SOON-Sage-A-Unity-3d-Animation-Graph-Editor

I have the product released on my website. I submitted it to the asset store, but it hasn’t been approved yet. Let me know if you have any questions.

5

Looks good but whats with the color choice? Cyan and pink headers with yellow splines? Is that customizable?
Excited

6

I have been mostly focused on functionality at this point, and not too worried about the theme/color scheme. So, I decided initially to go with primary colors and high contrast for it to be more readable at a glance. As of now though, it is not customizable. However, it is something I will look into for a later version of it.

7

In case anyone has been following this thread, Sage has been released and is in the Unity Asset Store now. Please check out the official release thread for more info here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/120017-RELEASED-Sage-Anim-Graph-Editor