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Phasing out Legacy animation in favor of Mechanim?!

Discussion in 'Animation' started by ShuuGames, Feb 27, 2014.

  1. ShuuGames

    ShuuGames

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    (I'm sorry if this has already been discussed enough, but still...)

    From the manual I read "Unity intends to phase out the Legacy animation system over time for all cases by merging the workflows into Mecanim". They need to improve it A LOT before they should be taking this move, IMHO. What do you think?

    Reasons why phasing out legacy would be very bad idea:
    • it's not fully operable from scripts. AnimatorController is a black box. At runtime (or in editor scripts) you can only control the animation state machine, altering it is impossible.
    • procedurally generated stuff can't be animated or I'm stupid. Animator component is useless for this. It can only read and control the state machine in animation controller (which we can't access) and do IK.
    If Unity Technologies just opened up AnimatorController API, some things would still be quite annoying:
    • Animator component API is cluttered with generic, humanoid and IK stuff. These concepts shouldn't be implemented together. It's just confusing to have left foot IK controls for a window for example.
    • The avatar-animator-controller triad works as a whole, which is a pain when setting up simple stuff.
    Don't get me wrong, Mecanim does solve many problems with humanoid character pipeline, but it's just too complex and difficult to set up and use for simple or custom cases.

    Please don't just drop the legacy system unless the alternative is at least as good as legacy is now. And also, any rumors when to expect this change from UT?
     
  2. Alf203

    Alf203

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    I hear what you are saying. I needed to sample an animation with mecanim but it cannot do this while legacy can. So I ended up sampling it in legacy and then using that data on a second version of my model that used mecanim.

    However, this topic been discussed already. They won't drop it till mecanim can do exactly the same thing legacy does. There is a quote from the devs here in the forum if it makes you feel any better, I'm just too tired to search for it at the moment. So its just a matter of time before you will have more scripting power you seek.

    In my opinion, it will take a while before they remove it. My bet is that by Unity 6.0 it will be gone though.

    I have no problem using it for simple case (for animating simple one or two state props), the only drawback at the moment is that for those situations it has more overhead than legacy. But I'm pretty sure that they will work on that aspect too before they remove the legacy, so I wouldn't really worry.
     
  3. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    I don't think we have to worry about them doing it too soon. The legacy particle system is still there despite the new one being available for how long, now?
     
  4. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    It'd be incredibly depressing if it took this long for Unity to mature the Mecanim feature set.
     
  5. Alf203

    Alf203

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    I agree with you. However, we are not that far from Unity 5 and I have some doubts they would remove it in a 5.x release even if the feature set would match. To me, it seems more logical to break compatibility in a new release, but its just a guess.

    Like Angrypenguin said above, if shuriken is any indication, it could take quite a while, depressing as it may sound. On the bright side, mecanim has seen a lot more updates than shuriken so part of me is trying to stay positive.

    With Shuriken I admit I am already depressed. Since its introduction we had a couple of improvements and features but still not much is being exposed for scripting which is what would be needed to be able to phase out legacy particles.
     
  6. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    I agree. I would love to further it's usability but having the ability for the array of Particle[] to easily select a cell to display and animate for instance. Currently, I resort to terrible hacks.
     
  7. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    Well, on the positive side, Mecanim is a unique strength of Unity where Shuriken is not. Every engine has particles and, like hippo says, since we've got access to the raw particle array there's really little we can't do if we really want to. Not everyone has a character animation system as powerful and straightforward as Mecanim can probably become, though, so it could be that Unity are doing the logical thing and focusing on their strengths.
     
  8. ShuuGames

    ShuuGames

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    Thanks for taking some worries away, since I going to rely on the legacy animations for for now.

    Isn't that so that Mecanim was a completely separate projects unrelated to Unity. After Unity took them under their care all the Mecanim devs went to work for Unity, or was it so that Unity just bought up the technology, but the original devs went on to make some next big thing?

    Was Shuriken developed for Unity or was it a separate thing too at first?
     
  9. Alf203

    Alf203

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    It was a separate product. Unity thought it was a good idea to have this technology in its engine, so they made a deal with them. They bought it and integrated mecanim into the engine. The three guys that made mecanim have been working at Unity ever since.

    As for shuriken it was developed for Unity.
     
  10. ShuuGames

    ShuuGames

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    Then there is hope.