Daggerfall Workshop Forums

I was hoping someone more knowledgeable would chime in before now, but I'll take a stab at it.

Short answer: I'm not entirely sure, but I think doing it that way would be inconvenient for Unity workflow.

Long answer: Unity uses Mechanim animation system. It uses the concept of an Avatar to handle similar rigs in a uniform way so animations can be easily shared across many rigs. There are several pre-made avatars, but the most relevant and useful is the humanoid avatar which allows for animation retargeting such that any animations that are compatible with the humanoid avatar can be used universally with any other mesh using the humanoid avatar.

Having said all that, the only way I know that it is guaranteed to work in Unity is if you use just one rig that follows the Unity Humanoid Avatar pattern. Note that some bones are required, and others are optional such as the fingers, eyes, chin, chest, neck, and toes.
It may be possible to create a custom avatar that can handle your special composited rig, but I don't know that for sure. If it did work with a custom avatar, it may make it difficult for future modders to create new animations that apply to your models.

I hope this information helps.

Taking a step back, I'm guessing that you're rigging it this way so that you can allow different pieces of clothing and armor to be mixed and matched with other base meshes so that if the parent rig scales up/down, then so does that piece of clothing or armor and it is positioned correctly at all times during each animation clip. It makes sense to me, and if this isn't the right way to do it, then I don't know what is. I just don't know how this fits in with the Avatar system. It may not make a difference. Best we can do is test it, or hope that someone with more experience and weigh in on the issue.

Edit: After watching this video, I think what you're doing is fine.

Thanks for the answer! It helped.

I'm familiar with Unity rigging system as I tried to make some projects by myself. I know what is character controller, avatar etc. Well, I left pauldrons attached to the original rig, as they are a big pain in the ass, and for now incorrect animation of pauldrons won't affect anything. I'll correct it in the future.

BTW I don't like human rig in Unity. It always screwed my animations up because of some additional and corrective bones, which Unity doesn't understand. If you will use my models I suggest to use a standard rig.

Another WIP video



Almost done. Rigged and animated. Things to do:
- bake all materials into two sets of textures (armor and body)
- make LODs
So I need a couple of days to finish this model

Okay. Here you go.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

This is a first version with 5 LODs and 2K textures.
LOD0 is 11242 tris and LOD4 is 1405 tris.
There are two materials - for the body and for the armor. If my memory serves me right, Unity uses smoothness maps instead of roughness, so I inverted it.

Texture tags:
dfs - Diffuse or Albedo (also with alpha channel for the body)
met - Metalness
smt - Smoothness
nml - Normal (tag it in Unity as normal and it will automatically convert)

LODs tris count is roughly:
LOD0 - 100.0%
LOD1 - 80.0%
LOD2 - 50.0%
LOD3 - 25.0%
LOD4 - 12.5%

Animations are still far from being perfect. And textures are far from being perfect. Well, everything is far from being perfect and I'll likely make it look better sooner or later if this model will be of any use for this forum.

Beautiful work!

I'm going to try to get this implemented into a little test mod just so we can see how it looks sometime this weekend.

I haven't upgraded my DFU to the latest LTS build yet, so I'm going to do that first before I do this.

MasonFace wrote: ↑Fri Jul 17, 2020 12:43 pm I'm going to try to get this implemented into a little test mod just so we can see how it looks sometime this weekend.

I haven't upgraded my DFU to the latest LTS build yet, so I'm going to do that first before I do this.

Great! If everything's okay, I'm planning to make this guy then:

There's a slight problem with the texture maps.

You have metallic and smoothness as two separate maps, but in Unity, they should be packed together.

See Metallic mode in the Unity manual for the standard shader.

The metallic map values should be stored in the red channel, and smoothness in the alpha channel.


Also, it doesn't appear that the animations came through.

I just upgraded to the newest supported version of Unity and for some reason I can't get asset injection to work for MobilePersonAssets! I'm going to contact TheLacus for help.

MasonFace wrote: ↑Sat Jul 18, 2020 2:53 am There's a slight problem with the texture maps.

You have metallic and smoothness as two separate maps, but in Unity, they should be packed together.

See Metallic mode in the Unity manual for the standard shader.

The metallic map values should be stored in the red channel, and smoothness in the alpha channel.


Also, it doesn't appear that the animations came through.

I just upgraded to the newest supported version of Unity and for some reason I can't get asset injection to work for MobilePersonAssets! I'm going to contact TheLacus for help.

My bad. Check the folder again. There are packed textures now (pac). These are a metallic textures with smoothness in alpha channel. And I don't know why blender doesn't want to export animations correctly. I made Guard_NLA.fbx model. Looks like animations are in place now. And a .blend file is also there. Unity can use it, but it's heavier, than fbx.

Okay, Guard_NLA properly imported the animations, and the packed metallic map seems to be working.

The last little thing is the scale. The mesh is looking a bit small compared to the vanilla asset. I've manually adjusted the transform from a uniform scale of 1.0 to 1.125. I think if you scale your mesh up on export by 1/8, it should come out correct when I import it without having to scale it.
Note that I don't have the character actually implemented yet, I just dragged the prefab into the scene for this screenshot.