Disappearing Mecanim Character

Hi Unity!

We've been working on using mecanim for our animations, but we've now found the weirdest issue that we haven't been able to find any information about.

Basically, it seems that our mecanim characters stop rendering when they go off-screen, and when they should start appearing again, they don't. The even more weird part is that if you double-click the character in the hierarchy for the scene, the character will start showing up correctly again. We've found that destroying the animator component and activating the rigidbody components for the ragdoll causes the character to stop rendering again. We've tried searching around the unity forums, but we honestly have no idea what could cause this behavior, so we would like to ask for your help.

I've created a repro project that mainly contains what should be necessary to recreate the issue, and I've uploaded it here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B563jbWV7hpdRHRUc2Y1T0ttOHM/edit?usp=sharing.

More importantly, I think a visual demonstration is necessary, so I made this video to show the problem: http://youtu.be/-I2-E3ZrBnM.

Do you have any idea what could cause such behavior? Any suggestions for debugging?

Thank you!

 

In case anyone ever comes across the same issue, here's what I found: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/357314/ragdoll-disappearing-when-off-screen.html

Turning on "Always Animate" seems to have fixed the problem.

 

True, I have run into the same issue. Turning "always animate" solves it , but what should be done when there are many meshes? Since it could have a performance impact.

Any new solutions?

 

The game we're making doesn't really have too many on-screen characters at a given time, so we haven't really worried about it yet. We're planning to go through our project and make optimizations as required after we've gotten everything functional, so until then, this is the only solution we've got. Hopefully there does exist a more efficient solution out there (let us know if you find it!). It may be worth filing unity a bug report?

 

Just sent a bug report.

I keep my eyes open, if I find a solution I will tell