Hutts, Humans, Mecanim.

I wasn't able to fall asleep, don't worry. I have some sleepy tea steeping, so, hopefully.

When I lay with my eyes closed long enough and nothing happens, I get up and do something, the general rule is 15 minutes, but in tonights case, it was 30 minutes.

Anyways, technically its January 29th now. I'm not sure how I want to structure all the devlogs/journals/blog posts or whatever. Usually I just annoy my buddies with all my updates. It's somewhat a one-sided conversation, as I'll spend an hour reporting on some research or problem solving I've done in the middle of the night when no one is awake. One of them suggested a few weeks ago, that I could start a blog. And then I remembered that I've been paying for this domain for a couple years now, and I've done next to nothing with it.

Anyways, I digress. This post isn't about me or my life, or other projects or general blog things. It's about Jedi Game, and the progress I'm making, and the challenges I encounter, and the possible solutions.

Here's an interesting question I haven't been able to find addressed anywhere. Can you use Unity's Mecanim system for a half humanoid character?

Humans and Hutts are different. You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to figure that out. But they're actually sort of a lot alike, from the waist up. They have a face with a mouth, nose, two eyes, and a torso, with just two arms.

It would certainly be nice if I could reuse some of my pre-existing humanoid animations on the hutt, for, just the arms I suppose. Though the more I think about it, the less sure I am that this is even worth trying. Still. For science, I'll give it a shot. Maybe someone will happen to stumble upon my results on google and find it useful.

So I guess the first thing I'll try, just slamming a human rig inside the hutt, and hoping for the best.

okay lets put him ingame. This is with no manual rigging aside from placing the bones.

Aside from the weird split tail, it honestly retargeted pretty good. I actually like the way the body kind of jiggles and wiggles as he walks. I think with some weightpainting, potentially setting the tail to a higher up bone, like the spine or something, and maybe even lowering the weight of the legs on the areas they still do affect a bit, this could really work out.

For science, and, really, for you, the reader. I tried also removing the leg bones. Unity got upset, and wouldn't count the avatar as valid. This isn't too unexpected, but its worth noting, some bones can be removed from a humanoid rig without too much issue. For instance, I did remove the ring fingers on the Hutt, as he has a total of four fingers (counting thumbs) rather than five.

Setting pretty much all of the tail weights to the Spine actually gave me a pretty good result. As tends to happen with overweight characters on retargeted animations, his arms clip his sides, but it's still probably less work than a bunch of brand new animations on a different skeleton. I'll have to upload a video some other time, I should probably go to sleep