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Riggin' or animating a mesh?

Discussion in 'Animation' started by Daitli, Mar 2, 2015.

  1. Daitli

    Daitli

    Joined:
    Oct 3, 2014
    Posts:
    5
    Hello Unity users,
    I got a quick question, when it comes to creating a player character, I was wondering if I should rig it or just animate the mesh and import the animations instead, since I will have only a few animations. Will this cause any problems in the future? The fact that I am using a mesh with animations? Like I said I will be using around 5 to 10 animations for the Player's character only.

    Another quick question, pizza or hamburgers?
     
  2. RichardKain

    RichardKain

    Joined:
    Oct 1, 2012
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    1,261
    Rigging is going to save you some significant resources as opposed to exporting frames as blend-shapes. While the blend-shape approach is a possibility with the current version of Unity, it isn't really recommended for general character animations. Blend shapes tend to take up a significant amount of memory, and using them for key-frames will bloat your models in terms of their memory footprint.

    With rigging, the skeleton itself takes up very little memory, and the animations are just a bare-bones record of different transformations applied to the skeleton. It's much more memory efficient, and will result in a substantially smaller 3D model file.

    Baked animations are best used for things that are just much harder to do with skeletal rigged animations. I commonly use them for facial animations, though even some of those I might opt to do with rigged bones, depending on the case.
     
  3. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    Hey @RichardKain - thanks for the reply. I was going to reply earlier - basically the same answer you gave, but I thought possibly LedSanh isn't deforming the mesh but may be simply moving (maybe rotating) an object, and I second guessed myself about a non-deforming mesh animation.
    Does your answer still stand true if an object is just moved and rotated? Does the export still treat this as a vertex based animation (blend-shape).
    Would it be better to rig the object to just one bone - and animated the bone for movement/animation purposes?
    Could a null object simply be the parent of the non-deforming mesh and be moved/rotated controlling the position/rotation of the non-deforming mesh, or would this still be considered a vertex based animation?

    Thanks for clearing up the question and answer.
     
  4. RichardKain

    RichardKain

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    I'm not quite certain how an external 3D editor would handle animations for an object that was just being rotated and transformed around. Presumably this wouldn't take up much space. But I do have to wonder why you would bother animating things like that in an external 3D editor, when you could just create the same animations in Unity itself.

    Unity has tons of tools and windows for creating simple object-based animations within Unity. There's no need to do those sorts of animations in 3D Studio, or Maya, or Blender. Just get your models into Unity itself and handle basic object animations right in the engine. You can even use empty-object hierarchies to move pivot points and such wherever you like.
     
    theANMATOR2b likes this.
  5. shaderop

    shaderop

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    How would you go about doing any substantial animation work without rigging in the first place?
     
  6. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    Excellent point RichardKain. Based upon the question it's obvious I mainly deal with rigged characters.
    @shaderop - I basically agree with your statement but the key word is substantial which maybe should be substantial organic animations. All 3D authoring packages can perform substantial animation work without rigging. The software is only a tool to get the job done - there's a great deal of animations that can be accomplished by a competent artist without rigging (bones & skin). Any rigid character such as a robot character doesn't require bones or skin to create a believable animation. Similarly most mechanical animations would find limitations if performing animations using bones and skin. Mechanical animations do use a lot of animation controllers and constraints but this isn't considered rigging and would need to be baked upon export.
    Simple rigid object based animations would best be created within Unity as RichardKain suggested.
     
  7. shaderop

    shaderop

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    I dispute your definition of "rigging" as just "animation with bones and skinning." Maybe that's the formal definition of the term (which would be news to me), but I have never seen it used so narrowly in practice. Instead it's always used to refer to the process of creating the control rig that enables animators to do what they need to do. Whether it's car that needs to bank and follow terrain or a 44-legged centipede, the twiddly nobs that control the animation are always referred to as "the rig" and the process as rigging.

    And depending on the tool you're using, which would be Blender in my case, the limitations of the animation system necessitate using bones for animation even if it's just for simple rotation, scaling, and translation. So there always going be a "rig" in there somewhere.
     
  8. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    I agree with your definition of a rig or rigging.
    But when the end result is Unity - all that extra stuff used to control the hierarchy doesn't matter, whether the hierarchy is an organic character with bones and skin, or an inorganic character/mechanical component parented together without bones. Unity doesn't care if you animated a facial pose by a control rig dial/slider/manipulator or by keying the actual bone/skinned node in the face. All Unity understands/reads is if there's a skin and bones to control that skin, or if there is animation data and no bones/skin, it reads the vertex xyz position data.

    I use Max, and in Max and Maya and I thought every other 3D authoring package, bones or a hierarchy aren't needed to animate an object. You just click the animate button, move the time slider, edit the object and animation keys are created for that object. I find it hard to believe Blender requires bones to animate the translation or rotation of a simple cube or sphere object without requiring bones/skin/rig to be created. That seems like a counter-productive limitation if that's actually the case for Blender.
     
  9. ThmYgx

    ThmYgx

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    Mar 31, 2015
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    7
    This is a good point. But it is not the most effective solution, considering the most recent developments.

    For 3D facial animation in Unity3D, you are able to get professional-quality models and their animation done completely within Unity, without spending a lot of time in rigging or creating blending shapes, and without worrying if the end-result will work in Unity.

    This thread in Unity forum will tell you how. It blows my mind away that one can save so much time and cost.
     
    Last edited: May 31, 2017