Question Using Animation Rigging components to assist in making animation clips

For some of my animations, I don't need anything dynamic. I just want to make some animation clips, using some conveniences like IK and finger rotation so that I don't need everything to be so manual. My plan had been to use Animation Rigging components only while creating these animations, such that the animation clips contained the specific bone position and rotation values that result from using the AR components. When I'm done, I'll disable the AR component, and just animate the properties I've recorded.

For example, I wanted to record the movement of the IK target, such that the animation clip contained the bone rotations. However, instead, all I get in the animation clip are the changes to the target, since that's the only thing I'm manually moving:



From there, in order to get keyframes for the actual bones, it seems the easiest approach is to multi-select the properties, right-clip, and add a keyframe:



That's not the end of the world, but it's fairly tedious, especially when you start considering all the finger joints. I was wondering if there was a simpler approach to capturing the values that are changing?

 

I totally agree that's one of the missing features in the animation panel.

 

Try the preview package of Unity Recorder.
Have used it to record animation clips in combination with the animation rigging package.
Just drop the GameObject you want to record and make sure to check 'Record Hierarchy'
It then sets keyframes for all of GameObjects child transforms. Its so sweet

 

Thanks. I'll definitely take a look. I thought that package was just for generating video files. I didn't know it generated anim files too.

 

Check this out:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c...g@1.0/manual/BidirectionalMotionTransfer.html
I haven't used the feature extensively yet but it works very well from my tests. Bake keys from your IK effectors to your final deformation rig and back again if you need to continue tweaking.

 

I got back to this today to try some things out.

Unfortunately, using the Unity Recorder package didn't seem to work. It generated an animation clip. However, instead of capturing the effective positions and rotations of the IK bones, it merely recorded the IK target and hint bone positions and rotations. The resulting clip still required the Rig to be running for the animation to play properly.

Also unfortunately, it looks like Bidirectional Motion is only available starting in version 0.3 of the Animation Rigging package. I'm stuck on 0.2, since I'm using Unity 2019.4 LTS, and I don't have the option to upgrade. However, it wasn't clear to me that Bidirectional Motion was the right thing for essentially exporting a whole animation clip. It seemed more like it was for one-off frames. But since I don't have the option of using it, I haven't tried it yet.

 

Try to drop only the Transform containing the bone hierarchy in the Recorder slot ie: the hips bone transform.