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Animation retargeting questions

Discussion in 'Animation' started by MarkvDrimmelen, Jan 18, 2020.

  1. MarkvDrimmelen

    MarkvDrimmelen

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2017
    Posts:
    13
    Hi there,

    During the development of our third person shooter I’ve had my fair share of challenges while animating our character. Even though most of the challenges have or can be solved something has bothered me for a long time; Unity’s animation retargeting system of humanoid rigs.

    We have bought a 3d character (we are a small team without an artist ) with a biped rig and an animation pack with mocap animations. The first thing you run into when importing a character with a biped rig is that Unity doesn’t like triangular neck and pelvis’ rigs. Luckily we also own the source files of the character so I was able to fix this issue.

    After that you will soon notice that while the retargeted animations work, there are some differences between the source animations and the retargeted result. After spending quite some time adjusting our character’s avatar’s pose I luckily did manage to get better results. But as soon as I started implementing our animations for holding a rifle, these differences became even more apparent. When implementing these kind of animations it’s quite important that you position and rotate the rifle in the character’s hand so that the character aims forward. This of course looked fine on the original animations, but when retargeted on our character the position of both hands were far from straight. The avatar adjustments I made earlier seemed to even make things even worse. I’ve tried resetting the T-pose of the avatar but that doesn’t solve the problem either. Most people seem to solve this problem by using IK and I’m probably going to try and solve it using Final-IK (asset on the asset-store).

    In order to reduce the chance that the things I’m doing right now will have to be completely redone in the future I have a few questions. It would be great if someone with a little bit more expertise in animation could answer them.

    What approach do larger studio’s take (i.e. the developers of Apex Legends) when it comes to animation? They have a pretty diverse set of characters (male and female) with different postures. Do they create a full set of animations specifically for each character or do they also use retargeting?

    I’m aware our character’s rig is far from perfect, and the rig of our animation pack’s character probably has it’s imperfections too but are there people out here that actually do get good results using Unity’s retargeting system?

    If we plan to implement a female character alongside our male character in the future, will it take a lot of work to animate it or can existing animations be reused? Would it for example be better to create a new male character from scratch and then reuse this rig when creating a female character, or is this not an option either?

    If we would hire an animator, how useful would a mocap animation pack be to them? Would they benefit from having mocap data when creating animations themselves or will they just create new animations from scratch?

    Thank you in advance.