Character System

Hi,
I just bought this and i am trying to retarget a standard mixamo character just to test before i rig my own in maya, but i cannot seem to get the animations linked to her. she remains in t-pose, and as far as i can tell i have followed the video examples. Ragdoll works fine, but the console is giving me warnings about [mecanim] bind skeleton cannot find transform yadayadayada. do i need to create an empty node for armature and rename the various mixamo bones to match the ninja example or is there another place to match the animation clips up that i am missing?

thanks in advance!

 

Hi,

Have you tried to create a Avatar for your character? And then assign both scripts and the animation controllers to it ?
I tested it with different Asset Store characters, worked great after creating an avatar.
Also remapping bones and or setting muscle settings could help.

 

i followed the example in the video set up and just used the ninjaavatar in both the rig definition/importer (and extra bones) and the animator controller, but still t-pose.

 

In the top right, our character is using the ninja avatar. It should work if you create a custom avatar for your source character. Under Rig -> Avatar definition -> Create from this model. Then just assign the avatar to your animator.
Your capsule collider center should be 1 on the Y axis and the Height should be around 2 for your character.
The other settings looks good so far ;-)

 

ok yah that worked perfectly. for some reason i must have misviewed the video tutorial because i thought it showed using the ninja as the avatar source in the importer, but guess not. anyway, thanks! now time to transfer my rig from maya into unity and hope it syncs just as well.

 

Awesome! I'm glad to hear that! ;-)

 

Please don't use Robin's thread to pimp your own asset. I came to the forum expecting to see an update/discussion on the Character System, not your stuff.

By the way, his asset is 3000 euros (just under $4000).

Not interested.

 

i have a new character that uses a capsule collider that is not centered on the feet, so when i click play after setting up the character system, she falls thru the floor and the capsule resizes to 0,1,0. any way to use the system with a different capsule collider size or do i need to re-scale her first, then create avatar, then apply the scripts?


yah i see where the script is resetting the capsule collider:
col.center = new Vector3(0, 1, 0);
col.height = 2.0f;

is there any need for this? can i change those numbers to variables that i can switch instead of the hard-coded numbers? my characters are all of varying heights.

EDIT: rescaled the rig and model to conform to the capsule size and that is almost working. it still shoves the capsule -44 in the z axis for some reason that i cannot figure out yet, even though it is centered perfectly before playing.

 

Hey, bought your package and i wanted to give some feedback! It's great to get us starting and by no means i regret the purchase(actually i'm pretty happy with it), though i think there are some things that could be improved...

Main critique point, the response could be quicker, i.e. when climbing, the character pulls himself up and goes down again and then jumps up to the next collider(i know it's done on purpose to make it seem more realistic but actually its not very realistic) i think it would feel better if he would jump directly without that additional pullup in between. - Regular jump: The rate of the ability to jump could be increased, often i want to jump again directly after landing but there is some cooldown to wait, this makes it feel less responsive too. Worst feels the run to jump where the character need to stand still for a little while after landing before he continues running, this is a bit annoying. Generally i'd say its best practice to take the control away from the player as less as possible.

Second critique point is some chaining of actions, i.e. when performing a wallrun with the jump button, it's not possible to grab a climbcollider while in the air/wallrun. this is not very intuitive for the player. Also regarding to this, when you fall down and there is a climbcollider in reachable distance, it should be possible to grab it. Many times i try to climb up the huge tower in the demoscene and after a little mistake i fall down to the very bottom again, this can be very frustrating. I guess it would be better to be more generous with abilities to rescue yourself from such mistakes... it should be possible anytime in a fall, to grab an edge(maybe limited to some adjustable falling speed)... in tomb raider it's done automatically to some extent, i.e. when lara walks and falls over an edge, she automatically grabs it.)

Third and only minor critique point, the roll off from a drop. it works great when the character is in forward motion but if you fall backwards and the character performs a forward roll off then, its vey obvious that it looks wrong.

Other little thing is the climb offset, its possible to offset the characters climbing position but when i adjust it so that the character hangs perfectly on the edge, his hands are disappearing in the wall during the climb animation.

All in all, very good product and i'm happy with it but we need to modify it to overcome the issues above, really cool would be (if you are still working on it) to consider to adress these points in a future update!

Thanks a lot for this system all the best,
Peter

 

Hello, I want to buy this item, but is that this new version is compatible with UNITY 4.0.0 ? (I can see 4.2 on the Asset Store)

Thanks

 

Hi,

@mcconrad,
you can remove the collider settings in start if you want. It's meant to be a little helper for customers using it the first time ;-)
Hmm, z -44 : Does it stay in position when you disable your animation ? If so it must be a animation related problem. The character root should be zeroed out in your 3d animation app for in place motions.

@Becoming,
wow, that is some good feedback. Thanks a lot! The animations are made out of my personal perception and taste. Of course it is impossible to make everyone happy when doing stuff like that. But ill try my best ;-)
Thanks!

@Hadrien,
Unity 4.0.0 Mecanim features was a bit too bugged for a stable release. I had to wait for the 4.2 update to release it.
Thanks ;-)

Cheers!

 

lol, i am literally working on this as i got your update. the -44 seems to be local to my rig, so i made a simple adjustment script and nudged the collider at awake. i also pre-scaled it so that the forced dimensions on start aren't a problem anymore.

also figured out all the other issues, like going thru the wall when climbing (adjust climb offset to wall) and thinking it is falling when the slope is relatively tiny (adjust grounded distance value)

i so agree with @becoming regarding the jump->land pause, but that can be changed by swapping out the jump animation itself to a different one.

i do still have some issues with the rigidbody+velocity going thru walls and such at certain angles and speeds, especially if the mouse movement is held down, allowing it to seemingly push thru them with a virtual "effort." this might need to change in the code itself though, but i am still tinkering.

 

good tip, i'll try to trim the animation, thanks!

Thanks for taking the time to read it I hope it was not to demotivating with all the critics, because it was meant to be positive! Your system is already very advanced so i felt it could help on finetuning, maybe to something as advanced as Tomb Raider's animation system... you're almost there

One other issue i found in the meantime is, when you are in the ragdoll state and you fall into a water collider it does not stop your fall... Actually you have to run out of the water and enter back into the water volume collider to go to the swim state. Maybe you can consider to change the drag values of the ragdoll and its parts when entering the water collider. Then blend directly to the swimstate...

However, my big compliment on your system, i'll write a good review asap!

 

hey, i know its not your job to give so specific support but can i kindly ask you to give me an example for this. i tried
to move this from the void ThirdPerson () on line 202

up to the line 75 (so, somehere it the void start () area) but as always that doesent work :/

 

Okay, thanks for your reply and keep up the good work !

Cheers

 

Hi all,

@mcconrad, thanks for your feedback! noted ;-)

@Becoming, You're welcome, thats very kind of you thanks again!

@Der_Kevin, Yes, no problem, here you go :
Just exclude all yAngl based stuff since you don't need this angle in your case:
Add a public float myAngle = 30f;
Then in line 110 : Quaternion camRot = Quaternion.Euler (myAngle, xAngl, 0);
Now you can set that angle as you wish.

@Hadrien, thanks and you're welcome!

Cheers

 

@Robin S

Thanks for how well written and documented the scripts are. This asset is proving to be more valuable than words can express for me.

I am able to add my own additions to the scripts quite easliy. The re-targetting of animations is easy also. If anybody needs help to re-target, I am happy to help.

Here is a few videos of what I am doing with it at the moment.

[video=youtube_share;kNQlT8pN3eE]http://youtu.be/kNQlT8pN3eE

[video=youtube_share;-EruNTrpj7A]http://youtu.be/-EruNTrpj7A

This kit also integrates well with the Advanced Fantasy AI kit from Brilliant Games and others. I used them both together.

Thanks!

 

Hey Venged,

This footage is awesome! Good job! Will follow your projects progress for sure ;-)
And thanks for your kind words about the CS, i really appreciate it.

Cheers!

 

So you're the Daily Deal for today. Considering buying it but not quite sure yet why I need it... we already have Mecanim and thousands of biped animations on the Asset Store, many free, also the free raw-mocap package:

Without reading through 41 forum pages -- what exactly does your Character System to the mix? ...because I'm sure I'm missing something and wanna learn what it is

 

can these animations be used with other characters that are mecanim ready but dont have animation

is there like some tutorial for doing so

 

@Robin i have questions about your product.

do all animation run by mecanim?
is it expandable? can i add more actions like new weapon and animations to use this new weapon?
why do i need retargetting process? mecanim does this for us.

 

Hey, daily deal! congrats! now i think there gonna be S***loads of questions today

and I am one of these guys.

so: in the demo for v3 (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39674817/CharSys_v3.2/CharSys_v3.html) you have this trail effect on the sword when you swipe it. sadly on v4 its gone. do you want to share the script you used for this in v3? or tell me how you done this?

by the way. awesome work!

 

wow nice, perhaps he could put back in there or at least the code and some notes on how to put it back.

 

Hello Robin, I bought your pack and it is very good, I will put a very good rating asap.

However, is it possible to remove the little "hit ground animation" after a jump and allow the hero to run directly after the jump without this little "hit ground latency" ?
I need the hero's very responsive after the jump.

Sorry for my bad english… I'm french

Thanks in advance !

 

there are limitations if I start working with this Character System and Unity free?????

 

I'm having to press the keys multiple times to get "actions", any help?

 

Hadrien - I think that is part of the jump animation. If so which I believe is correct, you will either have to replace the animation or edit the one that comes with it.
Venged - starting to look very awesome. Keep it up.
Glid - the limitation is the pro only features like the ik foot placement and the ik turning to look at. But that look at can be changed. There is a script a few pages back explaining it.

 

I moved them from fixed update to the update function. It seemed to help out. And I think there is a response variable you can tweak. I'm not at home so can't double check for you.

 

Helped a lot, but I doubt it should work this way, like you said there must be a variable to tweak. Help from the author would be welcome.

 

I'm sure robin will jump in and answer. I'm not sure what time zone he is in.

 

Same problem here…!

 

but RobinS, what animations it's not possible to make on unity free??

 

Thanks for your reply. No it's not a part of the jump Animation, this is a single animation I found this animation in the "AirTree", the anim is called "LandM".

But "Landm" anim is central to the "AirTree" (which contains all the jump, climbing or falling actions) so I do not really know how to change it so that it is removed or replaced. I did not want to make any mistakes, so I prefer to have the opinion of a member… Thanks for your help!

 

I apologize if this has been asked before:

How does one edit the animations, in 3d max, maya, etc or in unity?

Is there a 3d max rig included? (I've yet to experience a clean conversion from a CAT/Biped rigs to the mecanim setup)

 

You can find the Ninja source in Blender format. Location : "_CharacterSystem/Character_System/Ninja/Source/Ninja_source.zip"

 

Ok I found the answer :
Simply tighten the delay between animations "Landm" and "MoveTree" (in the Animator -> AirTree)

It's as simple as that. You now have a smoother character !

 

Awesome find. We gotta put together a little cheat sheet of tweaks and things. Nice work.

 

@Archania : Thanks. Yes, it would be nice! It work for when the character is walking but there is still a problem when the character is running. When running, I think this is another animation tree.

I'm looking for the solution !

 

I found the solution for the Running state :

This is the same as for the Walk, except that instead of going into the "AirTree" go to "SprintTree" -> "AirTrees" and click "LandM" and change the values of this transition : "AirTreeS.LandM -> SprintTree.TreeS" ​​to your liking.

Now your character can run immediately after a jump, without latency.

I can send you screenshots if you want.

 

one more question if y ou buy this asset can you just buy the veteran character at some additional cost without having to get the whole veterain + cs system all over again... i mean wont these animations work with that character and cant it be setup using unity 4

 

I'll be checking it and tweaking mine after work tonight.
Like I said we need to combine all these tweaks and stuff throughout this thread and put together a cool pdf lol.
But this is really cool. Now to fix my shooting script and one step closer to getting a very good base for things.

 

Hi all,

@metaleap, It is basically a universal character controller starter kit with base functions for : climbing, swimming, wall running, shooting, sword fighting etc. all that is mentioned in the description ;-) you can use these functionality for your game, integrate it or/and build upon it.

@im, yes, you can retarget them to any bipedal skinned character within Unity 4 due Mecanim.
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/Retargeting.html

@atmuc, yes, it is fully mecanim based, the legacy version for 3.5.x is also included in a .zip file.
You can expand it as you wish or just swap animations in the controllers.
It uses the Mecanim retargeting process.

@PeterBrown, thanks! The trail script is still in zipped in the 3.5 version. I don't want to confuse new users with it for the new demo since it is 'just' a visual thing. And a nice little free gadget. ;-)

@Hadrien, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it! ;-)
Yes, that would be pretty simple to do. The transition the goes from AirTree to the landing animation can be muted or removed. Then you just need to set the same transition to the MoveTree (Default orange block). Your english is perfectly understandable and i'm german ;-)

@GLID3R82, Yes, the IK stuff is for Unity pro only. So AimLookIK and FeetAlignmentIK are pro only. Everything else works in both versions ;-)

@Setmaster, Hadrien, Archania, I'm about to submit the new update. This should fix this issue. Sorry for the trouble guys!

@O'parallel, You can import the fbx files to your animation app or use the source file as mentioned by Hadrien.

Cheers!

 

Yeah, nice ! Can't wait Thanks

 

Very cool. Glad you are improving it even more based on what people are finding.
Can't wait.

 

I see you have the same problems with DAZ figures that I do such as making the devil fingers when jumping/rolling, the hands not lining up with the rifle/pistol shooting, and the feet bending down a lot. I basically recreated every animation in there to use with Michael 4 to stop this. Well, some of them I just made a new animation layer for for hands only.

That stops if you make a build. I guess fixedupdate doesn't always register when you run it in Unity.

 

i'd make another suggestion if i can get it in before you made the next build, robin:

to be able to control the combo moves (punch/kick1 to 2) as a public var so we can tweak how precise the timing needs to be in the inspector rather than adjust the hard numbers in the script. currently, for me anyway, it is very tricky to pull them off (after i remapped the attacks to keys not mouse buttons) because the window to hit them in time is tiny.

thanks!

 

Very nice! Thanks a lot for your feedback guys! ;-)
@mcconrad, yes, i can do that. The reason for this approach is to keep memory allocation as low as possible. Cache only very important variables.
But i agree, could be helpful for the future ;-)
BTW. Have you tried to click and hold while the first animation is playing ? Works pretty good for me.

 

ah, cool. found it
i copied the TrailFX.cs script and tried to put everything inside my v4 scene(SwordTip,Trail_Mat etc.). then i replaced every "HeroAnim" with "HeroCtrl" in the Script but i got 2 errors

and

so, I dont think its that easy as "copy and paste" as i thought

so, maybe if someone here want to adapt the sword trail effect from v3 to v4 also, then we could stick our heads together and povide this little feature to the community

 

For the 3.5.x TrailFX script i used a delegate to trigger start animating. Example when the slash begins. With the new mecanim system you could use the current states normalized time, for example 0.2f start trail -> 0.9f end trail. Thats it ;-)

 

Thanks for the quick response. but i think i first have to go deeper into the unity world and learn a little bit more C#. I just started 2 weeks ago with unity and to be honest... i have no idea what you mean
I come from the 3D Artist area and it was pretty easy to add my own character i think that totaly speaks for you system if even a noob can use it

but still thank you and i still think your system is worth every penny. even if its hard for me to get some customization done but thats totaly my fault