Playing root motion from current position

I am having problems with the timeline.

No matter what I do, the clips always play from 000. I have tried resetting the offsets, which is fine but the first clip in the track always plays from 000. If I reset its offset, it starts from where I want.

What I want to know is how do I play a timeline asset from the current objects location as offsets?

No matter what I do including resetting offsets, the timeline always plays from where the object was at the first frame in the clip. I am using FBX clips just like you would normally use in mecanim.

Is this a bug or is there something I can do? What is the workflow for this?

Example:

I have a unit that can move from its current tile , in 4 directions. I have 4 timeline animations for this. But I would like to use these 4 animations for animating the object moving from any tile, rather than having to make a timeline per position.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!


EDIT: I am aware of track offsets, but wouldnt using them mean I would have to make an animation per tile? I had thought timeline could be used for more than just in-place cutscenes?

 

I don't believe timeline is the right tool for what you're trying to achieve. You should work with mecanim statemachine that handles root motion.

I believe timeline is more a "cinematic" kinda asset.

Anyway another subject on root motion : https://forum.unity.com/threads/timeline-root-motion.477095/#post-3281730

 

Thing is, I have watched very video and conference and the amount of "this can do gameplay" type talk from Unity and "this superseeds mecanim" makes it sound like it can do more.

Im already able to do all this with mecanim but I assumed timeline would be able to handle both mecanim use cases and cinematic use cases.

Unity should watch the kind of language they use when showing off features.

 

I'd like it to be this way as well but in my testing it seems way to early. Though it seems to add a lot of possibility, for now everything is a bit clumsy and lots of features are missing, like reverse animations, events, proper root motion handling, smooth transitions between timelines, making it difficult to handle for now.

 

I managed to get this working by making a script that rebinds the bindings on timeline clips but in general it is just as encumbering as mecanim and therefore makes no point.

I was hoping to be able to reduce the amount of code needed to produce decent blendable animations for my characters, while also being able to model interactions between 2 or more entities (such as a sword hitting an enemy, having that enemy react to impact + play sfx at right time) and then rebind those entities at runtime to get generic animations.

It seems this could be possible in the future and even is what unity wanted based on what they said, so hopefully it will change soon to be able to handle this so we dont end up with 3 animation systems, standard, mecanim and timeline :/ Be nice for them all to roll into one complete animation solution.

 

I stepped away from timeline for a good half a year, any update on how to do this now in 2018.1 or 2018.2?