Are most people using Mecanim Now?

Curious to know if most developers are using Mecanim now? I still Love Legacy, and honestly don't have a real reason to switch... Legacy works just fine for me. What about everyone else?

 

Legacy (of course ) and this..

 

Mecanim. But not root motion.

 

we are still using legacy.... I have not found a way out of this. I have seen several posts or youtube videos where studios swear on Mecanim, but my artist just refuses to touch Mecanim. so I am stuck in programming legacy.

 

Mecanim of course.

 

I mix. Sometimes legacy makes more sense, sometimes it doesn't. For characters mecanim is the obvious choice.

 

Mecanim hell yeah. At first Mecanim looked too complicated but once I got the hang of it I never wanna look back at legacy animating. I use Mecanim even to manage non humanoid animations or characters. It simply rocks. Can't say it can't be better, but definitely better than the legacy system. I don't use root motion tho.

 

i'm using mecanim and the generic system inside mecanim for the custom bones like fps hands, now i do see that crossfade does behave differently from legacy so in the mecanim function i just pretty much made a variable for controlling the weight over time. this can be acomplished with some simple coroutines, yield functions or manually writing out a timer such as using two floats

 

Mecanim. I find it a lot easier plus am able to use any animation and apply it to the character of my choosing.

 

Still use legacy quite a bit. I was super stoked to find that plugin that bakes mecanim to legacy. I hate having to drag/drop animations and create new controllers and set all this crap up in order to start scripting with mecanim.

 

Legacy

 

I understand people still wanting to use Legacy, but my experience has been that mecanim can do almost everything I need to do in my game as well. I transitioned from Legacy anims to Mecanim about 9 months ago.

At first, I was very skeptical of mecanim, and didn't really think I'd like it. But one feature that kind of opened up the world of mecanim for me was the "Events" feature. The fact that you can fire off a function just by setting an "event" using a slider along the animation time length was essential for me. And that feature alone is a lot easier than trying to time it correctly using Legacy's programming functions.

Mecanim also saves me some code space in my scripts. Although you still have a messy web of animations and states using the mecanim animation controllers lol.

I guess when it comes down to it, all I can say is, I'm glad I took the chance to try to learn mecanim, as it proved to be pretty useful for me -- and it's now 90% of what I use for animation. But you also sacrifice a very small amount of control you can get with Legacy.

I'm currently using both mecanim and legacy in my game, but like I said above, 90% of it is now mecanim.

 

wow 75% so far... that's good news i guess for Unity they can start planning to scratch off Legacy lol... well I hope they don't remove it for another 2 years or so, I would think alot of people are still using it and would suck if was just stripped out too soon before giving everyone a chance to fully migrate. I don't think Legacy is being removed in Unity 5, so all of us Legacy users are safe for now lol... glad see alot of people are using Mecanim and having good experience with it. I recall posting the similar question around this time last year and alot of people were very mixed of very much on the fence, felt like 50/50 at the time... but 75% so far seems like Mecanim has gotten much better since last year. Lets see how many more Mecanim votes we get.

 

Mecanim is awesome, particularly in generic mode. Humanoid mode does suck in a lot of ways (no bone translating or scaling), so I'm hoping Unity will expand the generic mode to have greater performance and more options (such as IK and perhaps other features).

I really don't see much point in using Legacy, unless it's to be a looping animation of something, or you don't really need much more than a simple blend.

 

I don't understand it at all.

 

Mecanim, mostly because of root motion.

 

Still using legacy on The Goblin Abyss, however that is mainly because mecanim wasn't as fast on mobile and had problems when I started the project over a year and a half ago.

If I was starting the game from scratch now, I'd probably use mecanim, but I'm too far in to switch at this point.

 

lol!

Macanim doesn't perform well on Mobile? That's news to me and definitely good to know... I guess maybe most of the people who voted Yes so far are not Mobile Developers? or maybe they found a workaround for their performance issues on Mobile with Mecanim.

 

I don't know why but I kinda felt like I was at a AA meeting with my last post...... "Hi, my name is Velo, and I'm a mecanim user.... but I'm not an addict!"

 

That seemed to be the case when it first came out, I can't say for sure now though. I'm sure its been improved on, plus mobile devices have got faster too.

 

I still use the legacy animation.
I have been wanting to switch to Mecanim, mostly because of re-target animations, but i haven't got the time to learn everything about it.
I would also need to change way too many things for it to work properly.

 

Hi guys,

I'm glad to see that most user did the jump to mecanim.
Here a small peak to some new cool feature that we are working on, of course there is no ETA when it will be available

@hippocoder, I think you will like it
First generic IK:

And then generic retargeting:

 

That's awesome!

We have a quadruped in one of our projects, and being able to retarget its animations would save us a LOT of trouble. (Right now we are basically spawning 3 different creatures with a lot of variations, then disabling the parts we don't want - it's really inefficient, but I don't see any way around it without having many copies of the same animations) And of course having IK on it would add a lot of interactivity and life. Put our studio down in the "we want it now!" category for those features! Hopefully early in the 5.x cycle.

 

@Mecanim.Dev

you look sometime at IK solution in asset store? Particulary Partel Lang's asset - he made amazing IK solution (additionally is more natural than Mecanim IK in some edge cases - you could see some video comparision in Partel Lang's thread where you could see strange behaviour in mecanim IK while his solution still look relatively natural)

but i like retarget for generic announce though and fact that u working on complex IK

and i will definitely use mecanim when 5.0 realesed

 

Very Cool! I look forward to eventually moving over to Mecanim with my future projects one day, and hope to find it as easy to use if not better than Legacy once i'm ready to move over lol.

 

I consider Mecanim over-complicated.

 

Hi angel,

If you would like to discuss what you find complicated and compared to what, we would be happy to heard what you have to say. Our goal is to help you create game more easily with the highest quality possible. If you guys don't speak up when something doesn't work we can't fix it

 

The Mecanim animators should be part of a integrated visual scripting program, vastly expanding the functionality of the animator and creating powerful visual development tools... But until that's done please add a option to use a input to modify a float, trigger or bool without needing a single line of code ASWELL as having the same functionality with triggers and collisions. Just this would allow a huge amount of functionality without requiring any coding.

 

Hi Tyler,

We are already working on this, if you saw the Unite seattle keynote on you tube you probably saw a new tool called the sequence tool and the compositor, this is part of the new visual development tools which will include the animation, audio and video.

 

Cool, will be awesome to see

 

I use mecanim because I can RECYCLE animations files for other models to be use in other particular model.

 

How does mecanim performance compare to legacy with lots of characters?

 

Mecanim is probably one of the best feature Unity has.

It is visual enough for artists to really tweak the animations, and all a programmers needs to do is to add a line of code.

 

Alot less coding, that's for sure. Most aspects can be visibly tweaked.

 

@Arowx, It depend what your animation setup look like.

Comparing both system is difficult because Mecanim is doing more stuff than legacy. By example a mecanim humanoid rig does retarget the motion, apply IK to fix foot sliding, can blend many animation layer and blendtree clip.

If you take a simple case where you only have one animation playing for your game object.
Legacy will be slightly faster than Generic, and ~2x faster than humanoid rig.

If you take a more complex setup with many clip blending together, then mecanim will start to out perform Legacy. I don't know if you ever saw our 2000 character demo running on a battle field, it was made with Mecanim.

One reason why it faster in this case it because Mecanim does support multi-threading.

So I would say that for GO with simple animation setup like a props playing always the same animation, Legacy will be faster and easier to manage. But for GO with complex animation blending like a character locomotion system then you will get better performance with Mecanim since all the blending and IK is done all in the animation engine. For the same locomotion with Legacy you have to write a lot of script code to achieve the same thing.

Best regards,

 

Thanks for your interest. I find the whole system pretty confusing and unintuitive.
I miss text tutorials (in the old-style) because they are easier to follow and more understandable than videos for non english spoken people like me.
Are there any?

 

I think Mecanim is great. But I don't feel confident with it yet, I feel "safer" with legacy because I already know how to use it well. Maybe it's the transitions between animations... I don't feel like I have control over them, I don't know, it's a new system and there's a lot to learn. I prefer having an animation set and have full control over their weights. But I believe that's normal for everything that changes. Maybe for my next project I'll consider switching to Mecanim.

 

Ok one thing I can't stand about using the "humanoid" mecanim setup is the fact that game objects (like a character in the game) do not scale correctly. If I try to scale one of my warriors (for example) in my game, they start to stretch super thin and come apart at the shoulder joints lol.

I really would love to be able to scale my models correctly like I can with Legacy. I'm not sure if all of my info is correct, but this has been my experience. Is it even possible to make this happen?

 

@angel_m, good point I will see if we have anything that could help you.

@Velo222, You are right, scale is not supported for humanoid rig, in this case you need to fallback to either generic rig or legacy. It on our road map to add support for translation and scale for Humanoid rig.

 

I'm curious how it's coded that this could be the case. Internally, does it set .lossyScale instead of .localScale? Does it do math with animatedTransform.position and animatedTransform.rotation instead of using animatedTransform.TransformPoint when placing the vertices? It feels like I would have to go way out of my way to create bugs like this.

 

You are right. I like it. VERY MUCH

 

@StarManta, it not a bug. Our Humanoid rig use a specialized normalize space that alllow us to retarget any clip on any avatar. To do this we do convert translation and rotation curve into muscle curve, by example for an elbow we only have one muscle curve.

If you would like more detail I would suggest you to read this blog about humanoid rig
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/26/mecanim-humanoids/

Like I said before we are working at expanding our Humanoid rig to support scale and translation.

 

Regarding mecanim, I feel that one of the most important things for us speed. We are noticing mecanim take up 0.7ms on device per character (for generic rig) so any advice for "best practises" for keeping the speed up is very welcome. We use generic.

 

I like using Mecanim. On desktop I don't have any problems with it. Being able to retarget animations is a huge benefit, I can't see why that wouldn't be standard across the board after seeing how beneficial it is. Zero interest in using Legacy now.

Only comment at this point would be that it can be a little confusing to start using, with the different rig types and controls that are exposed to users but after using it a bit and going through the docs I'm pretty happy with it.

 

@hippocoder, good point, I will work on something and post it on the Animation forum and add it to the doc

 

I'm still on 3.5.7 at home, so I have to use legacy. At work we use 4.x and mecanim.
One of the things that I have found essential with legacy is this script http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/191282/sharing-animations-between-models.html. That allows me to re-use animations on different models with slightly different skeletons. It does this by stripping out all the position keys and only using rotation.

 

Better documentation with using mecanim and both root motion and non-root motion animations.

 

That is good to hear Mecanim.Dev. I'm glad to hear it's on your guys' "roadmap" at least. I hope you guys are able to make this happen somehow.

It would help us single devs out not having to get ahold of 3d software programs and having to re-scale models ourselves, or having to contact and wait a long time for the 3d modeler who created the model to re-do their models just to adjust scale.

If the team can somehow "engineer" this, that would make it much better. Thanks for taking input from the community as well.