Animating a surfboarder with mecanim... Humanoid or generic ?

Hi !

I am doing my first trials with mecanim (been using legacy before) and I need to animate a human character on a small surf. I feel like the surfboard has to be part of the rig since the character will grab it and do some board off moves.

After some trials, I am thinking to uses the generic rig animation type instead of humanoid since the board bone is not getting animated when using humanoid rig animation type.

What do you guys think about this ? Would you keep using humanoid? How would you animate the board then ?

Thank you !

 

The board bone should animate in Humanoid, make sure you apply a skeleton mask and make sure its affected.

What is your reason for wanting to use Humanoid ?

The only reason I see to use the Humanoid is for the retargeting so if you would want to reuse the same animations on a different rig. However, Humanoid is not alway precise so for something precise like holding the board with the hands, you'd probably need some IK solution to fix the hand position when they are grabbing.

If you have only one character, then Generic would be better. The surf can be part of the rig or animated separately. In the latter, it would have its own animator that would be synced with whatever the character is doing, so two different skinned meshes animated at the same time. It's a little more complex to set up but can allow you to have different boards models and remove the board more easily if you need the surfer with no board later on. If you don't need to change board models and characters then I'd say use generic and have the surfer and board as part of the same skinned mesh.

 

Thank you for your answer. I think I will go with generic and do retargeting in my 3d app.