PSA: Renaming prefab components after adding Animator breaks animations

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#1

Make sure you keep your prefab’s components named the same as what they are named in the Animator window otherwise they won’t work. I learned this the hard way in the next upcoming video Cinemachine Camera after I realised at around 2 minutes in the video that Nathan had renamed the ‘mixamorig:Hips’ child component on the character to just ‘Hips’, and when I thought I’d do the same my animations stopped working and my character was stuck floating around in the T-pose.
Took me about an hour to work out what I had done wrong (thought it was camera related) but if you do something like this and suspect you broke your character animations, check the Animation window and you’ll see the components are flagged yellow and missing.

You live and you learn!
~ Maezumo

#2

Yes, the animator uses the names of the components to match the animation elements to the skeleton elements.

One way around this is to re-import all characters and animations as Humanoid, which will make animations made for other humanoid characters still work with characters whose skeletons are not named exactly the same.

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