UMotion Pro vs Very Animation: The fight of the best Humanoid Animation Editor of Unity

Hello Everyone,
I have been using UMotion Pro and Very Animation for some times now. Both has their advantages and disadvantages. In this post I wanted to share their differences so anyone thinking of purchasing either of it, can make a better decision.

Please note that I am in talk with both of the developers. They are both very helpful and constantly updating the assets with feedback from users. So some points mentioned here would not be applicable later on as they add more features.

So with that said, let's get started.


Workflow
The biggest difference between these two assets is their workflow. UMotion Pro works by creating a separate project for you animations. This project will be inside your own Unity project and within their own editor window called "Clip Editor". This helps a lot as you have a non-destructive workflow. You can create an animation inside their window and export it to your preferred folder. If you don't like something you can tweak the animation and export it again. All of these editing is also within Unity. You can see all the changes in the "Scene View" so that also means less chance of having any issue with it.


(UMPro allows you to create project instead of directly allowing you to edit an animation clip)

Very Animation on the other hand has a very direct workflow. You want to edit an animation you select the animation on the animation window and press edit to instantly go into edit mode to tweak. All changes are done on the animation file it self. So if you go past the Undo limit, you can't change it back. Of course you can always create a backup animation first and then start tweaking the original one.

To me, both ways has it's use cases. If I just want to tweak a single part of the animation, I prefer VA otherwise I always open it in UMPro.



Editor Window
Another big difference in these assets are it's choice of editor window. VA uses Unity's default animation window for allowing it's user to edit the animation. And UMPro on the other hand created a separate animation window for it's use which works almost similarly as Unity animation window. Again both has it's pros and cons here. VA using default animation window, means it is more familiar with the user. All the keyboard shortcut and default functionality just works here. But this means it also faces some of the issues as the default editor window without any way to overcome it. For instance. If you select a bone in the character, it will be selected in the animation window but you would manually have to scroll to the bone in the animation window to see it. UMPro can simply scroll you to the field for ease of use. But the biggest advantage of UMPro here is that, it can choose what field to show in the animation window which VA can't. In VA you will see all the unnecessary field such as eye, mouth, twist left-right etc. And I really mean a lot of unnecessary field. You will not be editing all these field and it will hamper your workflow. Finding the correct field becomes a chore. Specially since they are not places sequentially. You can find a leg bone field just in between hand related field. In VA you will almost always want to select a bone of the character in the scene view than in the animation window. However UMPro having their own animation window makes this much much easier. There is only the important fields that you know you will have to edit. And it's all sorted properly. You will always find the root bone at top. And if you select one IK bone here, it will only select one bone in the animation window. On VA however if you select Leg IK bone, it will select multiple fields in the animation window, since Unity requires to move all those bone to actually have that IK movement properly reflected. UMPro does all these automatically for you when you export it's animation. So animating a character is a breeze in that application. This is where UMotion Pro really is a winner for me.


(VA's usage of default animation window with lots of unnecessary field and non-sequential fields)



FK to IK Conversion
When you import an animation into UMPro it can convert all the FK animation to IK. If you haven't realised it, it is a big blessing. Now you can just use IK to to tweak existing animation. Dont like how the leg looks in one keyframe, just delete that keyframe for that IK field. You don't have to mess around with bunch of animation field to edit your animation anymore. Please know that both asset has IK manipulation functionality. What I am talking about here is converting existing FK animation to IK for better ease of use. And this is only been possible since UMPro has decided to implement it's own "Editor Window". It adds all the FK field when you export that animation. Since VA uses the actual animation clip inside Unity's default animation window, It can't do such magic.



Preview Window
In both asset you can see and edit the animation inside Unity's scene view. VA however also has a separate preview window to see the animation. Seeing the animation without any clutter of scene view is incredibly helpful. You can also keep that animation in the preview window in loop while you tweak the animation. This preview window also shows the body orientation and root orientation just like how default Unity's clip inspector allows you to do that. If you are making a root motion animation you will definitely appreciate that.


(VA has a nice preview window (in bottom right) and it also has a bone selection window like the avatar mask)


Onion Skinning
VA has an onion skinning feature where you can see the ghost line of your next and previous few frames of the animation. This has been very helpful for me. I asked the developer of UMPro to add such feature, he says he wants to add it too but has no ETA for it at the moment.


Bone Selection Window
VA has a separate bone selection window which looks like an Avatar Mask window. This helps you to select a particular bone very easily. Without this window I find it very hard to select bone in VA as it's animation window is cluttered with unnecessary field.


Documentation
Both asset has good amount of video tutorial to teach you the basic. But I would say UMPro is much easy to learn due to a proper manual page and it's easy to understand video with audio. VA has all of it's video in Japanese subtitle with no audio and you would have to use Youtube's auto translation feature to understand what is going on. The developer also recommends that you turn on auto translation to understand the video. I so far haven't found it much difficult to learn the software due to the language barrier. But would really have preferred if the video were in english possibly with audio just like UMPro.


User Interface
In my opinion UMotion Pro overall has a much more user friendly polished UI compared with VA.


Root Motion Editing
Right now UMotion Pro does not have any mean to edit or create root motion curve ("Motion T" & "Motion Q" field inside animator property). This mean if I want to edit those fields, I have to export the animation from UMPro and open it in VA Editor. And since VA uses default unity animation window, I can click on "Add Property" button to add "Motion T" & "Motion Q" field and then edit those on the timeline. For those of who are wondering, these two fields allow you to have different root rotation and positing from your body. If you see blue and red arrow in animation clip inspector, blue is what the Motion curve represent. Or at least thats what I have come to find so far. Not many people need this, specially if your game does not deal with root motion. But I found it very necessary. I am in talk with the developer of UMPro and he told me that he will consider adding it after further investigation of it's use case. Which leads me to my last point support.


Support
Support is top notch with UMotion Pro. The developer always replies back(sometimes within few hours) and is eager to make changes to the software to improve it. I can clearly see this software getting better and better.

VA also has great support. I emailed the developer and he too is eager to fix all the issues I have mentioned to him. I however suspect that few of the things we talk about might get lost in translation. But overall I am very happy. As long as the developer is eager to listen and improve his asset, it will get better.



So there you have it folks. Pros and cons of the best animation editing software for Unity. I of course did not cover everything. Both of these assets has lots of other unique features. But I only mentioned those which i use regularly and found important in my workflow. If you know some other important features, please do write them down in the comment section.

And as for which asset to buy, that is entirely up to you. I found both asset to be helpful based on what I want to do. But I am more inclined on UMotionPro for my current workflow. As soon as it allows generating "Root Motion Curve", "Onion Skinning" and "Preview Window", this asset is all I will use for animating my character. But i'm also very happy with VA. Sometimes doing things raw inside Unity's editor window is just more convenient.


Thanks everyone for reading such a long post. This is my first post in Unity's forum where I am not asking for how to fix an error but instead sharing my own knowledge. This feels good

 

Thanks for the comparison. I own both assets but have only used Umotion so far. It makes it really easy to configure Mixamo animations for use in Unity.

I will try VA for tweaking an animation like you describe. I have a prone idle animation where I want to tilt the head back just a bit for all of the keyframes.

 

Really helpful. Thank you so much!

 

Great writeup.

Two things you could add:

• How do these internal workflows compare to using separate modelling applications like Blender/Max/Maya?
• You talked about editing existing animations, but what about creating new ones from scratch? Is there anything either plugin does particularly better than the other in that regard?

 

Which do you think is more intuitive for animation beginners? UMotion seems to have a lot of settings you can adjust, but a lot of it is jargon to me.

 

I worked only with blender few years ago for animating. UMotionPro seems more similar to that.

For creating animation from scratch both asset seems good to me. Cause that means VA has less field on the timeline in that case. So that means all the issues i have with it are mostly gone.

 

VeryAnimation is very straight forward. So that might be easier to grasp for beginners. But I would suggest UMotionPro. It might have more features, but you can just ignore those. It's timeline's user friendliness makes it seem worth it to me.

 

Thx for the comparison! Dont' know if you have tried this but one thing that seems to stand out from the different tutorial videos is editing multiple clips simulatneously in the editor. VA appears geared towards doing that and doing it well. I'm hoping to do some grappling animations such as overhead throws and such and VA seems geared to do that... Any idea about Umotion being able to animate two characters together at once???

 

Have you worked with the Unity package Animation Rigging? How is it compared to UMP and VA?