Animation system wish list

About facial animation (nobody replied at the technical issue thread, so copy message in Animation wish list).

Daz Studio can analize speech sound data and automatically make rather smooth lipsync and head movement animation with acceptable quality. But lipsync animations are not bone-based, but mesh morphes.

Then exported from Daz to fbx, Maya can play this animations, at list animations for Victoria 4 and Genesis, but Unity 3.5 can not - it plays only head movement, no lipsync. If required, I can supplay sample fbx with autogenerated head and lipsync animation, but it 9 megabytes size.

Is there some future plans for integrating these animations? It can be very much time saving for all.

PS. Daz Studio 4 currently available for free for a limited time, as well as Brice and Hehagon. Documentation is currently under development, but partly from Daz 3 may be helpful. Daz models are very highpoly and not well suited for games, but where is additional tool, Decimator for DAZ Studio (100$), wich can covert highpoly Daz models to lowpoly.

 

Integration of legacy animations with Mecanim for more advanced facial animation. Unity seems to have a bug with facial animations with mecanim whether applied or not. Mecanim will never be able to work for everyone so integrating it together will be advantageous.

 

Can you tell me which bug are you talking about? And what do you mean by "Mecanim will never be able to work for everyone"? - how does integrating legacy animations helps? they are already integrated - they are called Generic animations (support for float curves and some more stuff I guess is still missing).

 

Lets say I want to have two components attached. For the face bones excluding the head bone that would be a Animation Component which is seperate from mecanim. For the body from headbone down this would be mecanim whether retargetted or not.

This way rather than using some complex setup of masking, include exclude bones, layering, blending etc. The Animation component would control the face animations and the Animator would control the body. Very efficient and very simple.

And as far as the bug this is being resolved now by another developer - I have followed his instructions to resolve the issue with no resolved issue yet but me and him are still conversing to make sure this is a real bug or not.

The Generic animations does not work properly regarding retargetted animations.
"Generic Animator [Prefab] has a human AnimationClip [Animation] that cannot be applied on non-human Animator"
I also keep getting animation must be marked as legacy errors.
If my character needs a humanoid setting for retargetting animations from another character then her facial animation cannot be as legacy because I need the retargetting.
Another "bug" I get when there is no error is just two hands behaving strangely and none of the other bones moving. That is my experience of the useless Generic setting.

In the docs it is said to use Mecanim "as the recommended setup". Perhaps one day when the program has become polished. Right now its a complicated mess.

 

Getting and Removing AnimationEvents on a clip at run time.

It is kind of awkward that we can add animation events to a clip at run time but cannot remove or get a list of them.

 

A 1000 times this, frame labels like in Flash would also be very helpful instead.

 

it will be nice if we could use inverse kinematics chains in genereal skeletons not only in the ones that match in avatar

 

When you import a model, then in the inspector when you input the list of animations and what frames they are at, it would be great if you could copy and paste those details to another model

 

A million, billion times this. I can't believe how completely incompatible anim culling and anim events are.