What "copy from other avatar" is?

Hi all,

As the title suggests, I wish to know what the purpose of it.

 

Docs are pretty straight forward.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/FBXImporter-Rig.html
Used when you are using custom and mocap animations on a custom humanoid or generic character. Associating the anim to use avatar definition of the custom character (in my mind) speeds up the process of having to configure the avatar to match the humanoid character avatar. Since spine bones can be numerous or only two spine bones, hands and feet and head can all be slightly different, having to go into the configure mapping every time when importing an animation would be redundant and time consuming.

It is also probably useful with generic rig setup with bones that do not match the humanoid structure.

 

Thank you! Clear .

 

I think I understand generally how this works, but I've got a specific question/use case:

The project I'm working with has a Main textured, rigged, material embedded FBX that is used for rendering the character in the scene. I'll call this "MainChar.fbx"

In another "Animations" folder, we have all animations ( ex. "SomeAnim.fbx") for that character. These animations are setup to clone the Avatar from the above "MainChar.fbx".

It would be convenient for me to remove the association (Switch everything to "create from this model") to the main FBX avatar, since all these animations are going into a submodule that we're using to keep animations in one place.

So, what changes would this cause?
- Would "Create from this model" break any animations? I've run some tests with single animations and they appear identical.
- I know "Create from this model" would create a lot of redundant avatars, but since the generated animation clips will be the only things loaded at runtime I'm okay with this.

If anyone has some more experience with how unity handles this, I'd appreciate the input!