Hello!

I am in the process of creating facial expressions for my DAZ character. Each expression is an animation placed in an Additive layer of the character's animator (not an additive layer of UMotion, just to be clear), which means that all animations need a first frame with all the used blendshapes set to 0, before the other frames in the animation animate those blendshapes.

Problem is, I have nearly 300 blendshapes and I'm adding more. They are essentially shape morphs, expression morphs, correction morphs, detail morphs and pressure morphs and yes, I need them all. An expression animation typically uses 10-20 blendshapes (lips, eyes, jaw, nose etc) so all of them need to be set to 0 in the first frame if I want the additive layer to do its job correctly since the first frame seems to serve as the "offset" for all the subsequent frames in the animation.

But only those blendshapes, and no other! Otherwise, the character's other blendshapes are overwritten by this animation even though it is supposed to be additive. Don't ask me why.

For example, my female character's glutes contract when she walks. If I zeroed all the properties (blendshapes and bones) in the first frame of my expression animations, there would be a conflict, the glutes would reset and it would look bad. So I need to zero only the blendshapes I use in my expressions, and not the glutes. This means I have to carefully select the appropriate blendshapes in the clip editor every time I want to make an animation, which is a very error-prone process.

In UMotion Pro, I would like to simply copy-paste the keys from one of the existing keyframes to the first frame, and to click on something to zero those pasted keys. I have looked pretty much everywhere and did not find such an option, but it would be very handy! Right now I have to manually reset those keys in the pose editor by dragging all the sliders to 0 one by one. It's tedious and time-consuming.

My second request would be to be able to export animations that have only one keyframe. Right now, when exporting an animation, UMotion refuses if it doesn't have at least two keyframes, but would it be possible to export it anyway by automatically copying (at export time) the last existing keyframe to the last frame of the animation? After all, we already specify a duration for the animation in the clip editor, I believe it is 1s by default. It would be great to not have to do a copy-paste of the keyframes ourselves so we don't risk inconsistency and unwanted movements when changing one key and forgetting to copy it to the end of the animation.

Likewise, it would be great if we could specify somewhere that we want the animation to loop, without having to manually copy the first keyframe to the last frame (like we have to do in Blender too, it's not just UMotion). Once again for the sake of keeping things consistent and avoiding copying data.

Another request, since I'm working with blendshapes. I noticed that it is difficult to enter a number for one blendshape in the pose editor's channels part then Tab to the next. Usually, that focuses on the "config mode" button and hides the "pose mode" panel, which is confusing. It does not do this by shift-tabbing (going backwards) so for the sake of consistency, it would be great if we could Tab from one property to the next.

Oh, and another request! Could we have the ability to set a blendshape to a negative number or to a number beyond 100, please? Unity allows this but apparently not UMotion. Sometimes it is very handy to use a blendshape with a value that is outside its envelope. For example, DAZ has a "cheek puff" blendshape but not a "cheek sink", which could be simulated with a negative "cheek puff" value.

Thanks and keep up the good work, UMotion is a tool I can't work without, and a tool I know I can rely on.

Hi, I have a computer screen with a texture on it with different states of the screen. In umotion editor I added a custom property Main TEX ST x and y, to animate the offset of the texture. In Umotion editor the animation looks like it should but when I export it, the property for animating the screen switches from offset to tilling. Any easy fix for this?

Here is the animation in Umotion editor

Here is the exported animation

Here you can see the animated property of the main texture after export

Hello,

I was wondering if there is way to exclude certain Game Objects from the configuration when dragging an Object into the UMotion Pose Editor. My Main Game object has different things like clothes, multiple versions of hair, brows, etc on it. In this example, the hair variants all have child objects with the name names I cannot change (the name is generated by unity's new hair system).

Being able to pre-filter a hierarchy on import would also make it cleaner and more consistent for me. 

I'm not able to show the bones of an object that the player should be using, a sword. When I click on config mode, on the sword object of the rig hierachy that message appears "Animating generic objects that have no humanoid bone in their parent hierarchy is not supported"

Please help, I'm new to Umotion

Hi, I have this rope with 35 bones and when I move one, they all move (and not in the way I want them to). 

In comparison, with a character model, when a bone is moved in a model, the other bones "adjust" in a nice way. Sorry for the newbie description.

This rope with 35 bones is a child of the fishing pole, which is working fine as a child to the hand of the model. That all animates fine. 

As you can imagine, I want to drag individual bones of the "rope" and have the others fall into place in a curve.

But when I move any of these 35 bones in the rope, they all move in exact formation. It is like I am moving all 35 at the same time. Not just one. How do I set it so I can drag certain bones up, and the others will adjust as a "chain" and not move all together?

If you want me to post a video of what it is doing, I can. Hopefully this explanation is clear.

When importing an animation into UMotion Pro to edit, it's common that, say, a thigh bone may create 100 points on the timeline. If I want to keep the animation but move the leg right a bit, do I need to update 100 points individually, or is there a way to select all, and offset them all right by the same amount? Thank you

It there a way to rotate the pelvis and lock  the thigh, calf and foot from rotating with the pelvis. When I made an animating where the girl go from lying to sitting it looks not good when I rotate only the spine bones.

Hey Peter, GameDevDave here again,

So this happens a lot:

The animation type Humanoid/Generic does not matter, IK seems to flip out of sync, sometimes without a keyframe or curve to correct. 

It shows up in the export too.

It happens sometimes after baking FK to IK or when turning on pinning.

There are workarounds such as re-keying the frame or redoing a bake, there's no other way to go about it as far as I know and it is very time consuming.

Sometimes it 'does' show up in the keyframes, in the graph editor there will be extreme spikes, sometimes oddly enough multiple keyframes in a row, and they need to be fixed by dragging them up or down to fit the rest of the curve. 

How to solve this?

The character model that I'm working with is using a naming convention that uses slashes to seperate words rather than underscores. When I try to import this model into the pose editor I get a warning message stating that I need to rename the bones. Is there a workaround?