AvatarPlay - A Spearated Animation System

Hi everybody,

I'm announcing a unity extension named AvatarPlay, which is a separated animation system in unity without relating to Mecanim or Legacy animation system.

Since it has a private animation format and separated playing code, it is more flexible and easy to be expanded, customized, and applied to cross platform.

It's based on 'avatar', which means it is well supporting animation retargeting. Differing from mecanim, AvatarPlay doesn't contain any build-in avatar pre-definition, instead gives a flexible way to define and configure any type of avatar, thus it supports any skeleton including humanoid and non-humanoid.

Features Included:
* Smaller animation clip size, reduce your game's size and save more memory on runing
* Convert Mecanim and Legacy animation clips to AvatarPlay clips.
* Create and define avatar
* Avatar mapped editing
* Animation clip editing
* Animation retargeting for any type of object (not limited to humanoid)
* Animation smooth crossing
* Optional Loop Play and RootMotion Play
* Name a keyframe and get specified frame at run-time
* Event trigger at animation clip position or keyframe
* Complete bone mask support (activate and deactivate any bone of skeleton at run time on an animation layer)
* Compress and store clip to byte[] in memory, as well as decompress and load
* Multi layers playing support
* Animation Clips Viewer tool
* Animation Clips Converter tool
* Animation Recording and Baking tool
* Use clipset to manage and configure clips
* c# code and full code included

Create & Configure Avatar


Editing Clips


Playing Component (including clip preview in edit mode)

 

Very interesting!

Please show a video of quadruped animation on one model retargeting onto a different quadruped model.
Say unicorn above retargeted to any quadruped model free in the asset store.

 

Hi theANMATOR2b,

Thanks for your concern. As your request, I have made some videos to show a simple workflow of AvatarPlay with two free animal model assets from Allosaurus and Compsognathus.

Create Avatar

Create Mapped

Convert Clip

Play Animation

 

Interesting.
Wil you sell it on the asset store and do you know what the price will be?
Also do you own Final IK and Puppet Master and will yours work together with them?
How long until you will release it?

 

Hi RandAlThor,

Yup, I am announcing this package. I intend to set the price in 20~30 for it's a preliminary version.

I'll add some basic IK supports in the further version, but it's recommended to use Final IK to get the comprehensive IK solution. I know Final IK and Puppet Master but I havn't owned them yet, I am not sure but I think my work has no confliction to work together with them, might event be more efficient than mecanim with the features such as runtime bone mask.

I don't know when the package will be approved since the Asset Store Team declined it, for they asking me to provide some WIP to show them and potential users that I have a presence in the community.

 

Ok, understanding.
The price is right i think.
Maybe you need some beta testers

 

Thanks for the example videos. Nice workflow examples.

But what I was hoping for was an example of retargeting an animation from one quadruped to another. The example you provided was of two 3 jointed bipedal creatures.
Could you show the process of a quadruped retargeting? Something like an animation from a cat/tiger being retargeted to a horse, or dog, or anything else that walks on 4 legs.

 

Hey htheANMATOR2b,

When you talked about quadruped, I just thought you want to see a 3-bones-legs creature example. In fact, there are not so much different between quadruped and biped in AvatarPlay, but just have diffent initial poses of avatar. For animating a quadruped with AvatarPlay, you have to create a quadruped avatar first, and the workflow is exactly the same with biped, which I won't show again, but just show the result,

Look at this

Assets from Cute Kitten and Rhino Cartoon.
The retargeting is not perfect because Kitten has all 3-bones-legs while Rhino has 3-bones back-legs and 2-bones front-legs.

 

great work.

but there is one thing still missing for it to be usable as an animation system, that is CrossFade (as in Animator.CrossFade. --or is it Animation smooth crossing?)

and if I understand correctly, it can be used to make animation (or edit animation)? Could you make a video about that?

 

Of course, AvatarPlay has the Animation Smooth Crossing support as I had listed within the Fetures List on my first post.

Yup, AvatarPlay has the editing tools to create / modify animation clip with AvatarPlay clip format, and you can bake other animation clip format to AvatarPlay clip format.

Making Clip Example