Official Animation Status Update (Q2 2022)

Do we have an ETA for the new Animator ?
The animation workflow is one of the biggest issue of Unity for me, so I'm very excited for this.
Maybe an alpha in 2023 ?

I don't want to sound impatient though, take your time to do something good with it !

 

I tried to instal the Animation package in my project and after a bunch of error , I find this thread.
Just to tell you that I very enjoy to see what It will coming, and I hope to use it soon in my new project with full DOTS !

Thanks for your work!

 

Please Hurry up with this.

 

Please do not forget that animation doesn't just exist on its own usually. When firing a gun you also want to make a sound + add particles + maybe other stuff and all of that should be in sync
Using animation events to sync sound is painful. Something like timeline is much better, but Animator can't play those

Other thing Mecanim forgot is that gameplay code might be dependent on animation. Mecanim always assumes like animation is some one way dependency which is weird and wrong. Game can wait for animation a lot of time too and binding those, again, only way through animation events. And those are really bad

 

Tools related to animation always have many problems.
I don't think there were any major problems with the functionality of the previous DOTS animation packages. Rather, I think there was a problem in the editor UI.
But apart from that, we need to think about whether the current method is right for TAs to easily edit animations.
There are a lot of negative comments about Avatar here, but the Unity Mechanime Avatar is just Unity's implementation for the biped.
Whether you're using MotionBuilder or Character Studio, do you think you can create character motion without a biped?
Now that the Animation Rig has come out, a lot of the work that the biped should have been able to do with the Rig, but it wasn't like that before.
Then, on the contrary, let's think about whether it is necessary to maintain the hierarchical structure.
I have to use a constraint anyway, but can't it be done by forcibly inserting a constraint instead of a hierarchical structure?

And for animations that exceed 1000 units, is it correct to maintain a bone buffer for each entity?
Wouldn't it be much faster to just create a bones buffer for each frame and re-bind the buffer according to the animation position?
And I am against the current method of motion matching. It's too unnecessarily heavy. A good TA would be able to put together almost the same animations much more lightly. Wouldn't we need a more streamlined system for motion matching, such as Unreal pose warping?

 

it is still difficult to knit animations with sounds and shapes, it is very false and I would like some elementary simplification

 

Are there any plans to improve Animator?
Animation development is one of the most important parts of a game.
However, the current Animator does not seem to be convenient or accessible.

For example, why does Copy/Paste Transition ignore Interruption Source?
Why can't I get the name of a state directly and have to check by IsName(sting name)?
Why does OnStateMachineEnter/Exit have to go through the Entry/Exit node?
Why can't I even get information about whether or not inside any sub state machine?

If you could at least open up accessibility, we can freely improve it through editor extensions...


By the way, I would like to have VisualScripting inside Animator so that I can precisely design transitions and control parameters. without C#.

 

Is this the new experimental animation package?
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.animation@0.9/manual/index.html

 

Last updated in January of 2021, but yes.

 

interesting animation middle-ware by unity

 

This stuff is all interesting and cool. But I really think Unity needs to start by building a solid system than can easily and efficiently playback fbx animation clips. Then go nuts and make all kind of addons like this.

 

It is roughly as cool as kinematica and we know what happened to that.

It's also kind of insulting when they work on high end features like that when their baseline is trash.

 

It's a cool idea, but the look at constraint shown at 3:40 really puts me off. If I tell a character to look at something, foot sliding is not what I want to see.

I also totally agree that Unity should focus on getting the basics right before building fancy stuff.

 

that is probably due to unity's way of calculating root position from the hip,
and not going to change.

this tool could be well used for animation authoring / correction
and not so much for in-game use.

 

Will we be able to sample an animation more than once per frame? I feel like I have exhausted all animation related Unity APIs trying to scrub an animation more than once per frame. I tried:

-Animator.Play(...) (+animator.Update)
-animation["State"].time=...
-playableClip.SetTime + Playablegraph.Evaluate()
-animationClip.SampleAnimation(...)

And nothing will make an animation move more than once per Update frame, its like the whole animation update loop is out of reach

 

I hope you all noticed that wasn't the Unity interface, it's probably some separate software that they will sell as an additional service / subscription IF it ever gets to a usable status.

In the meantime, if you think that looks cool, check out Cascadeur (which is probably what Unity is inspired from anyway), that already does all (most?) of the things the Unity tool promises, and also it exists now and is pretty affordable.

 

kinematica was working, afaik *

machine learning can replicate that, so in near future expectable, unreal tech just recently got it in-engine supported.
unfortunately I also know what happened to gigaya.

*and
this tech, pose-correction can be used in motion-matching, it just needs structurized for logic.
so it essentially can be a stepstone to another level.

I bet animators would love to work with something like this.

and you can record your work in .anim anytime, but compatibility is not good even throu dae or bvh workflow

 

yes, Cascadeur is cool and very capable software,
unity will also be capable as a codebase to code something like that
and even in couple ways.
Cascadeur is editor, unity is runtime. realtime environment.

 

@ChinnyBJ Any updates on DOTS Animation? I’m super excited for it. Thanks!

 

Bump