Discussion Has Unity given up on maintaining the current version of the animation system?

Recently, I posted many threads on Animation and Playable, discussing their issues and giving some development suggestions. I also browsed many other posts in the Animation channel, but without exception, these posts did not receive any official response from Unity personnel, which is uncommon in other channels.

I know that Unity is developing a new DOTS Animation system, but it appears that this new system will not be publicly released in the near future. Therefore, the existing version of the Animation system should be given more attention.

 

If you're talking about the Animator specifically, then yeah, it's horrible.

I switched to Animancer Pro a few years ago and I've never looked back. Fixed pretty much every issue I had with the default system. You do have to code, but at least my stuff works now haha.

 

@Unrighteouss Recently, all of the questions and suggestions I have raised are related to the Playable system, which is the underlying system of the Animator. As far as I know, Animancer is also developed based on Playable, so in certain complex usage scenarios, it may encounter the same problems I am currently facing. This is why I have chosen to develop a new animation system based on Playable instead of directly using Animancer.

 

If you assume Animancer may have issues because it's based on Playables, then how is developing your own system based on Playables going to fix that? Obviously no system is perfect and it depends on what your problems actually are, but the way you phrased it sounds like you haven't actually tried Animancer to see if it has those problems.

 

Hi @Kybernetik ,

I wrote some AnimationScriptPlayable code to work around certain Animator mechanisms and avoid bugs.

I agree with your point, and I haven't thoroughly tested all of Animancer's features. I'm not saying Animancer isn't good enough; it has a large user base and quite high ratings, which shows that it's good enough.

When choosing whether to develop new tools or use existing third-party tools, many factors need to be considered. When selecting a third-party tool, in addition to considering whether its existing features meet requirements, the cost of extending it should also be considered. Before I fully understand the source code of a third-party tool, I won't rashly modify parts of it. Another important reason is that developing tools in-house can better meet the needs of the project and accumulate technical experience for the company.

 

I share your mindset, that's how I ended up making Animancer after all. The main downside is that I've been stuck working on my plugins for the last few years instead of working on games.

The reason for my question was more from the perspective of wanting to improve Animancer. If there's something it can't currently do then I'd like to hear about it so I can consider it for future development.

Animancer does support Animation Jobs, but they're mainly positioned at the root of the graph to modify the final output. I'd like to add the ability to stick them anywhere in the graph like you can with raw playables, but very few users have requested the ability to do that so it hasn't been a priority.

 

Currently, I mainly use AnimationJob to do some bone-by-bone processing and motion correction on animations. This requires putting the animation in the middle of the Playable tree, because the corrected animation needs to be blended with subsequent animations. At the root of the Playable tree, I only collect AnimationStream data using AnimationJob.

I have already submitted some Playable-related bug reports to Unity, but have not received confirmation yet. If you would like to see details about these bug reports, I can share the links here after Unity provides a public Issue Tracker link.