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Using AC's "Look at" with Timeline

I'm using Unity's Timeline for a few of my cutscenes, but I noticed if a character is animated within Timeline, I can't at the same time use a "Look At" action through an AC Action List. Is there any workaround?

It's possible to completely override/add to an animation within Timeline using Overrides (https://forum.unity.com/threads/animation-timeline-facial-additive-layer.1037212/) but this only allows me to add to it with say, a whole "Look Up" animation - not the 360-degree control that AC has as it allows a character's head to follow the object in any direction.

Any ideas, or am I missing something?

Comments

  • AC has its own "Head Turn" track type that you can use to direct a character's head in a Timeline.

    See the Manual's "Head Turn tracks" for details.

  • Nice! I'll give it a shot, thanks.

  • edited September 2022

    Is this possible for non-humanoid characters? My current models are generic and head turning works by using blend trees with 4 animations for each direction, using a float parameter as suggested in the forums here. I'm converting my characters/animations to humanoid ones but as expected, it's messing up/breaking a lot of my existing animations. Seems a bit overkill just to get head turning integrated with the timeline, so would be perfect if I could just stick to generic models for now. Is it possible?

  • As I understand it, Timeline Animation tracks override the Animator they control - it's not possible to have both play at the same time.

    If you want to animate head-turning on a character being animated with Timeline, you'd have to either use IK (which doesn't rely on Animator states), or use a second Animation track that plays the head-turning animation manually with an applied AvatarMask.

    In what way are you controlling your characters in Timeline? This control shouldn't take effect if you just animate position values, and AC's "Character Animation 3D" track type can be used to control a character's idle/walk animations automatically.

  • This control shouldn't take effect if you just animate position values, and AC's "Character Animation 3D" track type can be used to control a character's idle/walk animations automatically.

    This is a good idea, I'll give using AC tracks for animation within Timelines a shot. I wasn't aware of AC having its own Timeline tracks, thanks for pointing it out!

  • Ah, I misunderstood the function of the CharAnimation3D track. This is only for walk/idle anims? My timeline has a few camera shots, and the character plays a sit, eat and wave etc animation while sitting. I want the head to track during this, so I guess the AC track won't help here with these sitting related anims.

  • Yes - it automates the playing of standard anims.

    If you're playing custom animations within the Timeline, you'll need to similarly do so with head animations with a mask, or rely on IK.

  • Still trying to switch to IK in that case, but head turning for this new character doesn't seem to work. All other animations work fine. If I switch to my old Generic character with specific Look animations, the head turning works fine. Is the IK for head turning set up correctly?

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  • I can't see any issue here - but the character is an NPC, you'll have to use Actions to turn their head, rather than have it turn automatically to Hotspots.

    What does the Action look like? A Head layer on the Animator should not be necessary.

  • edited September 2022

    No, this is a Player character, not an NPC. Walking past Hotspots with this Player does nothing, but it works with the older Player :/ Using an Action to turn his (or any NPC's) head doesn't work either

  • edited September 2022

    I see that if I go into the inspector and try to manually rotate the neck (or any other) bone, that doesn't do anything either. Not sure if that's normal behavior. Seems the bones are being controlled by something else.

    Edit: I guess you can't really edit bones for humanoid animations. Huh https://forum.unity.com/threads/is-it-possible-to-create-humanoid-animations-in-editor.380049/

  • edited September 2022

    Also note that a red gizmo does appear and follows my "Object to face" target game object if I use the Action to turn their head. But the head-turning doesn't occur on the character.

  • Ok, I'm not sure exactly how, but everything seems to be working now using Generic models, Timeline and AC's Face Object Action.

    I reverted to my old setup, and using an Avatar Mask on the Timeline for animating the character model as before, I excluded the character's head (I had it set up this way previously as well) For some reason, the Face Object Action somehow seems to be having an effect through this, without using a second animation track for the head and manually animating the head's rotation. Unless I misunderstood and this is what you'd initially suggested!

    Not really sure what's changed this time and whether this will continue to work going forward, but fingers crossed.

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