object location different in Preview Mode vs Scene Playback

title pretty much says it all. set up a few characters doing some combat in Preview. plays back fine in Preview on the Timeline in the game or scene view, but if you start the scene,the animated objects move location and the offsets no longer make sense relative to new location. they don't seem to move to to world zero, however. taking off Root Motion on the Animator Controllers doesn't improve anything either.

additionally, if this is previewed, looping will reset all characters positions correctly while scene playback will continue moving the characters position (presumably based on root motion?).

is this a bug? do i need to bake the Timeline to a separate animation to play it back correctly? the UNITE demos looked totally seamless positionally between playback and preview modes, so i'm a little confused why i get such a different result. it does seem that a few others have reported similar symptoms though.

some images to share:


this is the shot from the Preview. camera and characters are positioned correctly. note second blue character on floor as well. And here is the playback version, at approximately the same time:

The camera is clearly out of position as are all the other characters. the main player is rotated to her left. players feet are also below the level of the floor. the pink enemy has moved back, and the blue enemy is far to the left.

any clue what's going on here? i asked a similar question on a different thread and at least one other person is getting different locations between scene playback and preview. for now i'm just working in preview as it seems most reliable. any help appreciated!

 

I noticed some weirdness where some assets under timeline control were getting their local transform set to P0,0,0:R,0,0,0 on entering playmode. At least that is what it kind of looked like????

Didn't find a workaround, just kind of backed off timeline for a bit. :-(

[Edit: Disclaimer: I'm playing with 2017 beta 2, so I'm ok with weirdness]

 

Has this issue been fixed in 2017.1.0f3? Is there a link to the bug tracker for this issue?

I'm experiencing the same problem. I was using Timeline to animate the path a seagull flies in my scene. After animating the flight, it looks fine in the timeline preview. However when I actually run the game, the path of the bird is rotated 90 degrees and is offset incorrectly. Checking "Apply Track Offsets" and moving the starting position / rotation seems to have no affect either.

I think I worked around this in one case by deleting my animation and starting from scratch, but it just happened again. I think this is a bug.

---
Also, I don't think it is clearly documented how the position is calculated when running an animation timeline. It seems to me that final result is:

Local Position = Local Position from when object was added to timeline + Apply Track Offset (if enabled) + The value of the position on the animation timeline for the current frame

The confusing part is that the animation timeline seems to remember the position the object was in when it was added to the timeline, and everything else is relative to that. Is this true? What if I want to change this value later? It doesn't seem like there is any way to view or alter this value without destroying the animation track and rebuilding it.

 

Horrible usability is horrible. This should be the user's choice. WITHOUT the workaround of removing the animator controller.

 

Thanks for the information about the issue. After reading your response I did a few experiments on my own to make sure I understood how it was all working.

For others, I'll mention the work around I'm using for now.

Since the animators on my seagulls never modify the root position, the bug above causes all my animations to be based from (0,0,0) even if the preview shows them starting from somewhere else. So as a workaround, I make sure the seagulls I'm about to animate are positioned at (0,0,0) and rotated at (0,0,0) before I drag them into the timeline. That way, the preview animations match up with the actual animations.

 

Any ideas on how to address this issue?
Any hack? Any workaround?
I tried the offset idea but it keeps moving my object to 0,0,0 still.

 

I found a package called Default Playables.
This has something for Tween. Can this be used to move an object from point A to point B using Timeline.

 

I have a similar problem. Probably the same bug but it's not fixed in 2017.1.0p3. It's not fixed in 2017.1.1 either.

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/t...preview-mode-but-they-dont-in-playmode.492442

 

is it possible to play the animation in absolute reference not relative without getting rid of the controller ?

because i have a similar problem

i have an intro and outro, lets say player entering and exiting room animation that must be played at exact absolute position

during those two events the player can control avatar manually in gameplay

but when i play the outro its always plays with an offset relative to were the avatar in gameplay mode last was, not were i want it to play in absolute scene offset reference like i want it to

for instance i cant get it to play exit animation from the door location

 

@seant_unity This problem should be a lot more visible to users. I accidentally stumbled across this thread after 2 days of debugging. We were about to revert to Unity 5. Why is there a discrepancy between the playback between the editor and play mode? That seems like the actual bug here. If there wasn't I'm sure I would have found the solution in a couple of minutes

 

I'm having a problem, unsure if it is because of the issue described in this post... however...

In editor everything works fine, in the build one of my characters is rotated incorrectly.



[Edit: Updating to 2017.1.1 fixed the issue...]

 

still broken in 2017.2 right ?

 

2017.3 Beta - Also broken.

 

Wow, this is amazing, I just spent my money in the subscription thinking that the timeline would be really an awesome tool, and now I see all these bugs here and there! Not only the timeline is rendered unusable for animating characters positions and rotations (which is pretty much what any cut scene is made of), but also there is not event system in the timeline still... Really a disappointment! I see these posts from Unity saying that they are gonna fix this and that but at the end when I return almost 4 months later the issues still all over Unity. To top it off, the last Unity response in this post was in September 6, today is November 29. One would think that the issue was fix based on the long absence!

 

Yes. I have been feeling tired of reporting bugs to Unity Team in recent years because they are not getting fixed. Every new Unity version feels more buggy. I am afraid I am losing hope day by day

 

But there are no engine features behind the paywall, you could have used Timeline without paying anything

 

The trend I have seen with the Unity Engine is that many of the most important features for making games, end up mediocre at best. Water, Terrain Engine, Tree Builder... etc. Instead of making important features better, the keep adding new ones, without making the main ones really good. I don't recall the last time I saw a change in the Terrain, or the water, or the trees. Hell if I was to use the vegetation shader that came with unity, my trees wouldn't have especular light still... What! are you kidding me? do you get what I am saying. What about the terrain for example, the grass still sucking frame rate like a monster, and if you try to make a toll mountain, get ready for the stretching of the textures...This have been like this since the beginning.

They engine has become jack of all trades, master of none. Anyway venting some frustration here...

 

I cant stress enough how much I would prefer updated versions of the very old parts of the engine, over new features.

Ultimately unity wont care because if they havent started paying attention to people saying this stuff, they never will.

 

ASAP not being 2 months later? Because I would consider this a very long time to go without communication, let alone saying "Get it to you ASAP".

Please contact whoever controls what information can be relayed to the public, and sort out this mess. Timeline is so broken you should NOT be advertising it still.

 

@seant_unity @mikew_unity Any update? It's been 2 months...

 

Just posted a new thread for this, we would also like to know about any updates or fixes please.

 

Update

 

Unity 2018.2 b; the latest one till this date, is still having this problem. I have a Gun which has to be spawned in a Weapon Slot when my player spawns. and an animator controller is assigned to the gun's animator. But when the game enters play mode, the gun is drastically rotated and positioned. Sad to say, but even when some bugs are known to the dev team, they are still not fixed even after 6 Updates .

 

I wish this was the only important bug fix they ignored for months/years

 

Still broken.. took me about 4 hours to realize that the animator was rotating objects that don't even have keyframes.

 

Hi @seant_unity -

This was very confusing to our team and it feels like undocumented behaviour. We spent all afternoon trying to figure out how make our Timelines animate relative to the Character's localPosition. We don't attach controllers to our Animator because we are using a workflow more similar to Unity's SimpleAnimation example where we animate using PlaybleGraphs instead of using AnimatorControllers directly in the Animator.

From what I'm reading in your message, it seems we have 2 options if we want our Timeline animations to play locally:

1. Place an AnimatorController in our Animator - we can't do this because we aren't using AnimatorControllers; we're using a PlayableGraph
2. Place our character (an Animator component) under an empty gameObject, so that we can still move the Character's parent and have the timelines animate the Character at it's 0,0,0 local position

Neither is a good option, and it feels like there should be an API to switch Timeline animations between local/world position animation modes rather than having the existence of an AnimatorController in the ANimator component decide this.

So my question is this - Is there really now way to signal to the Timeline to play the animations local to the Character's position WITHOUT having an AnimatorController in the Animator? Is there an API to force the animations from Timeline to play locally? If not, it seems anyone using the Playables API instead of AnimationControllers basically cannot use Timelines for gameplay.

 

Hello! For anyone facing these problems, what I have done to fix it was to remove the animator controller off any character or objects that'll be in animating in the timeline,(after-all you won't need them) and also..... Turn on the root motion on the character or they'll be moving on the spot.

Here's a pic of what my problem was with animator controller on :


and here it is in the preview:

and this is it after removing and applying the root motion to the character:


Let me know if this helped you out or not...
If your interested in seeing this animated short film I'm making called "Run&Conquor" you can follow me on Instagram to keep updated on posts:

 

Did anyone test this with the 2018.3.0b1 Beta? I have and it doesn't seem to be fixed. I hope I'm wrong.....

 

On the 2018.2.9f1 and similar problems....

 

I'm currently working on a cutscene with 2018.3.12f1. The same problem is still there. I've struggled for quite some time and tried almost everything I can find through web. But nothing works. Is there any simple way to solve this problem?

 

I don't know if it's related but please see my post here. Maybe it helps you.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/tra...ut-they-dont-in-playmode.492442/#post-3986368

 

Many thanks!

 

2021 still happening...

 

Did you see my report and how it got resolved?
https://forum.unity.com/threads/tra...ut-they-dont-in-playmode.492442/#post-3986368