Old AC'r is back with a question or two :)

blogsabout

Hello There
Having used AC in the past to "hack" concepts (I have projections for shows etc, using the camera switch functions etc).
I'm finding out if it could the right choice to pull AC back from the dusty corner, to use on a project where I have a digital host that I have animated and will react to certain choices.

1. Can using several mixamo animation clip for my character - when a specific animation is being played, can I also play a facial animation that I have made as an animation clip at the same time?
2. I have several particles in the scene, can I play those while the character animations is running? (and not after the animations is done, since it would be next node. I need to have several nodes running at the same time)

Thanks.
Best, Dan

ChrisIceBox

Welcome back, @blogsabout.

Can using several mixamo animation clip for my character - when a specific animation is being played, can I also play a facial animation that I have made as an animation clip at the same time?

On a technical level, this is more of a Unity question than an AC one - since you'd be using Unity's Animator component - which supports layering of animation - to handle your character's animation.

AC can play animations on different layers, however, with it's Character: Animate Action. If your character is speaking via AC's Dialogue: Play speech Action, you can also enter in the name of an animation to play on the head/mouth layer (as defined in the character's Inspector), provided your chosen Animation engine is Mecanim.

There are also a number of options for lipsyncing - see the Manual's "Lip syncing" chapter for more.

I have several particles in the scene, can I play those while the character animations is running? (and not after the animations is done, since it would be next node. I need to have several nodes running at the same time)

So long as you don't check an Action's Wait until finish? checkbox, the Action that follows will be run at the same time. The ActionList: Run in parallel Action can also be used to run multiple chains of Actions together.

However, it may be worth looking at Unity's Timeline feature, which is a handy choice when attempting to sync up animations from different objects. AC supports Timeline with its own MainCamera and Speech tracks, as demonstrated by the updated 3D Demo when AC is imported in Unity 2018.3 or newer.

blogsabout

Thanks Chris.
Have had so much fun working with AC, I think it's time to get back in.
The Camera Switch feature has been so useful with the offsets and smoothing - I did a large show for a very famous theme park that was shown on massive screens.
Almost gave it a "steady cam" feel.
Impressive to see how new features keep getting added.
Thanks for this amazing tool.

ChrisIceBox

I did a large show for a very famous theme park that was shown on massive screens.

If you can't elaborate here but can in a PM, I'd love to hear more!