Character Rigging for Animotive
If you or one of your team is rigging or adapting a character specifically for Animotive here are some best practice notes to bear in mind;
Skeleton
Your skeleton should be in a valid, palms down T-pose for best results where possible
Your skeleton should be based on real world sizes, check your units in your 3D software
The skeleton should be in a single hierarchy that corresponds with the hierarchy in Unity’s avatar system: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/HumanBodyBones.html
Currently, Animotive only uses basic joints such as; Scapula - Shoulder - Elbow - Wrist, etc. You can have twist joints on the rig, but they will not be used within Animotive. Please keep in mind that if you have types of joints that help deform part of a costume; eg: a skirt - or other joints that depend on a driving system to move, these will not be driven in Animotive
For naming conventions we recommend you add ‘_L/ _R’, and/or ‘.L/.R’ into the joint naming to denote either “left” or “right”. This will help Animotive’s automapper to identify joints
Add a group node for the rig that is named appropriately, with the pivot at the world origin
When it comes to the Translational data for your joints;
Translate X, Y and Z attribute fields will typically have data in them because they contain the positional data for the joints
Rotation attributes should be at 0
Scale attributes should be default to 1
Painting skin weights: Please ensure that all of the vertices on your characters mesh(es) have skin weights
Blendshapes
Animotive can use your VR headset hardware to facilitate facial animation using your character’s blendshapes. Here are
Animotive has the ability to use 3 main types of blendshapes (shape keys), which are;
Our current character setup dictates that the eye meshes be influenced by a single eyeball joint NOT a blendshape
If you are using ARKit blendshapes, bear in mind that they move the eyeball mesh with their eyeLook blendshapes, you will need to take the influence for these blendshapes away from the eyeball meshes
Mesh Rigging
Animotive also supports a humanoid character whose movement is driven by a hierarchy of meshes as opposed to a skeleton rig.
Ensure meshes are named appropriately to allow Animotive to map them into its Humanoid Mapping system. Here is a reference to Unity’s Humanoid mapping. https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/HumanBodyBones.html
Ensure that the pivots for each mesh are in the correct place so that they can drive movement in a hierarchy.
Exporting to Animotive
Character assets for Animotive should be in an FBX format. The FBX should contain only a skeleton mesh - no control rigs will be accepted inside Animotive.
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