1. UMotion - Animation Editor
  2. Questions
Answered

Animation joints breaking when playing outside of Clip Editor.

Mark Swinimer 1 week ago • updated 1 week ago • 2

Hello. I'm new to using Umotion Pro so I may be missing something.

I've made a simple animation in the Clip Editor, IK Wizard and dragging model into Pose Editor seem to work. Then when I export the clip and add it to the animation controller and play it, everything is sunken downward (except the models head).

I've added some images.


Here is the animation bones in the Clip Editor.

Image 1546



Here is what the animation looks like when played on the model in the scene. For illustration I've used Pose Editor to Apply Scene Pose to see the bones. It looks the same outside of this. I notice the joints are all mismatched by a lot but not sure why.

Image 1547



Thanks for the help!

UMotion Version:
1.29p04
Unity Version:
6.0

Answer

Answer
Answered
Peter - Soxware Developer 1 week ago

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

It appears you are using "humanoid" as your animation format? Please note that humanoid is an animation re-targeting format. I.e. it's a system designed to "normalize" animations in such a way, that they can be re-used by different characters even if they have different rigs, body proportions etc.

So what Unity does is it takes your authored animation, normalizes it and then re-applies it to your character. Both step's are lossy (i.e. you loose detail/quality with each step). This is just so that you know that with humanoid, you will always have slight differences. That's why humanoid should only be your go-to animation format, when high animation detail is not important but it's more important that you can share the animation across multiple characters. Otherwise use generic, which is a 1:1 animation format.

More info on the inner workings of humanoid: https://unity.com/de/blog/engine-platform/mecanim-humanoids

Anyway, I do agree, that the shoulders look quite off and even when using humanoid, you should be able to increase quality.

  1. Have you applied some scaling within your character's rig? Scaling should only ever be applied to the root of the character, do not scale anything that's between the hips and the root of the character. This could explain such an issue.
  2. Try to create a fresh UMotion project and re-do this pose. This is just a quick test to rule out that you've done some breaking modifications to your character after you created the UMotion project for it.
  3. Try export the animation to .fbx instead of .anim. Go into the export settings, select your character's fbx file as destination file. After exporting, you will find the animation within the character's fbx file. This usually produces the best re-targeting quality.

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

Best regards,
Peter

Answer
Answered
Peter - Soxware Developer 1 week ago

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

It appears you are using "humanoid" as your animation format? Please note that humanoid is an animation re-targeting format. I.e. it's a system designed to "normalize" animations in such a way, that they can be re-used by different characters even if they have different rigs, body proportions etc.

So what Unity does is it takes your authored animation, normalizes it and then re-applies it to your character. Both step's are lossy (i.e. you loose detail/quality with each step). This is just so that you know that with humanoid, you will always have slight differences. That's why humanoid should only be your go-to animation format, when high animation detail is not important but it's more important that you can share the animation across multiple characters. Otherwise use generic, which is a 1:1 animation format.

More info on the inner workings of humanoid: https://unity.com/de/blog/engine-platform/mecanim-humanoids

Anyway, I do agree, that the shoulders look quite off and even when using humanoid, you should be able to increase quality.

  1. Have you applied some scaling within your character's rig? Scaling should only ever be applied to the root of the character, do not scale anything that's between the hips and the root of the character. This could explain such an issue.
  2. Try to create a fresh UMotion project and re-do this pose. This is just a quick test to rule out that you've done some breaking modifications to your character after you created the UMotion project for it.
  3. Try export the animation to .fbx instead of .anim. Go into the export settings, select your character's fbx file as destination file. After exporting, you will find the animation within the character's fbx file. This usually produces the best re-targeting quality.

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

Best regards,
Peter

Mark Swinimer 1 week ago

Thanks Peter.

I don't need too much precision for my project so that's fine, and I need the humanoid rig for asset compatibility.

I started a new project and imported my models and tried a lot of different methods.

I think I found the culprit though! I used a mixamo model for a base rig, and then I was importing that same rig to all my other models. This worked fine for everything else but apparently this seems to conflict with umotion. So generating the rig from each model seems to fix it.

Thank you.

Customer support service by UserEcho