Gear, shadow rig and Unity

[mirkoj]

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone is using this combo for some time now and if anyone found if it is possible in any way to use gear shadow rig with new mecanim stuff?
As I saw mecanim humanoid rig is based on bone setup, while gear shadow rig is all nulls so...
Other thing is what do you think if it would be possible and also good to build another shadow rig on top of current one...
made of simple bones for exporting to Unity instead of current one?
Tat would involve new weights as well but...
well you see where I'm going
Thanks

[gaboraa]

I don't use Mecanim but exported lots of models to unity. I heard Mecanim is like Motion Builder where you have to have some required bones to get the character going. I heard the hierarchy for the process is as follows:

HIPS - spine - chest - shoulders - arm - forearm - hand
HIPS - spine - chest - neck - head
HIPS - UpLeg - Leg - foot - toe - toe_end

it would probably be much better to make your own shadow rig but for me the most important think is that creating an independent, non-hierarchical rigs work best much of the time because all the bones would get animation independently and in this way you can easily export animation out of XSI but these kind of rigs don't get along well with mecanim.

Also it would be wise to test on your own and see if gear would serves you best.

[mirkoj]

well gear works grat, geting job done and all but not really working well with mecanim, and it seems like mecanim got some nice things that could be usefull like ground detection for like running up the ramp or something...
seems that gear wont be working for things like that...

also another thing is would it be possbile when exporting FBX and having animation sepparated, like for example:

Character.FBX
Character@walk
Character@run
...


To export animations without mesh as well to reduce size and only read actual animation from fbx file?
I tried but seems like there has to be mesh inside fbx as well in order to read it correctly on fbx without animation.


EDIT:
Forget it it works my bad.
I was turning of geometry export in FBX options and ofc it didn't work. Exporting Shadow rig only and no geo works fine. Now just to see if it affects size as I hope it will

[mirkoj]

Another important thing I've figured out today.
It is more Unity thing but may have reason in GEAR as well.

When using mecanim to drive models with animations when built app is twice as big compared to same app that is using legacy anim instead of mecanim.
Now it can be due to mecanim it self... but also may have something with the fact that GEAR got it's shadow rig made of a LOT of nulls that drives envelope.
It seems that number of bone objects in this case nulls is affecting size and probably even performance as well.

Now if anyone can confirm that? Also would it be good to try and make 2nd shadow rig.. to remove a lot of those nulls and keep only "important ones" or to create another bon rig on top of those nulls and use that as skeleton in Unity..

Does anything of this have any sense?