At any rate, the component that I created is designed to let animation data, rather than procedural velocity values, drive a character’s motion in space. The component sits on top of Unity’s animation API to let you simply play, crossfade, and blend animations using any of the existing API methods, and the computer takes care of everything else after the fact. The way it works is by tracking the position and rotation of the pelvis in the space of the character’s root node for each active AnimationState and then backward applying this motion to the root node itself and snapping the pelvis back into its position hovering over the root. Since the source code is all available in the project, I won’t belabor the details too much here, but you can certainly ask me if you have any questions. (The one thing perhaps worth mentioning, as an addendum to the video, is that the pelvis forward axis is not strictly necessary for computing output: only for displaying debug information. For computation, the character’s rotation is determined using the pelvis right axis.)

You can download an example project from Mixamo that contains the component as well as a sample character with some animations. Because the tutorial video on the Mixamo website is compressed pretty substantially, I have also uploaded a copy to my Vimeo account in case you would like to watch it in full HD resolution.

I’ll be releasing an early version of all of these scripts for free download soon, which will come as an update to my AMTools Maya Python package as well as a Unity package containing all of the editor scripts and components I created (these include a point constraint, orient constraint, aim constraint, expose transform, and so on).

As noted in the video, there are some limitations (some of which I can and will fix later). Briefly:

• The orient constraint that I coded only uses slerp, average, and slime, so it does not yet support the Longest or No Flip interpolation types
• Expressions support a limited range of node types (I currently only support transforms, aim/orient/point constraints, and some custom nodes that I made for Maya)
• No support yet for getting attributes or executing MEL on-demand inside expressions (e.g. $var = `getAttr pSphere1.tx`;)
• Unity only lets you set Euler rotations using zxy order
• I have not yet finished adding quaternion decomposition for arbitrary rotation orders, so you can only get Euler rotations in zxy (hint: if you’re still using Euler angles, it’s time to step up to flavor town)
• Euler angles can be set to any value, but since they are decomposed from a quaternion they can only be obtained as the shortest arc from [-180,180]
• I have not yet implemented functionality to build game code from node networks

Moreover, Ryan and I recorded a Maya Python MasterClass for them, which you can view on the Area website. In it, Ryan covers an example of how to use threading and I cover an API example (the expose transform plug-in I recently released). Check it out and let us know what you think! Please note you will need to go through a free registration process on the Area website to view this video.