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

Should Mechinim be used for all characters on screen?

Discussion in 'Animation' started by 3, Sep 29, 2013.

  1. 3

    3

    Joined:
    Sep 16, 2012
    Posts:
    387
    I was wondering if this would slow the game down too much, should you just make every character onscreen use mechinim? Or just have the player and inportant chararacters use it, and just use legacy animations for the others.

    Also, is it possible to use motion capture data with the normal (command 6 one) animation system? Or do you have to use mechanim to import a humaniod's animation?

    And is AI with mechanim even possible?

    Thanks,
     
    Last edited: Sep 29, 2013
  2. TonyLi

    TonyLi

    Joined:
    Apr 10, 2012
    Posts:
    12,670
    As always, it depends. :)

    However, the Mecanim developers reached their goal of animating 1,000 characters at 30fps on a standard laptop. Especially if you're using blend trees, Mecanim is much more efficient than legacy (command 6). Only in some specific cases is legacy faster.

    You can use mocap in either system. In legacy, the animation data needs to match the characters' skeleton, though. Legacy can't retarget animations to characters with different skeletons. In other words, you can't download Unity's Raw Mocap for Mecanim and apply it to any legacy model. The model's skeleton would have to match the mocap data's skeleton.

    AI is separate from animation, although they're closely linked. Animation is one of the only ways that a character can express AI. But, since they're separate, you can implement AI with any animation system.