Not a bug

Can't get it to work

Jouri 5 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 5 years ago 3

I've tried the quick start guide and any other guide but I can't get my model to follow the bones.

I'm using a model from Make Human.

Image 570



Any help is appreciated

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

If your model's mesh does not follow the bones, then your model might not be skinned correctly (skinning is the process of assigning bones to the mesh vertices). You can verify if this is the case by clicking on "Clear" in UMotion's pose editor (to unlock the character). Then in Unity's hierarchy window, expand the whole hierarchy of your model (ALT + left click on the arrow). Select the upper arm bone (in the hierarchy) and use the rotate tool to modify it. If your model's arm mesh does not follow, then the skinning of your model is incorrect. This problem is then unrelated to UMotion and needs to be fixed in your 3D modeling application.

I'm changing this to "not a bug" for now.

Please let me know in case this doesn't explain your issue or you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Answered

Animation jitter in playback

Anonymous 5 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 5 years ago 1

Hi, I came across an issue that I'm a bit confused about. 

I tried to do a simple walk cycle to test out UMotion and noticed that on playback the model started to jitter during the animation that differs from the bone animation. 

What I tried:

• I initially thought that this was due to the IK/FK Blend or IK pinning  so I tried to match the IK/ FK in the keyframes but that didn't help.

• Next I tried to turn off the IK pinning but that also didn't help. 

• Looked around the settings to find something that might answer for the shaky model 


I'm unsure what I'm doing wrong since the preview with the bones themselves are working just fine, just the model is twitching while the animation plays back. Is there something I missed?


I have enclosed a video, hopefully that helps the context: 

Youtube video
Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

Please try to update to the latest UMotion version from the asset store and see if that helps (1.22p14 is the most recent one).

This could be due to floating point imprecision (this can happen if your character is far away from the scene's center or if it's scale is very big or very small). To verify, click on "Clear" in the UMotion pose editor to unlock the character. Then set it's position to 0, 0, 0. Verify that it isn't scaled up/down in an extreme way (I recommend using 1 unit = 1 meter). Then assign the character to the pose editor again and see if that helped.

If that does not help, may I ask you to send me a Unity package that includes just everything I need to reproduce your situation (i.e. your character without textures, the related UMotion project file)? You can send the files to me via the email support form (or request a link to my Dropbox via said form).

Best regards,
Peter

Answered

Linux Support

Anonymous 5 years ago updated by Invector 3 years ago 4

I noticed on the Unity Asset Store that UMotion doesnt support FBX export on Linux.  Are the other feature supported on Linux?

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

Yes the other features are supported on Linux.

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

Best regards,
Peter

Answered

Rotate animation

Anonymous 5 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 5 years ago 5

Could someone help me with my animation, I have an animation where the character runs forward and stops, I need to repeat the same animations at 45º, 90º, 135º, 180º, -45º, -90º, -135º and -180º is there any way to modify the animations to go in these directions?

You can edit the Motion Q and MOTION T fields in Umotion. I need edit root motion curve to rotate direction from all my animation to go this angles.

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

What type of animation do you have (humanoid or generic/legacy)?

  1. For humanoid, you can adjust the rotation of the source animation by selecting the *.anim file in Unity's project window.
  2. Then in the inspector window, adjust the rotation offset:

  3. Then import the animation into UMotion.
  4. Repeat for all rotation offsets required.
  5. Then combine the clips with the different rotation offsets by copy & pasting all keys of one animation into the other.

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

Best regards,
Peter

Not a bug

IK position in-between bugged after deleting keyframes

frostymm 5 years ago updated 5 years ago 4

I was working on making two keyframes when I took a break to figure out custom properties for the fingers.

Then when I came back and started working on those, I somehow accidentally made and extra 3rd keyframe between the two I was working on so of course I deleted it. Now at the spot in the animation where I deleted that key, both of my foot IK just wig out and go up into the air and it doesn't seem to reflect the position they're set to or the curves.

First Key:

Image 559

Deleted Key:

Image 560

Last Key: 

Image 561

I can't even make one gosh darn animation with this plugin man.

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.


Have you been using IK Pinning or the child-of constraint? Keys that are in "IK Pinned" state are using a different coordinate system (i.e. they are relative to the world) in respect to keys that are not pinned (they are relative to their parent bone). When you transition from pinned to not pinned, you need two key frames right after each other to correctly transition from one coordinate space to the other. UMotion creates this extra key automatically for you (that's probably the key you thought that you've accidentally created). If you delete this extra key, then the position/rotation curves interpolate between two completely different coordinate systems thus resulting in unwanted positions/rotations.

More information:

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

Best regards,

Peter

Answered

Trying to group fingers rotation via custom property

frostymm 5 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 5 years ago 5

Was following the custom property video here:
/Assets/UMotionEditor/Manual/pages/ProLesson4.html

Figured that was how you grouped the finger bones together (I saw that in a different lecture at some point).

But apparently it isn't that simple!

Image 554

Added the bones but upon selecting the rotation channel, I get this error. I'm not quite sure what it means, why it's happening, or how to fix it. I just wanna group my finger bones in a way that lets me affect their rotation on one axis for gripping since just selecting them manually is so difficult.

Seriously though, can we get some quality of life improvements on the animated properties list? Like grouping all the properties based on what objects they're from and adding some dropdown arrows? Unity does that by default and it's much easier to navigate!

Small rant, sorry bout that. It's a little frustrating to learn the tool sometimes. Either way, any help would be greatly appreciated!

On a side note, is there a way to force the IK FK to always be synced to each other? Depending on which one you've moved? Like moving FK, will update IK position and vice versa. It's disorienting when the FK bones don't move with the leg.

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

In euler rotations mode, the rotation in of a bone/transform is defined by the 3 values (i.e. the rotations around the 3 main axis). This is easy to imagine, but suffers from a mathematical problem called gimbal lock. That's why UMotion also supports quaternion based rotations (i.e. the rotation is defined in a 4 dimensional space). Quaternions are hard to imagine and it's thus not allowed to manipulate its rotation properties directly. This video tutorial explains the different rotation modes and shows you how to switch between them:


In order to control a rotation via a custom property constraint, the rotation needs to be using the euler rotation mode (that's what the error message is indicating).

Btw. if your character is of type humanoid, you get grouped fingers automatically. You can control those groups via the muscle tool assistance displayed in the scene view window when no bone is selected:

Seriously though, can we get some quality of life improvements on the animated properties list? Like grouping all the properties based on what objects they're from and adding some dropdown arrows? Unity does that by default and it's much easier to navigate!

Yes I'm with you, this is something that can be improved. For now, I recommend to go the other way (select the bone in the scene view and UMotion automatically selects the corresponding animated property for you). So in most cases, you don't have to seek in the animated properties list as of instead you select the easier to spot bone in the scene view.

On a side note, is there a way to force the IK FK to always be synced to each other? Depending on which one you've moved? Like moving FK, will update IK position and vice versa. It's disorienting when the FK bones don't move with the leg.

You can disable the FK bones completely (in case they annoy you and you are just working with IK anyway) via the rig layers:


You can manually sync FK/IK bones using this buttons:

Usually you only need to sync them at those frames in your animation where you transition from IK driven to FK driven (or the other way around). So in other words, there shouldn't be the need to have them synced each frame.

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

Best regards,

Peter

Answered

Exported animation has different speed

Anonymous 5 years ago updated by Deletado 5 years ago 2

I'm having problems with the speed of the animation exported with the anim format, I tried as fbx but it doesn't work, with anim some animations work correctly, however when I create a layer the speed is out of control, even reducing the speed to 0.1 the animation is bad. What is happening?

Answer

Hi,

thank you very much for your support request.

When you select the exported *.anim and preview it in the inspector window, does it play correctly then?

If yes, then you need to check your Animator state machine setup (maybe you altered the animation speed there).

If not, please post some additional information so that I can help you: A video demonstrating your problem or even better a unity package that includes your character, the UMotion project and the exported animation so that I can look at it. You can send me the package via email support (or request a link to my dropbox via said email).

I tried as fbx but it doesn't work

Please check out the chapter "Exporting Animations FAQ" in the UMotion manual. Use the "Update existing file" mode when exporting a humanoid animation.

Best regards,
Peter

Answered

Project Wide Layers

mel 5 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 5 years ago 2

Kind of relate to https://support.soxware.com/en/communities/1/topics/713-copy-a-layer-to-another-animation-clip#comment-1140

I think it would be useful/logical to have a project-wide offset. Either by adding project-wide layers (duration might be an issue for that.. not sure), or a project-wide pose offset (constant no animation)

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for sharing your idea.

There is already a way you can do this (though a bit tedious) by adding all the different animation clips into override layers of a single animation clip. Then on top of all of them you add the additive animation layer. Using the UMotion API, you can write a script that exports the same animation clip multiple times but mute/unmute the override layers as needed.

Currently I don't think that a project wide additive layer would be wide-spread used by other users as in most cases you would need different offsets for different animations. It's the UMotion's API goal is to cover such specific use-cases, so currently I do not plan on adding such a feature to UMotion natively, I'm sorry.

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


Best regards,
Peter

Answered

💊 - Some kind of API

mel 5 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 5 years ago 1

I really enjoy UMotion a lot. After playing with it non-stop for 2 days I realize how many hours of work it will save me in the long run, but I do have some feedback that I think would make it even better. I've already submitted 3 other ideas, but I think having this one could resolve all of them: Add an API.

I understand that you don't want your code stolen and went the obfuscated road, but I think having a way for more advanced users to extend it would be great, from the top of my head (I'll add more to it as I think about it) that's what I think the API could provide:

- Access to:

    - The properties and their keys, The clip and their layers, 

    - The Umotion project infos and methods (save, save as...)

    - The Config Modes constraints (there is currently no way to set the min/max values in batch which is very long to do manually)

- Ability to extend the Clip Editor's menu (to run scripts affecting the parts above)


Thanks

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your idea. I really appreciate that.


UMotion already has an API. The API does not feature all the things you mentioned yet, but a few parts are possible right now. Please check out the manual's chapter "UMotion API" for further information.

Let me know if you have any questions related to the API.

Best regards,
Peter

Answered

👁 - Isolate Curves

mel 5 years ago updated 5 months ago 2

Hi,

Is it planned, or is there a way to isolate the animation property components?
For instance, in the screenshot, I'd like to select localPosition.y  in the left list and expect it to filter the curve view with only its curve.

If not is there an easy way to select a curve?

Thanks

Image 551

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

Yes this is possible. You can toggle the visibility of single curves using the eye icons displayed in the "Animated Properties" view (in your case it is hidden because you would need to scroll to the right):

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


Best regards,
Peter