New Animation Rigging Preview Package Available For Unity 2019.1

Edit: The Animation Rigging package has now been released. You can find the new introduction thread here: https://forum.unity.com/threads/welcome-to-animation-rigging.1024759/

We are happy to introduce the Animation Rigging package as preview for Unity 2019.1+.

(Please note, this thread is intentionally locked for comments. To discuss a specific topic related to Animation Rigging, please visit the Animation Previews forum https://forum.unity.com/forums/animation-previews.141/ to browse the current conversations or start a new thread.)​

The new Animation Rigging package gives you more artistic control over your animations. You can use a set of predefined animation constraints to manually build a control rig hierarchy for a generic character or develop your own custom constraint in C#. At runtime, rig constraints are converted to a list of AnimationJobs that are appended as post-process operations to the controller playable graph.

This enables users to do powerful things with animated skeletons during gameplay such as world interactions. For example, when a character's hands interact with a prop, or to aim at a target in the world. It is also possible to get higher quality rigging using procedurally controlled bones for skeletal deformation rigging, such as twist correction for shoulders and wrists on skinned mesh characters. We also have physics-based constraints that can be used for dynamic secondary motion on character rigs.

Installing the package

1. Download Unity 2019.1 from the Hub
2. Open your project in Unity and go to Window > Package Manager
3. Open the “Advanced” drop-down and make sure “Show Preview Packages” is set
4. Select Animation Rigging in the list and click install

Getting started

1. Please check out our GDC Developer Days presentation for free on the GDC Vault
   
2. Our documentation can be found here
3. Import the Samples into your project from Package Manager. (see the image below for reference)

Feedback

We are very interested in hearing feedback about how these tools are working for you. Please let us know how it's going by sharing your progress on our forums here. If you find issues, please follow these instructions to report a bug.