What is the Animator CrossFade "normalizedTransitionTime"?

Hi.
What really is the "normalizedTransitionTime" parameter in CrossFade and CrossFadeInFixedTime?
Is it the exit time?

 

same question ...

 

Unity doc about Animator.CrossFade is unclear and confused ...

my guess:

Animator.CrossFade(int stateHashName, float normalizedTransitionDuration, int layer, float normalizedTimeOffset, float normalizedTransitionTime);

- normalizedTransitionDuration : normalized transition duration refer to current state
- normalizedTimeOffset : normalized transition offset refer to current state
- normalizedTransitionTime: normalized transition offset refer to target state

 

I reported the issues with those documentation pages a few years ago and I'm entirely unsurprised to see that they have still done absolutely nothing about it.

 

2021/11/27

 

17/06/2022

 

2022-10-02

 

hi, how can control TransitionTime? myskateboard

 

Define control. What are you trying to do?

 

2022-10-05

 

2022-12-02

 

It's super clear! It's the time of the transition, but normalized! Duh!

This is what you get if you let Doxygen generate you documentation.

 

Look at these functions. they have two parameters:
normalizedTransitionDuration: The duration of the transition (normalized).
normalizedTransitionTime: The time of the transition (normalized).

I am not sure what the different between them.

 

Haha, this is just so typical for the Animator.

"Normalized time" should just mean the duration expressed as a value between 0 and 1 - 0 is the start, 1 is the end. We use that all the time in our own animation system - asking for the current normalized time of an animation is pretty common in order to use as input to lerp functions or whatever.

So normalized time offset for a cross fade makes a lot of sense - CrossFade with a .2 normalized duration would mean "the cross fade should take 20% of the duration of the animation to finish". Same for offset - how far into the animation do you want to crossfade?

The only problem is... which animation? Is the normalized duration expressed as a normalized part of the source animation, or the destination animation?

If you think about it, it can't really be the source animation, because Mecanim doesn't really have a concept of a source animation, or the "current animation" to blend from. What you're CrossFading from is the current blend of the animation graph, which can be any arbitrary blend of any number of animations. So the only sensible thing to use the normalized duration of is the destination state, because that's the only thing that's clearly defined!


So, hey, I understood how this works after thinking about it because I've built an animation system. That's not going to be the case for the average reader of the Animator docs!


@ChinnyBJ, Mecanim has been poorly documented for years. Every droplet of information about why something does what it does has required, if not a battle, then at least a skirmish with either bug reports or forum nagging before it's available.

So big questions going forwards is;
- Are you aware, internally, that the documentation is in fact lackluster?
- Do you know why it's like this? What went wrong over the years for the API docs to end up where it is?
- Are there plans in place for the new animation system to ensure that this doesn't happen again?