Hi! I have something regarding the character model and animations coming from mixamo. For me, both the character and animations are set to use generic rig by default. This will break the animations. When importing the character, you must also go to the Rig tab and select Humanoid as animation type. You must also do the same fo the animations themselves.
(This will automatically put an animator component on the character, but that is OK).
Thank you, this was also the case for me. Note you have to change the rig before making the prefab in order to drag the prefab into the animation preview for it to work. Cheers
On one hand, you’re right that setting up the character as an Humanoid fixes most of the issues in previewing the animations, but on the other hand that’s not actually a requirement to make the animation work in actual play mode, if everything is set up properly.
When using Unity’s Humanoid rig system, you convert the rig of your character into Unity’s own unique type of rig with its own nomenclature rules. It fixes a lot of things such as bones orientations and other things. This ensure that Unity is also able to re-target each bones in real time properly if there are some sort of variation between the animation and the model being animated.
The potential issue though with the Humanoid rig is that it was and still is only meant for humanoid rigs. (It’s in the name.) There were talk about it being updated for non-humanoid over the years and some features were added toward that goal, but it’s still not quite there for non-humanoid. For example, if you got a quadruped monster with 1 additional bone in the forearm and legs, you can’t use the Humanoid rig unless you can live with the fact that any additional bones’ animation will be interpolated instead being 1-to-1 animated. If you got a 4-arms monster/character (like Mortal Kombat’s Goro character), you can’t use the Humanoid rig system unless you cheat in some ways and manage the additional bones separately from the animation system. (For example, it’s possible to animate an hidden rig with 2 arms and, in LateUpdate(), copy the hidden’s rig’s animation to the additional arms.) It would be the same with a creature like a centaur.
When you use the Generic type rig, the Preview will only work if the animation file and the character FBX source file has the same nomenclature rules. Meaning that the bones within the character’s FBX is required to have the same names and hierarchy as the bones in the FBX animation file. Any disparity between the names of the bones or parenting in the FBX files gets ignored in the result. If you use Mixamo’s animation, you need the character FBX file to have the same bones’ name as how Mixamo applies it. It’s possible to upload your character to Mixamo’s rigging system as explained in this help page and apply Mixamo’s own rig to your character.
This is why, in the video, there are no issues while using the Generic rig type as the character imported uses Mixamo’s own rigs with the same names as the available animations.
1 Like