Search Unity

  1. Megacity Metro Demo now available. Download now.
    Dismiss Notice
  2. Unity support for visionOS is now available. Learn more in our blog post.
    Dismiss Notice

Retargeting animations with different bipeds on one character

Discussion in 'Animation' started by toddw, Feb 19, 2015.

  1. toddw

    toddw

    Joined:
    May 9, 2010
    Posts:
    129
    Hi,

    Since I'm not an artist and don't have a budget for one, I've been buying animations from various sources such as 3DRT.com, Mixamo and the asset store. None of these sources have all of the animations I need but when combined I'm able to obtain most of what I need.

    The problem I'm running in to now is that the .fbx models with baked animations from 3DRT.com have extra bones in the biped as opposed to the Mixamo animations. Upon attempting to re-target animations from either source to work on the same character, I have to import the rig with "Copy From Other Avatar" in order to drop the combined animation clips into the Animation Controller. When I do this, the clips from one of the files will work and the rest just freeze or look weird when I play them.

    I have read Unity's documentation about this limitation in Mechanim and would just like to know if there is a tool or utility out there that can rip animation keyframes off of an fbx and assign them to a biped. I own Poser Pro 2014 Game Dev and have the latest copy of Blender but I can't seem to find a way to do this.

    Thanks in advance!
     
  2. Jself

    Jself

    Joined:
    May 29, 2014
    Posts:
    56
    It sounds like you have a avatar conflict with the skeleton bone count not matching up with model file.

    Meaning you have 32 bones in the character models skeleton export and 45 bones in the animation files. This can be bad. Or the hierarchy of the skeletons don't match up. I can't really say for sure. But those would be the two things I would check if i ran into this problem.

    If you have a rig that you want to use primary, like the Mixamo rig with the least bone count. Then I would take the 3DRT rig and make the bones that are available the same naming convention as the Mixamo rig. With FBX in 3dsmax. You can import the FBX animation and choose to either add, update the animation, or update the animation with the imported FBX. So as long as the bones are named the same, Mixamo rig shouldn't know any better and update it's animation with the 3DRT rig. It just won't retain the extra bone information from the 3DRT rig. You will need to make sure the skeleton hierarchy is consistent between the 2 rigs. I'm not sure if this being inconsistent will be problematic.

    I don't know though. That is what I gathered from your description.
     
  3. toddw

    toddw

    Joined:
    May 9, 2010
    Posts:
    129
    Yup, you nailed it, that's exactly the issue. Both the hierarchy and the bone count are different. The strange thing is that when I import the fbx into max I can't seem to access the existing biped. I can see the physique modifier which shows something similar but i'm unable get the biped to show up and so I can't change the hierarchy or node names. I'm a noob with max so i'm guessing it's probably some thing simple but I haven't figured it out as of yet...
     
  4. Jself

    Jself

    Joined:
    May 29, 2014
    Posts:
    56
    You can try and right click on any part of the view port and "unhide all" see if that reveals the bones.

    Also. Try going to your display tab and make sure all "hide by category" selections are unchecked.

    My last suggestion. Would be to open your "select by name" window and see if there are extra joints in there, and they are just really small.

    Also. When you say "Biped". Are you talking about a character studio rig? Or a character that is bipedal, rather than quadrupedal?
     
  5. toddw

    toddw

    Joined:
    May 9, 2010
    Posts:
    129
    That was it, right click then unhide all exposed the biped.

    Also, select by name exposed the bones as well so now I can rename them to match the mixamo / poser bipeds.

    Sorry, as I said I'm not well versed in 3D modeling / animation, so I use the term biped to describe the skeleton you attach to a mesh to animate it.

    Thanks so much for your help!
     
  6. toddw

    toddw

    Joined:
    May 9, 2010
    Posts:
    129
    That did the trick, all I had to do was rename the bones in the 3DR fbx file to match the bones in the Mixamo file and now my animations are running perfectly. Thanks again!
     
    theANMATOR2b and Jself like this.