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Root bone and bone connection
Hi
I'm working on an RTS project where the skeleton is separate from the 3D models, which are attached to the skeleton ingame.
I use blender and animate everything in it, however a friend of mine told me that I needed a root bone that was forbidden to move, rotate or otherwise change any parameters. My first question is:
Does the root bone have to actually be connected to the whole skeleton, or is it enough that it's parent to the first bone in the parent series, and that child bone inherits the rotation from the root bone, in Blender. Or does unity not understand the "inheritance" system?.
The other question is that are bones required to actually be connected or is it enough if they have child-parent relationships?
How much information is actually exported in the fbx format?
Thank you in advance.
Thank you. I worked around it in Blender to connect everything, to be on the safe side, but an answer to the question would still be nice.
i just think your question was too advanced for everyone here :)
Answer by whydoidoit · Mar 27, 2013 at 09:19 AM
It depends if you are using Mecanim - which is looking for "Root Motion" the movement of the root bone and actually moves your character based on this rotation and translation.
Here's a mixamo rig imported into unity:
The root bone is the Hips here - using legacy animation any amount of translating or rotating this transform does absolutely nothing to the position of the mesh attached to it, altering any of its children does of course.
$$anonymous$$ixamo rig imported from an FBX I should say!
fascinating .. so that's one of the paradigm changes with mecanim.
Yeah it's why there's never any foot slip - because the animation moves the model not the model moves and the programmer desperately trys to balance animation speed and weight to make it look right.
$$anonymous$$uch harder when you are doing path following etc because you have to work out what animation to play at what speed to get where you want to go!
it's a whole new world.
it's funny how things like that go. for 20 yrs we've all been screa$$anonymous$$g at newbies: "For God's sake - you play the animation and then move the object, what, do you think the computer magically knows where it is or something??"
now newbies will just scream back "What the hell are you talking about? Any crap animation system knows where it is at, you old Idiot" :-O
I was so sad because unity animator broken for me today but yeah lol your comment is funny
Hmm, Root motion is quite an interesting thing, but how demanding is it? I'm getting the feeling that it requires more peformance to calculate movement. Would it be suitable for an RTS? Would it also require a root bone that is imobile in animations? Although, perhaps it'd be better to animate in mecanim.
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