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Animator or Animation? The best to use

Discussion in 'Animation' started by clarklak11, Mar 23, 2017.

  1. clarklak11

    clarklak11

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    What's the best practice to use for animating models? and what are the Pros and Cons of these two? I'm currently using Animator.


     
    clarklak11, Mar 23, 2017
    #1

  2. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    theANMATOR2b, Mar 23, 2017
    #2
    clarklak11 and TonyLi like this.

  3. TonyLi

    TonyLi

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    Con: The Animation component is legacy and will go away at some point.

    Use Animator. Old devs who grew up on the legacy animation system sometimes argue that it's simpler, but new devs with no preconceived ideas pick up Mecanim just fine. But, simpler or not, you don't want your project to be stuck when legacy goes away. You also don't want to obsolete your skill set by working in an animation system that hasn't been maintained since Unity 4.0.

    Other pros of Mecanim:
    • Humanoid retargeting
    • Root motion
    • Blend trees
    • Parameter-based state machine control
    • State machine behaviors
    • Visually see what's going on
    • Sprite animation
    • More efficient for complex animation (e.g., blend trees)
    • Works with newer Unity features like Unity UI (e.g., button animation)
    With recent versions of Unity, you can add clips on the fly and do other things that people complained were missing when Mecanim first came out.
     
    TonyLi, Mar 23, 2017
    #3
    LMan, TrickyHandz, clarklak11 and 1 other person like this.

  4. clarklak11

    clarklak11

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    Well noted! Thank you so much! So I'm on the right path then. :)
     
    clarklak11, Mar 24, 2017
    #4

  5. TonyLi

    TonyLi

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    Happy to share my experiences. I was one of those old farts who was used to legacy animation before I switched over to Mecanim, but I was using the excellent Sage editor (which is basically the Animator state machine window for legacy animation) so the transition was easy.
     
    TonyLi, Mar 24, 2017
    #5

  6. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    Tony do you still use Sage or are you pretty much 100% mecanim now?
     
    theANMATOR2b, Mar 24, 2017
    #6

  7. TonyLi

    TonyLi

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    100% Mecanim. Sage has a great state machine/blend tree editor for legacy, but it's still legacy. It doesn't have all the other great Mecanim features like humanoid retargeting, root motion, etc.
     
    TonyLi, Mar 24, 2017
    #7
    theANMATOR2b likes this.

  8. ZJP

    ZJP

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    I use Mecanim for biped animation only (these advantages in other areas does not concern me). The only advantage I find is retargetting. With each update of Unity this library includes its batches of more or less blocking bugs. I am not satisfied with Mecanim. In addition, it is less efficient (speaking of FPS) than Legacy. He is slow.... :(

    For me it is a kind of "hostage-taking". Be obliged to use the least efficient of the two libraries.
     
    ZJP, Mar 24, 2017
    #8