Hi,

thank you very much for your feature request.

While you are right that you can't use the arrow keys to navigate the Rig Hierarchy, there are general shortcuts for selecting bones/transforms that also allow you to navigate the hierarchy. These shortcuts correspond to this portion of the pose editor UI:

[Keypad 2] Selects the child of the current selected bone/transform (--> goes down the hierarchy)

[Keypad 8] Selects the parent of the current selected bone/transform (--> goes up the hierarchy)

[Keypad 6] Selects the sibling of the current selected bone/transform (--> goes sideways in the hierarchy)

These shortcuts also work for navigating the Rig Hierarchy (and they also work in scene view and in pose mode when doing regular animation stuff).

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Hi Edward,

thank you very much for reaching out.

If you have your character's configured as "humanoid", only a limited number of face bones is supported by the humanoid system itself:

• Jaw
• Left Eye
• Right Eye

You can assign bones to this role in the humanoid avatar editor:

To access the avatar editor, select your model's source file (e.g. fbx), then open the "rig" tab and click on the "Configure..." button. When changing the avatar, you need to create a new UMotion project file for your character for the changes to take affect.

It is also possible to animate any other generic face bone, but those bone's won't be re-targeted by the humanoid animation system. That means that when the animation is played on a different humanoid character (with a different rig), the face bones not defined in the humanoid avatar will be ignored.

To animate any other generic (facial) bone in UMotion, you simply need to enable them: Go into config mode, select the bone you want to enable from the rig-hierarchy. Then open the properties tab and set "Visbility" to "Show".

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Hi,

thank you very much for your support request.

So technically speaking, an animation made for character A never works directly on character B. That's why Unity introduced the "humanoid animation system" which is a so-called "animation re-targeting system". In other words, humanoid takes an animation A as input, and converts it into an abstracted/normalize format that humanoid then tries to play as similar as possible on any other character configured as humanoid. This does come with quality losses though (if you think about it, it really has to loose quality as characters often have different body proportions etc. so this can't be a 1:1 transition).

Very interesting article how this re-targeting works under the hood: https://blog.unity.com/technology/mecanim-humanoids

So in other words, without export your animation to humanoid first and then re-import it for your other character (in UMotion) you won't be able to edit the animation on that other character. But be warned that every export/import step might introduce some loss of quality due to the animation re-targeting.

So usually, you would only create the animation using a single character, export the animation as humanoid and then use it on any other humanoid character.

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Hi Dave,

thank you very much for sharing your ideas.

- deselect multiple keyframes shortcut

That's already possible: CTRL + D

You can change the shortcut under "Edit --> Preferences --> General" in the Clip Editor:

- Option to isolate selected animated properties
- add selection and deselection of keyframes to undo stack

Yes these are valid points and I already have them on my to-do list. Both require some bigger internal changes so they won't land in the next update (V1.29) which is scheduled to be released in the next 1-2 days. But on the positive side, some of your previous ideas are going to be included in V1.29 so stay tuned :-)

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

If you animate the facial expressions manually, then yes:

1) Create a Unity timeline sequence with the sound file and your animation

2) Sync UMotion to Unity timeline to edit the animation file

3) Make sure that in Unity timeline you have audio preview enabled (to actually hear the sound file while playback)

There is no automated way to do this in UMotion.

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Hi,

thank you very much for your support request.

What export settings do you exactly use? I would recommend using the "update existing file" mode and have your character's FBX file selected as destination file.

Another thing to consider, humanoid gives you less degrees of freedom in animating than generic. Looks like you've applied a tilt on your upper leg bones in UMotion which is something real-life humans are not capable of doing. UMotion let's you correctly preview your animation but once your animation is exported to FBX and then imported as humanoid by Unity, it discards that rotation.

If you want 100% artistic control over your character in your animation, use generic instead of humanoid.

The only reason to choose humanoid over generic is when you have lots of characters that should all use the same animation. If that is not the case, generic is recommended. More information on what humanoid actually is, can be found in this blog post: https://blog.unity.com/technology/mecanim-humanoids

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Hi,

thank you very much for your support request.

After looking at the API again this might actually be a feature request: Would it be possible to get a TrySetComponentProperty to go along with TrySetFkLocalPosition/etc.? With that making the transform handle work with UMotion would be no problem at all.

I'm currently working on a new UMotion version that comes with an updated/extended UMotion API. I've already implemented your requested method today. The new version should be available in a few days.

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Hi,
thanks for your support request.

1- the size on windows is not the same as the size in unity. Size in unity is around 200kb while in windows explorer its 8 mb

This is the correct answer. More details here: https://support.soxware.com/en/communities/1/topics/350-umotion-multiplies-x9-my-animation-size-what-can-i-do#comment-397

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

I solved it.

Generate was doing that.

Sorry.

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request. I'm glad to hear that you are enjoying working with UMotion so far.

1. Can we export humanoid animations into multiple single clip FBX? For organization purposes, I much prefer if each animation is a separate FBX (I also use the FBX curves and masks, so not being a clip makes this much easier) but attempting to do so gives a warning that it's not recommended for Humanoid Animations, and if you do so anyways, attempting to copy the avatar leads to errors about conflicting bones even though it should be the same model and rig.

Exporting into a separate FBX is going to add the bones exactly as they are in your UMotion project to the FBX. If you get errors regarding conflicting bones when copying the avatar, then there might be differences between the rig that's in your original character's FBX and the prefab you have assigned to the pose editor (reason can be that Unity modified the imported FBX or that something was added/removed in the prefab). I would recommend that you use a 3D modelling application to compare the original and the exported FBX files to further debug this.

I was able to export and update the existing FBX, but beyond just exporting a single clip at a time and constantly duplicating the FBX, I'm not sure ift this is possible?

There is currently no built in way to do this, but you can use the UMotion API to write your custom export procedure (if you know a bit of C# coding in Unity). Here is the link to the documentation: https://www.soxware.com/umotion-manual/UMotionAPI.html

Your custom script could automatically duplicate the original FBX file etc.

2. This is just a brainstorming thing, are we able to take a clip using it as a base layer, and then apply another clip ontop of it additively? For example, something I was thinking about is how Mixamo usually has a male and female run animation, and what I'd like to do is take one of those as a base, but then apply all of the keyframes of the other and use the resulting animation. The idea is for to help easily create a more unique animation.

UMotion does support additive and override layers. Here is the link to the documentation: https://www.soxware.com/umotion-manual/Layers.html

And here is a video tutorial that uses additive layers to adjust the look and feel of an existing animation:

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,

Peter