Tool (child of right hand joint) animates in Clip Editor but not in editor play mode (Mechanim)
Hi Peter,
I have tweaked a human animation (mining with a pickaxe).
The pickaxe is child of the right hand joint and animates in the Clip Editor but not in editor play mode (Mechanim) after export as anim file.
I have added the "child of" constraint to the axe and keyed it to the right hand parent, but still, when I view the animation in play mode the pickaxe just stays in T-pose place.
CLIP EDITOR Animation
PLAY MODE Animation
I've tried saving the keyframes on the base layer as well as on an Override Layer .. nothing helps
Thank you for any support!
OH MAN,
I just solved this! Out of some unknown reason the pickaxe gameobject was checked as static.
So, thanks a lot for bouncing this stupid issue back and forth.
Keep up your great work - your tool is absolutely awesome.
paste the same rotation of key joint for all the key frame
I copy the all the property of the LeftArm in the first keyframe. and paste it in to all the LeftArm in all the keyframes left, but it do not works.
How can i do it and save ?
Colored stick bones
Hi, I have been working with non humanoid model and I thought it would be nice if the stick bone ends (and maybe the normal bones too) to be colored differently.
As you can see in the picture it gets a bit confusing in the head area since there are so many bones clustered together there. And thought it might be a quick fix/idea if the bone ends were colored differently than the rest so they are easy to see and select. Reducing the bone size helps, but maybe it would be a nice utility/quality of life to add different colors too.
Hi,
thank you very much for sharing your idea.
I've added your idea to my list with ideas to consider for future updates.
A few things that might help you that are already implemented in the current versions:
- The bone size can not only globally adjusted, but also individually for each bone (in the "properties" shown in config mode). Config mode also allows you to hide some bones or change their link style to dashed/none.
- You can change the overall color of the stick bones in the "options" tab of the pose editor. But as you've mentioned, it's currently not possible to change the color of the joints separately from the color of the connecting stick between the joints though.
Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.
Best regards,
Peter
Animation not showing the same in playmode
When I set up my animation it looks fine in the scene:
But when my character (the same character) is on that animation it looks misplaced. The hand a bit rotated and some fingers on top of each other:
Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.
What you're seeing is a quality trade-off that is due to the use of the "humanoid" animation system. Humanoid is a lossy animation format that does not provide this level of precision for animations (but in exchange for the precision loss, humanoid gives you animation re-targeting, meaning that you can play the same animation on any other humanoid character).
In order to get 100% accuracy for your animations, switch to "generic". More information about humanoid and why it comes with quality trade-offs: https://blog.unity.com/technology/mecanim-humanoids
To convert your existing UMotion project to generic, duplicate your character's fbx file and configure it as generic. Create a new generic UMotion project for it. Setup IK and then use the UMotion Clip Editor's animation clip importer to import the whole humanoid UMotion project. All your humanoid animations are now in your generic UMotion project. Exporting the animations now saves them as "generic" and can be used with your generic character.
Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.
Best regards,
Peter
Export Animations to Packages, limited to Assets folder
Hi there,
We've been loving using UMotion, but running into issues while evaluating it. I was wondering, is there a reason why exports are limited to the Assets folder?
Our team uses a workflow using local packages to share assets across projects. This is necessary so we can control levels of access to our code base where our outside collaborators (external contractors) can contribute animation assets to our projects without having access to the entire project due to various reasons. The issue though is that our animation assets lives in a valid Unity project location like:
/ProjectRoot/Packages/com.company.sharedassets/Runtime/
instead of the more common:
/ProjectRoot/Assets/
I realise this is a newer area of Unity development, but it's a really stifling our ability to use UMotion. We need to store our fbx's and animations in a local package. Is there any chance the warnings and blocking checks that prevent exports outside of Assets could be turned off with an option? or instead that you could add the Packages folder to the list of valid locations alongside the Assets folder?
I'm guessing you have some kind of api requirement using AssetDatabase.LoadAsset or hard coded paths that expect to be working with assets that live inside of the Assets folder, if not then hopefully the request is a simpler one, if you do though hopefully the code can be improved to expand to support working with assets within the Packages folder.
Our lead artist has also mentioned that it's not just exports, but also where UMotion project files can be stored that are limited to the Assets folder. We also need these project files to live in Packages so that our various contractors can access them.
Thanks,
Jason
Thanks for providing all the details, that helped me a lot to quickly dive into this topic.
A fix for not being able to export into to embedded packages is already implemented and is going to be released with the upcoming UMotion patch release (V1.26p01) that is going to be available via the asset store next week.
Best regards,
Peter
Freely Position-able Target Point (Inside Humanoid)
Hello!
I would like to, as part of my humanoid animations, sometimes create and 'animate' the position of an invisible game object.
Description:
I am working right now on an animation, where my character jumps up, hangs for a moment, and hoists himself to his feet on a ledge about 3 meters up. I would like to have two freely movable, pinnable game objects to track through the animation where the static 'ledge' edge is, and also the current general position of the hands. However, I am having trouble accomplishing this.
The 'Target1'/'Target2' transforms of the GameObjects will be referenced inside a C# script, which will update the player's physical location frame-by-frame as the animation unfolds.
Problem 1:
When I add two game objects, named 'Target1' and 'Target2' to my character's 'root' transform, UMotion tells me that I am not allowed to 'animate' a game object unless it has a humanoid-bone parent.
Problem 2:
I tried adding 'Target1' and 'Target2' with 'hips' as the parent. Although I can now animate the position of the game objects, there is no way for me to 'pin' the targets; they inherit the motion of the hips, and they move and rotate along with them.
Problem 3:
I tried adding multiple parents to the 'Target1' and 'Target2' points - pretending that they have 'legs'. I added thigh, knee, and calf game objects for both Targets, and set up a 'Custom IK' for both. This was the closest I have come so far to a working solution. However, there are limitations to this setup - for instance, the distance the game objects can successfully be pinned is limited by these imaginary legs. Furthermore, I'm just not really a fan of this setup.
Any advice?
Thanks!
Zach.
Hi Zach,
thank you very much for your support request.
You can assign the child-of constraint to your GameObjects. Then (in pose mode), select the GameObject and set the root GameObject as parent (in the channels view). There should be no need for creating an IK chain (like in problem 3).
All the details about the child-of constraint can be found in this video tutorial:
Another solution would be to change your character to generic as it gives you full flexibility because you can animate any GameObject in it. If you do not need the animation re-targeting of the humanoid animation system, generic is often the better choice.
Please let me know if that works for you.
Best regards,
Peter
Blendshape Animation Multiplies in Size
Hello,
I'm editing an animation in Umotion but since the animation contains blendshapes I can't save it as an fbx. The alternative .anim export is uncompressed, resulting in increased file size. Do you have any suggestions that would resolve this issue?
Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.
Unfortunately only the FBX export can make use of Unity's animation compression pipeline. One thing you could do would be to export your animation twice (once as *.anim and once as *.fbx). Then you can copy the compressed animation data from the fbx into the *.anim that also contains the blend shape data. You can copy and paste the keys using Unity's animation window. Unfortunately there isn't a more comfortable way I'm aware of.
Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.
Best regards,
Peter
Recreating an animation not refreshing
First of all this product is fantastic. I am moving forward at an incredible rate in my creation.
But here is where I am having trouble.
I have the Umotion project where I create animations for my character.
I then export current clip.
Then drag that anim to the folder of the secondary project, which is also open. This works!
But when I modify the Umotion anim and copying it to the secondary project folder I press preview and the new animation doesn't take effect. I got this working at one time but now I can not find what I need to do so the animation in the Unity anim timeline performs the changes I made.
The timestamp on the modifed anim in file explorer shows the latest too.
Any ideas? Thank you in advance.
Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.
I found the discrepancy. The model jumps to position 0,0,0 when the Unity animation preview button is pressed. When game play is pressed the model stays in its position and the animation takes place at that new relative position of the model placement instead of snapping to 0,0,0.
You mentioned that you're using the animation in Unity Timeline. There are dedicated settings in Timeline that define how the start offset should be handled. If you select the animation track, you get this choices shown in the inspector:
And if you select the animation clip (in Timeline), you have this settings:
Hope this helps. If there is still something unclear, let me know.
Best regards,
Peter
Blender Armature not same in unity
Hi, I am not sure what exactly am I missing here. As you can see the armature in Umotion differs from the one I made in blender.
1: Why does it automatically connect the two child top bones to the main one ? ("bone" to "Bone.001" and "Bone.002")
2: Why are the end bones not there?("Bone.002" and "Bone.004") If I move the down edges of "Bone.001" and "Bone.003" then "Bone.002" or "Bone.004" are moving.
I exported the mesh as FBX from Blender and the rig in unity is set to generic.
Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.
1: Why does it automatically connect the two child top bones to the main one ? ("bone" to "Bone.001" and "Bone.002")
Because the FBX file does not store any information about which bones should be visualized as "connected" and which bones should not. You can change such visualization things in UMotion's config mode. If you want to hide the connection of a joint to it's parent, set the "Parent Link" property to "Hidden":
The only thing left now is to figure out why are the end bones disappearing in Umotion
In your first picture, you can see that the end joints have been imported by Unity (the cubes) but the end joints are not bound to the mesh (thus not displayed as bones but as regular transforms). If you want them to be imported correctly, you need to make sure that the end joints are also skinned.
In your second picture the end joints are completely gone (due to changed export settings in Blender?). 90% of the time, this is how a model is imported into Unity. So this is a common situation. There are two ways you can deal with this:
1) You can select this joint whenever you want to rotate the last bone:
2) Or if you really want the last bone to appear, you can also create custom joints for the end joints inside UMotion. This is covered in this video tutorial:
Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.
Best regards,
Peter
Animation not playable in Umotion clip editor but plays in Unity's player?
Oops. My bad. I did not have this gameobject in the Pose editor. Possibly leave this here for others to find?
No play button option and when skipping to next frame model does not move like the keyframe points show in clip editor.
This clip was exported to another project and works fine over there on a like character. But motion is not in that project.
Hi,
thanks for your support request.
Op answered his question by himself:
Oops. My bad. I did not have this gameobject in the Pose editor.
Best regards,
Peter
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