DOTS animation character customization

Changes in where animation puts stuff in the entity hierarchy has seen a lot of churn been a bit of a pain to keep up on. So I thought I would just ask what the team suggests for this use case.

Which is characters that have mesh slots and we switch them out at runtime. Our basic approach is we have a prefab for the character that has a rig, and a prefab for each clothing set with no rig. A So one single shared rig. The clothing sets are purely a prefab organization thing at runtime characters can mix/match any combination from any set.

At conversion we take the clothing prefabs and create a separate entity prefab for each mesh slot.

So during conversion we have to modify a few things, remove components, etc.. Then runtime stitch stuff back together. That's been the pain point as what is connected to what has seen a lot of churn over the last few releases.

Any tips on what a suggested approach is would be helpful.

 

Hi snacktime,

The approach that you took is very similar to what we are doing in dots shooter with LOD. Basically we do have a shared rig that can be mapped to all the different LOD skin mesh. As you do we are also doing alot of stitching at runtime to make it work.

So as you know all this new dots thing is pretty new and there is a lot of thing missing so the big picture is not yet there.

On the animation side we do currently provide the com.unity.animation package which is the low level API that allow you to build everything that you need to evaluate a multi pass animation graph pipeline.

But we are also working on the animation rigging package which is not yet available but this package will handle all the high level animation concept with tools to build a complete character workflow with LOD, constraint setup, physics integration, cloth, facial.

I know it doesn't help you very much right now to get the job done, but like you we are currently looking at how we should stitch all thoses animation concept all together in a unify workflow

 

I'm on the fence of trying out the com.unity.animation package but it could do with some documentation at least similar to the one provided by the dots physics package.

The animation rigging package feature set sounds good but I guess it will probably take a significant amount of time before its ready for public preview.

 

Is there something new ? if there is only a few cloth to change,you can set all cloth as child,and DeclareLinkedEntityGroup.then u can use setEnable to show or hide the child.but the problem is if you have lots of cloth,make all the mesh into one single Modle may not be a good idea.

 

Almost a year later, is this available yet or in preview, or an explanation of how to streamline generating skinned meshes/character customisation in DOTS?

 

Any news?

 

According to a discussion in the audio forum, DOTS is taking more time to build than they thought. They do not even seem to know where it is all headed, so news will come later and package updates probably not this year.

This is for the new audio stuff, but I fear it is safe to assume the same for Animation and etc.

 

I am really sad about the slow project especially that I do not see an end before 2023