Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

The results of the IK algorithm are baked into the exported animation (like when you would be using IK in Blender, Maya,... and then export to Unity). You can of course use Final IK (or any other runtime IK solution) on top of the created animation. You can also use Final IK inside UMotion and then decide weather you want to bake the IK into the animation or execute the IK during runtime. You can use an empty GameObject (created outside of UMotion) as IK handle. For further information, check out the manual chapter "Pose Editor/Options" at headline "Extending 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.

To control the orientation of the elbow (i.e. the pole rotation) you have two options depending on how you configured your IK constraint:

1. If you have created an IK pole target (the IK Setup Wizard does that by default), move the pole target (the blue wired sphere) to rotate the elbow to where you want it to be.
   
2. If you have not created an IK pole target, use the "IK Pole Rotation" channel to rotate the ellbow.
   

The rotation of the hand can either be controlled via the rotation of the IK target (the wired cube) or via the FK rotation of the hand bones. This again depends on how you've setup the IK constraint.

For further information, please check out the manual at "Pose Editor/Constraint System/Inverse Kinematics" or take a look at the in-depth video tutorial related to IK:

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

Best regards,
Peter

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

From my experience it's usually sufficient to use the following FK method for animating tails which result in very good results:

• Hold Shift while selecting the first (top most) bone of the tail. This automatically selects all child bones too.
• Then use the rotation tool to apply a rotation in the direction you want the tail to move. Notice how the rotation is smoothly distributed between all bones of your tail:

The IK feature in UMotion isn't really optimized for smooth tail movement. If you have a good tail IK solver (or know how to write your own) you can use UMotion's Callback System to integrate it into UMotion. UMotion can even bake the results into the exported animation (to save some CPU performance as you don't need to execute the tail IK during runtime). For further information see UMotion manual at chapter "Pose Editor / Options" headline "Extending 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.

Yes that is possible. UMotion just configures the "Custom Property Constraints" for the blend shapes by default with limits ranging from 0-100 (as this is the most common use-case). In order to set different limits, switch into Config Mode and select the bone/transform that has the blend shapes assigned. Then open the Constraints tab and change the limits to e.g. -100 ... 100:

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

Best regards,
Peter

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

PuppetMaster is a run-time functionality for blending between animations and physics (ragdoll). You can create the animations with UMotion just like you would create any other animation. There isn't anything specific to show when creating the animation with the goal to use it combined with PuppetMaster.

What exactly are you planning to do with FinalIK? In UMotion, you could again create the regular animation and then in your game use Final IK on top of it (that would again just be plane animating in UMotion). Or you can use the FinalIK components inside UMotion (to replace UMotion's built in IK). That would require the use of the UMotion callback system (see manual at chapter "Pose Editor / Options" headline "Extending UMotion").

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

Best regards,
Peter

Hi Shayan,
thank you very much for your support request.

If there is a key with tangent mode "constant" (i.e. stepped) before and after the new created key, UMotion is automatically going to create new keys in between with tangent mode "constant" too. So what you could do is that you create a temporary animation key at a frame at the predicted end of your animation that is has it's tangent mode set to "constant".

Unfortunately there is currently no feature that would allow you to set a default tangent mode.

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

Best regards,

Peter

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

The foot roll setup shown in this video was based on a Blender tutorial that I saw in the past (can't find it anymore).

Here is a quick instruction how it was created. Please note that this instruction requires basic knowledge about the features of the "Config Mode". I highly recommend following it using the Robot Kyle model from the examples and later in a second step try it on your own model.

1. Create a new UMotion project
2. Run the IK Setup Wizard with default settings
3. Stay in Config Mode and extrude the toes bone (I recommend doing this in an orthogonal side view):
   
4. Create 4 custom transforms at the center of the toe joint. Move one to where the heel ends and one to where the toes and. Keep the other two at the center. Give them a proper naming and visual appearance:
   
5. Adjust the parent/child relationship as shown in the screenshot below:
   
6. Create a new bone at the center of "Right_Toe_Extruded" and make it a child of the "Right_MiddleLower" bone.
   
7. Make the "Right_Heel" a child of the "Hips".
8. Make the "IK_Foot_R" a child of the "Right_MiddleUpper" bone.
   
9. Setup an IK constraint on the "Right_Toe_IK_Target". The target is the "Right_Toe_Extruded" bone, the bone lenght is 1 and click on the "Up" button for correct bend plane orientation.
   
10. Setup a Custom Property constraint on the "Right_Heel" for controlling both FK/IK Blend channels at once:
    
11. In the "Properties" tab, set the "Visibility" to "Hide" for the "Right_Ankle_Joint_01", the "Right_Toe_Joint_01" and the "Right_Toe_Extruded".
12. Change the appearance of the "Foot_IK_Right":
    
13. (Optional) Add a Child-Of constraint to the "Right_Heel" and enable the "IK Pinning Mode". This allows you to pin the heel in your animation (otherwise it would move with the hips).
14. Save the Reference Pose.
15. Repeat for the second foot.

You can now switch to Pose Mode to test your setup. Make sure to set the "FK/IK Blend" slider of the heels to 1. Setting the "Rig Layer" to "IK" hides all the unnecessary FK bones.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Best regards,
Peter

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

Yes you can. The quality of the result is going to depend on your artistic skills of course :-)

If you need to sync fighting animations of two or more characters, you can use the "sync with Unity Timeline" feature of UMotion. That way you can animate one character while previewing the animation of the other character in context.

High-res video: https://www.facebook.com/Soxware/videos/1968103476786125/

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

Best regards,
Peter

Hi,

thank you very much for your support request.

Pinning works the same on the hands and feet. In order to pin an IK target, select it and in the "Channels" panel tick the "IK Pinned" checkbox:

The videos you mentioned show you how you can manually setup IK pinning (in case you are not using the IK Setup wizard). 

Using the IK Pinning feature uses the Child-Of constraint under the hood. There are a few common pitfalls you need to be aware of so I highly recommend watching the Child-Of video tutorial:

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 want to have the same initial pose on different characters, than the pose library implementation would need to be able to do pose re-targeting. Importing a humanoid animation clip (which is Unity's re-targetable animation format) does this re-targeting automatically. There are lots of edge cases that make a pose-library feature more complicated than you would expect at first glance, for example if you have a "generic" or "legacy" character opened you won't be able to use any of the "humanoid" poses. You can share humanoid poses between humanoid characters but generic poses can only be used on the same generic character... That might be confusing for users (especially Unity beginners).

So yes such a feature is possible but at the moment I think it's too complicated compared to the time saving it would give you as the alternative workflow (just importing an animation clip) is already pretty fast. I recommend that you create one clip that is called "HumanoidT-Pose.anim" that just contains two frames of plane T-pose. Import this clip in your new project, then rename the clip via the settings button. Keep this clip in a "Pose Library" folder, then you don't accidentally overwrite the animation clip. Please also consider to always use version control software (GIT or SVN) on your projects (making it possible to always restore your things in case you accidentally overwrite something).

Having a dialog that pops up when you overwrite an animation clip via export would basically pop-up every time you export your animation. I imagine this being quite annoying in the regular use cases... I'm afraid that there is no way to reliably detect if an animation clip was created by a different UMotion project and only show the warning in case of overwriting from a different project.

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

Best regards,

Peter