Overrides in LateUpdate having no effect on animation

I'm having an issue with animations where in various places I'm trying to override the animations in code and it's having no effect if the Animator is enabled. According to everything I've read in the docs and forums using LateUpdate should mean the values get applied after the animations, but it just doesn't work. I have a really simple test case where I'm setting one bones rotation to the identity transform and it has zero effect. If I disable the Animator component then it works just fine. So its like the animation is being applied after LateUpdate. I don't know if the problem is specific to the 2d-animation package, but this seems like such a basic thing to want to do I can't believe it doesn't work. I've tried changing the update mode on the Animator, and moving the code to Update or FixedUpdate.

I'm using Unity 2020.3.25 and 2danimation 5.0.10.

 

This is the entire test script.

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2.  
3. public class Testing : MonoBehaviour
4. {
5.     [SerializeField] private Transform m_targetBone;
6.     private void LateUpdate()
7.     {
8.         m_targetBone.rotation = Quaternion.identity;
9.     }
10. }
11.  

 

This should work, and in fact I just verified that it does. See enclosed package, press Letter O to override.

Are you modifying something other than what you think you are modifying?

Are you perhaps modifying the prefab bone rather than the instantiated one??

Or perhaps this 2D animation system uses different timing... which would seem ... unlikely.

Here is some timing diagram help:

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ExecutionOrder.html

My test script:

Code (csharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2.  
3. // @kurtdekker
4.  
5. public class OverrideMeJohnny : MonoBehaviour
6. {
7.     public Transform Thingy;
8.  
9.     void LateUpdate()
10.     {
11.         if (Input.GetKey( KeyCode.O))
12.         {
13.             Thingy.position = new Vector3( 4.0f, 1.0f);
14.             Thingy.rotation = Quaternion.identity;
15.         }    
16.     }
17. }

 

I imported your package into 2020.3.25 and it totally works.

It does seem unlikely... and yet I can't think of anything else it could be right now. Another reason I think it might be timing related to the 2D pipeline is that if I change the update mode of the Animator to "Animate Physics" then it seems to jump back and forth between the animated value and what I set in code.

 

Verified this is still an issue in Unity 2021.2.16 with 2d animation 7.0.4.

In fact, I opened up the _Character scene from the samples and attached the script from above (pointed at transform bone_3) and it shows the same issue.

 

This is the package for the aforementioned test using the 2d animation character sample.

 

I think I found a fix, by looking at the source for the 2D IK system. That system also updates rotations in LateUpdate, but it was working. I found that the magic ingredient is:

Code (CSharp):

1. [DefaultExecutionOrder(-2)]

I had actually tried changing the script execution order, but I hadn't tried making it negative. That actually doesn't make sense to me, since now it runs *before* the default update, so I would think that would guarantee that it gets overridden by the animation update if that runs in the default update. But hey it works so yay!

 

That is some extremely good information to know. Thanks for coming back for the postmortem. I will update my animation timing notes to include that.

 

Having thought about this a bit more the idea of setting the execution order to -2 makes sense to me. I think the animation system is running before LateUpdate is called on any script, but the sprite renderer (which uses the transforms) runs in the default time. So our script has to modify the transform inbetween the animation system modifying it and the renderer using it.

Another part of this is that if you are using IK at all, and any of the animations also use IK, then to modify the IK target transform you need the execution order of your script to be less than -2, so it runs after the animator but before the IK solvers.

 

Hi!
Has there been any updates on this? The above mentioned workaround does solve the problem, but I find it really inconvenient not to mention it took me an hour to stumble upon this solution.