Compatibility with Animation Rigging package?

[dgoyette]

I’m recently started using Animation Rigging to enjoy some basic functionality like IK and other animation constraints at runtime. I was just creating a Slate cutscene that uses a model with Animation Rigging constraints. Although the constraints all work fine in Play mode, they don’t work in the editor when previewing a Slate cutscene.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Animation Rigging. It’s still a preview package, but it’s been around for a while now: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.animation.rigging@0.2/manual/index.html

One of the Animation Rigging devs stated on the Unity Forums that constraints aren’t normally evaluated in edit mode, they do evaluate while an Animation Clip is being Previewed, or while a Timeline is running: https://forum.unity.com/threads/animation-rigging-only-in-play-mode-how-do-i-preview-the-animation.897857/

Do you know if there’s any way to get Slate to perform the same kind of evaluation of rigging constraints while previewing a slate cutscene?

[dgoyette]

I asked about this on the Unity forums, and one of the Unity Animation Rigging dev’s responded:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/animation-rigging-only-in-play-mode-how-do-i-preview-the-animation.897857/#post-6118037

The apparent answer is that it requires some implementation of IAnimationWindowPreview in order to get the animation clip to preview itself properly:

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Experimental.Animations.IAnimationWindowPreview.html

It doesn’t look like Slate uses this interface anywhere that I can see, unless it does so in an add-on I’m not using. Do you have any familiarity with it, to judge how complex it is to get Animation Rigging constraints to display properly when using Slate?

[Gavalakis]

Hello there and thank you for the information provided.

I was actually not aware of the Animation Rigging package at all (I tend to lean away from experimental features to be honest since last time I did it was a bit painful 🙂 ) With that said, the Animation Rigging package looks interesting. I indeed do not use the IAnimationWindowPreview anywhere, but I will take a look at it and its implementations. The problem I can see from the API documentation you posted, is that it needs a component attached on the Animator gameobject which provides and updates the Playable Graph, whereas in Slate, the Playable Graph is created and updated from within the Animator Track code. As such I suspect that implementing this feature will require some heavy refactoring. Unless this is a showstopper for you, I would very much prefer getting into this endeavor after the feature is out of experimental state though.

Let me know 🙂

Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/97q2Rjh

[dgoyette]

Yeah, it doesn’t really seem worth a major effort to support Animation Rigging at this point. I was asking in hopes that maybe it was a very simple thing to support that interface, but I figured that wasn’t likely. I’m mostly just evaluating it right now anyway, and will probably end up on a more supported package, like Final IK.

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