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Pose-Based Animation

Discussion in 'Animation' started by IntelligentDesign, Mar 2, 2018.

  1. IntelligentDesign

    IntelligentDesign

    Joined:
    Jun 13, 2014
    Posts:
    51
    So I'd like to recreate the techniques discussed in this video (a GDC 2014 discussion on procedural animation) in Unity - specifically, rather than importing full animations into Unity I'd like to import a small number of pose keyframes and let Unity handle interpolation for me. However, everything I've read seems to indicate that while you can add keyframes to an existing animation there is no way to drag specific poses into an animation timeline to act as keyframes.

    I'm hoping someone more experienced with Unity's animation toolset might be able to explain how I could accomplish this.
     
  2. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

    Joined:
    Jul 12, 2014
    Posts:
    7,790
    Wolfire wrote a complete custom animation system for that game - so if you want to recreate that - gotta write the system. :) There is more details related to that system - because he rewrote it 3 times - on there development blog.

    With Unitys default mecanim system - theoretically you could do this. Each animation would have to be the same pose for the length of the animation you'd want to transition to last - to/from pose to pose + one extra keyframe long.
    Then set up the transitions to be the amount of time you'd want it to take from one pose to the next.
    It would most likely look terrible - because mecanim is not set up for that type of animation.

    Alternately you could create one pose, with all bones keyed on one keyframe, define each animation as only lasting one keyframe in Unity, then use code (crossfade) to transition between each defined animation. I don't know how that would look - probably similar to the transitions created in the Unity interface.

    Another test - create all poses as stated above - place them all in blendshapes and trigger the transitions via code. IDK if that would result in anything useful or not - doesn't seem like it would.
     
  3. Kushovu

    Kushovu

    Joined:
    May 26, 2018
    Posts:
    12
    Ohh that cleared me out a lot of things! thanks @theANMATOR2b

    So if i should stop trying to figure out how to make this workflow on unity? maybe something close to it?