Unity character animations

[monkeyface]

I've tried dozens of different tools to retarget animations onto my characters and I've never found anything that can do the job as well as Unity.

With Unity, I find you can more or less import any character and with a few clicks you can make it into a humanoid and hundreds of animations will just work. 

The problem is, the Unity exporter for Bablyon doesn't seem to be able to export the retargeted animations. It looks to me like there is code to export animations already, but it doesn't handle the cases for the characterized animations:

 

 

As you can see from the image, we have data going through the pipeline for the animation of LeftFootT.x but the case statement doesn't handle that, so nothing is exported.

 

Is there a way to get the tool to be able to export character animations? Or is this something that is planned for the exporter in future?

 

Also, if anyone knows a way to retarget animations in a few clicks WITHOUT using Unity I'd love to know.

[gryff]

Also, if anyone knows a way to retarget animations in a few clicks WITHOUT using Unity I'd love to know.

 

Hi MF welcome to the BJS forum.

 

Well I use characters created with MakeHuman (using the gamerig), that are then imported into Blender.  The  MH people have created a plugin for Blender that allows importing and retargeting of BVH files to their rig. It works very well in my experience though I have only tried it with the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) free bvh files and a few other freebies I have picked up from the Internet over the years.

 

Here is an example : The Blue Lady

 

The importing of the BVH file with the MH plugin was quite easy - I spent more time cleaning up the file (CMU BVH files are recorded at 120fps) and then deciding which frames to actually use and looping it.

 

cheers, gryff

[monkeyface]

Thanks gryff! 

 

I have also used MakeHuman a lot and the MakeWalk tool works fairly well, but I've found it doesn't always get it quite right. There are often weird quirks and twists in the animation.

Also, I'm making an RPG and have a lot of animations I want to use, and a lot of different characters they need to be retargetted to as well,  so manually tweaking would just take too long. Unity can do in a few clicks what takes me weeks or even months to do manually. The problem is, they are then stuck inside Unity

 

I think the Babylon exporter is most of the way there in terms of being able to export those, I just don't know enough about the internals of either system to make it work myself

[GameMonetize]

Hello MonkeyFace, so far the Unity exporter does not export bones animations but if you are interested to add support for it I would love that

[benoit-1842]

Hi it's been a couple of weeks now that I am working on a retarget system.  It's working well but it's far away from being perfect.  My solution was that I have two models, one that's like the dummy one (this model is hidden) and have a specific bone structure and I have my model (this one is my animated model shown on the screen).  To have this working the skeleton needs to have the same bone hierarchy and names.  I remarked that the key of success with a good retarget is the hierarchy of bones used they need to have the same name structure.  I strongly suggest to always use the same bone hierarchy and name convention .  I had never try the retargeter from Unity but for my need the load and retarget from makewalk works very well with makehuman character.  Like Gryff told me once, always use the makehuman game.json rig.  And for me it's a real success !!! I have never been deceived by that bone structure and make walk.  It works with almost all the bvh I am sending to it.  What type of file are you using in Unity ? Bvh, .dae, FBX....  I would be interest to know what are the 12 retargeting systems you have tried...

[xirvr]

+1 for skeletal animation in the Unity exporter.