Tail Animator - Procedural tail animation for tentacles, simple capes, squids and more!

Tail Animator is package with components which are animating bones
(also it can be just transforms) in smooth slithering style.

Lots of possibilities, few my ideas included in demo scene

Features:
- Quick setup: Add component to start tail bone and hit play
- Interactive demo scene
- Works on all kinds of skeletons and on basic transforms
- Many parameters helping fixing wrong rotations in bones
- Full source code included with detailed commentary

> Asset Store Link <

There are coming up new cool features in next updates, stay tuned!

Release Video
Playing with parameters video
Support for fixing rotations video

Tutorial video with building flying tentacle monster using Tail Animator:

Be sure to share your creations using this component. I would love to see it!

 

Watching some of the animations in the second video (the "performance test" one), it seems that if one made an invisible tentacle, with only the last bone having a visible mesh, you might get a credible "school of fish" animation by moving the group the way you do. It might also work, and would have twice the fish for the same performance, to sneak in an extra fish object at a middle bone of each tentacle, or maybe 2/3 of the way down the chain.

This is the kind of asset that is going to absolutely glow with performance when the new Unity Job System and Entity Component System move to production readiness, if you make a version in that mode.

 

Yeah that's cool idea, probably will make examples of this, also I have in mind making it with ECS.
There will be updates enhancing package with such things

 

Bought! I'm working on a game that just so happens to have capes, tails, and tentacles! The videos look quite impressive!

 

Whoa! Cool, hope you'll find this package very useful
Probably today I will submit update to version 1.1 (price will go up)
There will be examples for animating UI elements, 2D sprites, better inspector and school of fish example

 

@FimpossibleGames , I've run into a problem. I copied the cape from the demo scene to make a cape for my player character. When the character is falling and the cape flips straight-up in the air, it does a quick, 360 degree twist around the y axis. Could this be a rotation-related bug?

This only happens when "use waving" is checked, but the waving axis is set to (1,0,0).

 

Can you PM me gif with it? Maybe I will need to reproduce it and check what's going on to fix it.

 

If someone had troubles with strangely rotated tail after adding component, solution is coming in version 1.1.1 (currently waiting for approval for 1.1.0)

There I explain why it was a case and demonstrating fixing feature:
THERE WAS VIDEO - NOT NEEDED ANYMORE

 

Just got this, looks perfect for my game -- only to find the tail on my animal is on wrong axis, so very eagerly awaiting the fix!

 

Ough I just was sitting whole day and it's after midnight in my country but I think I've just made fix for all troubles with this rotations. Now I was truggling with blender specification which is talented to make things hard to solve, it was very challenging and hard to figure but now everything should look right event tail have strange roll rotations between bones :O This thing will be in V1.1.2 (V.1.1.1 also will have some fixing functions but V1.1.2 will have it more universal)

 

New version is LIVE!
Suprisingly it automatically pop out version 1.1.2 ignoring 1.1.1 and some hotfixes

Here short video showing main new features:

Changelog (since V1.0.1):

- Added new examples and components to animate transforms with tail animator in 2D space- UI and Sprites
- Now you can put one transform to bones list and it will be root bone, so you can have component attached to much other object than tail bone
- Custom inspector to see all parameters more clear
- New example scenes
- School of fish example scene
- Added "Automatic" tuning option for fixing orientation axes automatically by default


Now I am working on tutorial video of making simple 3D model in blender and building tentacle monster out of it, pretty simple but there will be some useful tips.

You can check if this version will do job for you, there still can be something wrong, it depending on some modelling softwares specifications, export settings etc. I am not able right now to get from somewhere all kinds of this things to test, but this ones I checked now, which wasn't working before now behaves correctly.

When I will have some less intense days I planning to set up my mind hard as hell and then try to make totally universal solution for this thing (don't know yet if it's possible, this kind of animation is using some logics which makes some things really hard to solve)

 

I found all assets of this publisher interesting, so I put them into my cart, total price was 12$, and then I checkout ... wtf the price went up from 12$ to 24$ @.@ What happened in the time I check some other assets lol?
Maybe today is not my lucky day. Let's wait to Christmas madness sale lol.

 

Whoa unfortunately indeed (you made me sad man :O ), today was day of rising prices, my current approach was to make my assets lower price at release days then bumping up after week.
Wishing you'll be able check them out soon

 

The ECS thing sounds nice. Don't forget you can now talk to animator in at a lower level if you need to as well.

 

I've recorded small tutorial video of making simple model in blender then adding to it Tail Animator and building flying tentacle monster, check it out

 

What happened with the price? Yesterday I found this asset, thought it'd be cheap enough for toying around, although I don't need it. I wanted to check your other assets out more and get this one today, but now it's twice that amount. The introductory price didn't even last a week. That's sad, but too much for just toying around.

It would have been good if you would have stated how long the introduction sale was going on.

 

Please support 2D; Im doing an anime fighter and i need 2d whiskers, fur, tails, tree roots etc.. ..I saw a bit about 2d and I had my wallet out ready to buy but the video said to encourage the idea to make it a reality, add 2d and ill buy 2

Id use it with a puppet2d rig when rendering animated characters for spritesheet animations

 

It's supporting 2D since yesterday
Check v1.1 release video:

I want admit that this is young feature, I would need some 2D ideas and assets to check if it always work as expected. (I'm not experienced in Unity's 2D)
If you buy feel free to pm/mail me, I will be happy to cooperate and even extend components for your needs, just need to know what crazy things do you want to archieve in 2D

 

got the update and set up Tail Animator Simple on my animal...but now the tail is flattened. Any suggestions?

 

Does the animal have animator? TailAnimator_Simple is for not animated objects, Tail_Mecanim and Tail_MecanimBones are for animated ones (gonna make this things more clear in V1.2.0)

Now I am working on other solution for some math in algorithm for this component, making it more universal in terms of skeletons made in very different ways.
Also working on component which will skin static meshes easily inside unity and create skinned ones.

Edit:
In V1.2.1 "Full Correction" is doing the trick

 

Oh, I see. Some documentation would be helpful :/

But we're using Legacy animations, not Mecanim. Can we use Tail Animator at all then?

 

There is some info in readme file
Legacy should not be a difference here, but I was testing only few models on legacy animation.

Just attached to one:
https://imgur.com/a/8IxzFlS

You can PM/Mail me if you will need more help

 

So turns out the problem was that I had put the Tail script on one bone too high in the hierarchy -- when I put it on the next bone down along the tail, then it doesn't flatten the tail. However, now the tail-waving doesn't look quite right, since it starts out from the body rather than right where the tail meets the body (that's the bone that flattens the tail). I guess that's just a quirk of my model/rig, nothing that the Tail Animator can do? Or can I adjust this?

 

Yeah parent bone of first tail bone in rigs is often in totally different rotation.
There are some variables for adjusting this things, check this video:

For quick you can check "Reset Tail Forwards" toggle in Adjust Tab and Tail Rotation Offset in Waving options tab

 

Thanks. Reset Tail Forward didn't seem to do anything. I tried various values in Tail Rotation Offset but those didn't help either. How do those work, exactly?

 

Reset forwards changing things only when component starts, changing it in playmode will do nothing, rotation offset just rotates first bone You can pm me your model (or just skeleton), so I can diagnose what is wrong, then make sure next version will easily match up to skeletons like yours.

EDIT:
DURING 31.07 TO 07.08 I WILL BE ON HOLIDAYS, SO BE PATIENT IF I DON'T RESPOND IN THIS TIME

 

Your solution is very interesting. I wonder if it uses GPU instancing could it be optimized enough to be used for grass in a large field. Something like this with or without player interaction:

Because if it does then that opens the door to much greater things since it's a full 3d object, can benefit from dynamic batching and will easily apply 3d effects like AO and look great thanks to translucency and materials from shaders because it's real grass.

 

With GPU instancing and ECS it probably can get higher performance, but don't think it will be so high to make whole field of single blades of grass with it.
One thing is skinned mesh renderers are kinda expensive, second - there is some cheap math calculations but number of them with so big field can become problematic.
But who knows when I was testing current state I was surprised anyway

 

There is new cool update! V1.2.0

Many things are improved, more intuitive and some new features.
Some components changed names so I recommend to remove previous version before updating, importer was keeping old names when I was trying to update over previous version.

Check update video

 

Updated to version 1.2.1

Upgraded logics of option "Auto go through all bones" and renamed to "Full Correction"
Now it will calculate correction for each bone individually, makes it match initial pose at lazy state.
Also added new option "Animate Corrections" which is matching keyframed animation's rotations, it's visible when you toggle "Full correction".

Also price went down to 12$
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/animation/tail-animator-121819

 

By the way, the new update that you released, just happened to fix that problem that I reported back in July. Sorry I never got around to sending that repro project.

 

Good to hear Update brought many positive changes to the package.

I also created user manual, but few features described here will be in v1.2.2 which will be released very soon.
New User Manual

 

And version 1.2.2 is here:

> Asset Store Link <

 

@FimpossibleGam

Hi, been looking around for an asset to make my model's hair and cloths move naturally, I happen to stumble upon your asset and I'm very impressed with it, I went to your youtube channel to check out if you have some tutorial for adding it to hair and cloth but unfortunately you have none. Any chance you be making a tutorial or adding a sample in your asset about hair and cloth? I really like almost all of your asset really interested of buying it later. But for now I need something to work on my model's hair and cloth.

 

Hi, thanks for question, It depends what kind of hair and cloth you talking about.
Shape, bones structure, or on what kind of model it will be is making big difference, can you give me some example what would you like to archieve and on what kind of models?

 

Something like this for the hair

This asset has been deprecated,

For the cloth

 

It's very complex and dedicated behaviour for such stuff, you could get some hair and cloth animation with Tail Animator but it would look much simplier and less detailed. So when you are looking for super precise animation for this stuff, I recommend trying to find component more capable for this physics

 

Ok, I don't really need a super detailed one for my model for now, just enough to show a bit of motion will be ok. I be really interested of buying your asset if you provide a sample in the asset and tutorial as well

 

Good subject for new tutorial, I'll try to find or create some models to do this things and see how it goes

 

Awesome, there has been not much topic on the subject lately for hair and cloth that uses a new unity asset. Thank you for your quick reply.

 

Check this video for small preview of what I had in mind:

Also there is another newest update report, tail animator now have experimental colliders feature:

 

I bought a bunch of your assets recently. I am confused as to the difference between this asset-Tail Animator and the Spine Animator they seem very similar.

 

Thanks for supporting my work
It can seems like that at first but after few uses you will see they're designed for much different purposes.
You can't get some effects with tail animator like with spine animator and vice versa.

Tail Animator as name is calling is designed for tails, tentacles, but also can be used on cloth, hair, limbs etc.
Spine Animator can be used on tails and tentacles, but it is not purpose of this asset and sometimes it can be problematic to set it up for tail and also animation motion will be different, less smooth and less elastic - more follow like. You can't use spine animator on cloth / hair and it will not work on vertical bones chain like Tail Animator.
Spine Animator also is keeping keyframed animation motion of your model intact and just adding own rotations etc. to make spine motion looks just right.
Tail Animator isn't keeping keyframed animation motion intact, when you enable "connect with animator" it's keeping it but only partially and in more "elastic" way, animations will look different more like smoothed.
Besides that with this animator you have more tweaking options to change shape of tail,
experimental collision feature and others and Tail Animator have smaller load on cpu.
Another thing for Spine Animator it have feature to use reversed follow chain ("last bone leading" toggle) making spine follow animation possible for many skeleton rigs (most of rigs are using this hierarchy structure for spines, but not all).
So there is a bunch of things which making difference between this two.

Hope this short explanation will clear up stuff for some people

 

That's looking really good. Your assets are very amazing. So it comes with the character controller and walking on hills and walls too demos? Because those alone are very useful.

 

Yes in every package there are many demo scenes with different character models, you can use package preview to check what scenes are included:



There is simple character movement script attached to example characters, but it should be no trouble implement script for custom models and movement because spine animator do many stuff by itself.

 

Thanks, wow I can't wait to showcase what I make (It might be a while because I got lot of client work but once those are done it's going to be very fun ride).

 

One other thing I noticed is it seems you kind of have an Auto-Rigger?
In the video where you created bones for the waving plant....
Does that tool allow me to setup bones for a character and autoweight them etc?

 

It's pretty simple tool, designed to rig only simple single tail-like meshes in unity, no branching.
It creates skinned mesh renderer with bones and weights defined by variables (you can check it on preview mesh).

 

I think there might be a market for an Auto-Rigger if you are interested.
I just purhased UMotion and it's a full suite of tools to animate anything but it requires a rigged model
and I honestly don't want to purchase PuppetMaster3D-the reviews seem not so confident and I would rather not leave Unity to go to blender if possible.

I wonder if you have plans to make an auto-rigger where you can bring in a mesh like a person and then just click on the points to make the bones and then it will do all the math or maybe it's not something you are interested in?

 

This thing is possible to make, but it can be very complicated and probably will need a lot of time to make it work correct.
Maybe I will try to create such tool, but now I have many ideas for other further packages so idea for automatic rigging will have low priority.