Answered

Add Constraint button not active (so cannot add a custom property constraint)

Alan Kent 4 years ago updated 4 years ago 2

I found the section of the manual describing how to add custom component property constraints. But when I go to add a new constraint, the button is deactivated so I cannot add a new constraint. It did add all the blendshapes successfully when loading the character, but I cannot work out how to add a new one.

I create a new project of type Humanoid (because character is humanoid), import the FBX file, then in the Pose panel I go to Config Mode, under Configuration I pick "Constraints". The button is not active, so I cannot add a new one.

I have a component on the character with a float property I want to animate. I tried creating a "Generic" project, but then it refused to load the character saying it was humanoid.

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Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

You need to select a valid transform in the "Rig Hierarchy" tree to which you want to add a constraint. I'm going to display a "No bone/transform selected" text in one of the next updates to make this more clear. Thanks for pointing that out.


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


Best regards,

Peter

Answered

Animation speed resample curve

Vact0r 4 years ago updated 2 years ago 7

I always want resample total animation play speed by a animation curve , make origin animation clip change the rhythm to what I want .

Although this can be achieved by changing the animator playback speed , but I think changing the animation file is a more accurate, quick and easy solution .

Is any way UMotion can do this ? or some tips ? 

Thanks so much .

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

Yes you can change the animation speed of an animation clip in UMotion. Please check out the following answer I gave to a similar question, explaining how this can be achieved in UMotion: https://support.soxware.com/en/communities/1/topics/52-change-speed-of-animation

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

Best regards,

Peter

Answered

Renaming the weapon of a Humanoid

amirmahdijavidpour 4 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 4 years ago 3

Hello,So let me explain Im Creating  Humanoid Animations with guns for my game 
My guns are rigged as generic gameobjects and they are parent of the RHand

When I Export the .anim files Everything works fine,

but when I change the name of the weapons the animations doesnt work anymore

I want to have different prefabs such as M4A1-HoloGraphic , M4A1-IronSight etc for a single weapon

is there any way that I can have different names and still have my animations working without making animations for every single prefab ? since i have rigged guns thought its ok to change name of the gameobjects

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

Animations (*.anim files) are binding the animation curves to bones/transforms via "transform paths". For your gun the transform path might look something like this: Hips/Spine1/.../RHand/M4A1.

So you would have to manually adjust the animation and change the transform paths. But I would probably use a different/easier approach: Make the holo-sight and the iron sight separate objects and just enable them to your needs (but use only one "base" m4 model). You can separate meshes from models using a 3D modeling application of your choice (Blender, Maya LT,...).

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

Best regards,

Peter

Answered

Finger bone rotations

Anonymous 4 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 4 years ago 2

Hi, we are working on a VR simulator (using FULL BODY IK on the character) and we need to add a few simple animations to the hand but we do not get 100% accurate finger bone rotations even though the character is in a perfect T-Stance and all bones are correctly set-up and recognized by Mecanim. We strictly followed Unitys rigging recommendations.

Inside your tool the animation (a simple grab animation)  looks perfect but once exported to an .anim file some fingers looks different (little finger is 10 degree more right, thumb rotation is 20 degree too much left). It seems to affect mostly the the last finger-tip part. This inaccuracy is probably not a big deal if one does a game for desktop but in VR it looks kind of weird when one or two fingers looks unnatural when you see it very close. It breaks the immersion. We are not sure if this is a unity problem or a Blender related problem (even inside of Blender the animation looks 100% accurate as well as inside your tool).

We were hoping to bypass this problem with your tool since it's integrated with Unity.

We don't understand the fact that the preview inside your timeline is correct but once exported and added to Mecanim the result is different. We can't see the logic behind this behavior nor do we have a clue to bypass it.

Switching to generic is no solution since we are using FINAL IK on the body. 

We are running out of solutions (and nervs) :)

Thanks for your help!

Peter

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

Humanoid is not the correct choice for this task, as it's architecture per definition introduces small re-targeting errors. The amount of error is proportional with how precise the character's T-Stance (in the Avatar setup) is.

Generic on the other hand is directly playing the animation (without any re-targeting, thus without any errors).

Switching to generic is no solution since we are using FINAL IK on the body

Afaik Final IK is independent of the animation system and should work fine with generic. The only difference might be that you have to manually assign the correct bones to the Final IK component (with humanoid, it can do an automatic setup via the humanoid avatar).

You can transition your existing UMotion project to generic by creating a new UMotion project of type generic. Then change your character's configuration to generic. Assign the character to UMotion's pose editor and then import your old humanoid project into the generic project.

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

Best regards,
Peter

Answered

Replace weapon in animation.

Sergio Razo 4 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 4 years ago 1

Hello. I been watching the videos of Umotion. I'm thinking on buy in it because of the special. But I need to know if there is a way to replace objects in a animation. Example: I have a FPS arms with shotgun. But I want to replace the shotgun with another model. Is there's a way I can do that with Umotion?

Answer

Hi Sergio,
thank you very much for your interest in UMotion.

The most optimal way would be to do this partly in animation and partly in scripting. You have one animation that holsters the current weapon, then a script (e.g. triggered via an animation event) that removes that weapon, spawns the new one and then triggers the gun pulling animation for the new gun.

If you want to solely do this with animations (without any scripting), you would have to place every gun as a child of the character and simply enable/disable the required one via the animation (a custom property can animate the guns GameObject.active property to show/hide the gun). While being simpler to make, this has small performance penalties due to the additional transforms of every gun in the hierarchy of your character. If you're not targeting low-end mobile device, this might not be an issue though.


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


Best regards,

Peter

Answered

Editing Rotation Keyframes

Anonymous 4 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 4 years ago 1

Is there anyway to change the value of rotation keyframes in the curve editor?

I can do with position keyframes, but rotation keyframes I'd like to shift up-down or compress a section of them - e.g. to reduce the amplitude of a motion. I only seem to be able to slip them backwards and forwards.

Thanks!

Answer

Hi,

thank you very much for your support request.


UMotion supports 3 different rotation modes:

  1. Progressive Quaternion (default)
  2. Quaternion
  3. Euler

Only euler angles can be edited directly in the curve editor (as the others are quaternion based which is a "hard to imagine" 4 dimensional representation of angels, thus not suited for direct editing). UMotion's "Progressive Quaternion" mode is a special representation of quaternions that at least allows you to adjust the interpolation between rotation keys, but not the amplitude. The downside of euler angles is that they suffer from gimbal lock. That's why they are not the default rotation mode in UMotion.

For more information, please check out the dedicated video tutorial regarding this topic:

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

Best regards,

Peter

Answered

Is it possible to manually restore from a .bak file?

rob 4 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 4 years ago 1

I lost some keyframes and I'm not sure if it was user error (me) or unity didn't save something properly. At 12:30 last night I finished an animation and shut my laptop down. Today when I opened the animation, a bunch of keyframes were missing. I restored from the auto backup made at 12:30 but the frames are not there either. Could the backup be corrupted? Is it possible to inspect the data inside the .bak file?

Answer

Hi Rob,

thank you very much for your support request.


The auto backup makes a backup of the project's current state at the interval configured in the preferences. It takes the whole project's data and serializes it into the *.bak file. Unfortunately this data is not human readable so it's not possible to use it manually. If the auto-backup got restored without any error messages, then everything was re-stored correctly.


I'm not sure why your keys are missing, probably because you've deleted them before 12:30 on accident? Have you tried re-storing an earlier backup?


Attention: Auto backups are by default automatically deleted after 36h. You can change this setting in the preferences:

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


Best regards,
Peter

Answered

Humanoid animation does not look the same after export (serious difference).

Maya Gameworks 4 years ago updated 4 years ago 9

Mesh.rar

When I export an "Idle" zombie animation where my zombie never moves their legs in the clip editor he suddenly starts floating in the air, as if he is connected, like a puppet, to someone's hand. This does not mean he is flying - he is touching the ground with his feet, but he moves the feet to the left or right when standing, instead of them being glued to the ground like they should be. I've read all your posts about differences in animation, I've tried ALL properties and all tweaks - nothing works. I even copied the entirety of the animation from FK to IK, deleted all keys for IK foot positions and rotations but one and ensured they are pinned - nothing helps, the zombie still floats. Generic animation is out of the question.

I've attached the project file and the zombie mesh file to this post so that you can check for yourself.

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

I looked at the files you provided. When exporting a humanoid animation to fbx, I highly recommend setting write mode to "Update Existing File" (in the export settings) and set your original model as destination file. This exports your animation into the characters fbx file (Shirtless Zombie.fbx) and ensures that when Unity imports it, it uses the correct humanoid avatar to generate the humanoid animation. Here is a screenshots of the export settings I used:

Then select the "Shirtless Zombie.fbx" in Unity's project window. Enable the animation import in the Inspector and set "Root Transform Position (XZ)" to "Original". Then click apply. The animation should now preview correctly in the preview window (and should thus also work in-game).

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


Best regards,
Peter

Under review

Coundn't load error when i trying export character

Nick 4 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 4 years ago 1

Image 506

Answered

Reskinned model is incompatible with existing UMotion project

Anonymous 4 years ago updated 4 years ago 2


I've just lost 2 hours of work.

I've been editing my animation and did not export it when I saw that one of my vertices is skinned to the root. I reskinned the model, exported it and saved in my UMOTION project. Now I can't set it for my project:

Image 504

Image 505


Due to the fact that I can't set it for my project I cant export my animation. I tried creating a new project and dragging the old project into the new one through the "Import animation window" - it says the projects are incompatible.

All bones have the very same names. Both humanoid skeletons are configured exactly the same.

Answer

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

When you re-skinned your model, it looks like you also changed the bone hierarchy (that's what the message box in the first screenshot is saying). This of course makes the new version of the character incompatible with your initial character's hierarchy stored in the UMotion project.


So to fix this, try to re-store the original bone hierarchy for your model (go through the transforms shown one by one and compare the names). The transforms stored in the UMotion project are shown in the clip editor window. I also highly recommend the use of a version control system like GIT or SVN, so that you can always re-store previous versions of your assets.


Please let me know in case you need any further assistance.

Best regards,
Peter