Mecanim - How to work with more complex (nested) blend trees?

Hey everyone,

For a game I'm currently working on, I tend to, for most of the movement, work in more complex (nested) blend trees, rather than states. The main character has a 360 degree movement, so I blend between front/back/strafe left/strafe right through a blend tree, based upon degrees from input (think analog stick input). However, I want to be able to move further on from here and have a running version as well, which technically works perfectly fine with blend trees. I don't have a problem achieving this.

But, seeing blend trees are becoming more complex as the project continues, I've noticed that they're hard to maintain. If I want to add another blend tree half way through the blend tree flow I cannot just attach/detach as easily as I can with states. Instead I have to remove the attached blend tree and redo a bunch of stuff, which make them awful to edit when they're becoming more and more complex. Seeing I can't use states to easily blend from a distinct walk to a very distinct run (states don't sync animations, which makes it jitter if I initiate running at the wrong time) I am forced to work with blend trees. From what it seems, blend trees aren't meant to be complex. However, there are times when this is actually the case. Is there an easier way to maintain these within Unity/am I not understanding something about Mecanim?

Thanks in advance!

 

Hey pierrepaul,

This seems to be exactly what I'm looking for!Is there any ETA on this feature?
Thank you very much for your reply

Cheers!

 

Hey dudes, awesome job with this stuff, but I am kind of a noob and I was wondering how you would set something like this up...

I am in need of making a quadruped and it would be nice to just give it an arbitrary list of scalar properties like so,
bend body -> left to right
arch body -> up to down
twist body -> clockwise to counterclockwise
spread legs -> in to out
mood -> happy to glum
speed -> IDLE to WALK to RUN

Is there any way to throw in these clips:
walk
walk bent left,
walk bent right,
walk arched up,
walk arched down,
walk twisted cw,
walk twisted ccw,
walk happy,
walk glum,
walk spread out,
walk spread in,
all into a a walk state

+ same as above with run and idle

or is this asking too much?

 

It's been a year and there's still no ability to attach and detach sub blend trees, forcing a bunch of reworking if any blend tree changes need to be done. This feature is a must, and I don't see it as a candidate for unity 5.0 release either.

 

Aye, the inability to effectively rework blend trees (plus UI & UX in general) has been a major irritation & occasonal bottleneck. Anyone that's tried the 5.0 beta that can say whether this has changed?
Either way, progress on Mechanim throughout 4.x has been a considerable disappointment.

 

It would be great to get an update about the progress of the improvements mentioned above. I'm beginning to get frustrated by exactly the same issues the OP noted above, over two years ago.

Thanks.

 

Has this really not been addressed? How many thousands of people use Unity and Mechanim, and fundamental basic functionalities like this go overlooked?

 

I created an editor that works with the animator window to do exactly what you are looking for. It has drag and drop support for re-structuring blend trees, and a template system for saving off blend trees that you want to re-use. Check it out here: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/animation/anim-tree-editor-161217