Answered

Since there's no Pose library, what's the Umotion workflow....

heynewt 5 years ago updated 5 years ago 3

I really like Umotion.  My previous workflow for creating humanoid animations where they all share starting position from a "neutral" pose was to always have that neutral pose in my pose library (3ds Max).   In UMotion, I have to load a clip from a previous animation that starts with that neutral pose, then delete all except the initial keyframes.  

That's fine, not too hard.  The problem I just learned the hard way is that after you create your new animation clip (based on that previously created animation) when you export your newly created clip, you don't get a dialogue box asking what you want to call your new clip.   Umotion just overwrites the existing clip you loaded - with no warning - thereby erasing your reference clip.  


I'm sure there's a workflow people use to avoid this accidental erasure.  Having a simple pose library would solve so many issues.


Anyway, thanks for an otherwise very good product.


UMotion Version:
latest?
Unity Version:
2018.4.4

Answer

Answer
Answered

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

GOOD, I'M SATISFIED
Satisfaction mark by heynewt 5 years ago

I just realized that you can rename the clip in the settings icon.  This will prevent overwrite.  Still, an "export" is not a "save", and I think a warning should pop up if an export is about to overwrite a clip, even if it's the same clip you have loaded into the Clip editor timeline.  just my 2c

thanks.

Answer
Answered

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

Thanks for that explanation Peter, all that is reasonable.