I mean like, an additive pose needs to

[lavish spade]

How exactly did you set it? There seems to be a bit of confusion surrounding that

[buoyant osprey]

well i think that checking this box in the rest pose means "hey this is our new default and everything else will check this pose instead of the t pose." could be important if you don't want players to blend to the t pose on accident

[lavish spade]

Can you show this less cropped? Mainly with the clip/take list above it

[lavish spade]

Ah, the misunderstanding may be that you need to set the rest pose for every clip you want to use additively

And it is a pose within that clip

[buoyant osprey]

Huh?

[lavish spade]

Enabling it for rest pose would only help you use the Rest Pose as an additive clip

[buoyant osprey]

then what is it referencing

[lavish spade]

Not "referencing" anything

[buoyant osprey]

lol

wow

[lavish spade]

Just defining one frame of a clip as that clip's reference pose

[buoyant osprey]

well, that still doesn't fix my issue.

they still don't stack

[lavish spade]

You enabled Additive Reference Pose for each clip you want to layer additively?

[buoyant osprey]

yep

[lavish spade]

Did that make the sideways motion on the additive layer work, just when only moving sideways

[buoyant osprey]

it just doesn't work at all

additive layers don't work

i still don't know why.

[lavish spade]

I have a feeling it is due to overlooking something simple

[buoyant osprey]

possibly.

[lavish spade]

Which is why I recommend doing the simplest possible test of an additive clip/layer

It's usually faster and more informative to try that rather early, than troubleshoot for a long time

[buoyant osprey]

siiigh okay, i will set it up.

brand new animation controller, two layers, bottom layer is additive and full weight. Nothing else has been done, just two layers both with an animation. https://streamable.com/cfajum

[lavish spade]

Here your base layer has running, right?
What kind of motion does the Right animation actually have

Is it just a pose like it seems to be in override mode

[buoyant osprey]

like you wanna see the preview in blender?

[lavish spade]

More preferably in your import settings preview

[buoyant osprey]

Its just the pose that turns the player slightly like you see in game

the problem isn't that the animation is broken it just won't be additive

[lavish spade]

Then what we see is totally expected

[buoyant osprey]

additive completely not working is expected?

[lavish spade]

In this case yes, since it's a clip with just a pose and no motion

Additive animation adds the clip's animation relative to the clip's "additive reference pose" on top of previous layers

So that means it can't affect animation that's already there, only add to it per-property

And because it's relative to the additive reference pose, means the reference pose has to be different than the actual motion you want

[buoyant osprey]

What?

https://streamable.com/9y0uol

your saying this is wrong? this shouldn't be happening?

[lavish spade]

I'm not familiar enough with blender's NLA editor to really know what is precisely happening

[buoyant osprey]

I'm blending an offset pose on an animation

additive animation

[lavish spade]

If so, then it reflects what you can achieve in Unity

[buoyant osprey]

then why isn't it working

[lavish spade]

Like I said before you can't directly use a clip that's just a pose as an additive clip
Because you have no way to define that pose as relative to anything except itself

[buoyant osprey]

GRRR https://i.imgur.com/wn1qvUI.png

[lavish spade]

With Additive Reference Pose as some frame, change from that frame in keyframed properties is recorded

But if the clip is just a pose, and that is also the reference pose, there's no change at all

#🏃┃animation message

[buoyant osprey]

So it can't be additive and i have to export each additive composite seperately

thats lovely.

[lavish spade]

Not separately
More like together

You need a clip that has the reference pose ("rest pose") and the Right pose together
Could have all other directional poses in it likewise

[buoyant osprey]

ohhh, i get it.

[lavish spade]

Then you can use the Start and End to cut up that Source Take into directional clips

And make sure Pose Frame matches your Rest Pose, wherever it is in the source take
Preferably the start

[buoyant osprey]

ugh thats annoying. Id need to add a rest pose to the animation, why is that even a thing?

Can i add the rest pose outside of the loop time somehow

[lavish spade]

Outside of the source take, you mean
I have not found a way to do so

There may be a technical reason for that, but may also be related that the typical workflow used to be to import all animations in one long take and cut them up anyway, so every frame would be available to use as reference pose

[buoyant osprey]

I made perfect animations that work perfectly in blender, but completely fall apart in unity for some reason. Sigh, its never easy.

[lavish spade]

Two possible reasons come to mind
Your NLA strips are using "combine" method, not "add" exactly, so it could be different from unity's additive animation, though I think that's a bit unlikely
But moreover in Blender you're keyframing your IK targets and other control bones, and so it's their clips that are being blended
To export out of blender those bones are removed and they're all baked down to FK limb motion
So blending after baking and exporting can produce significantly different results

[buoyant osprey]

probabl something to do with ik being removed, but that really sucks

theres no way to bake all these animations

Without it being terrible

[lavish spade]

Also, when you're walking diagonally, are the clips playing at 50% weight/blend, or both at 100%

[buoyant osprey]

Should be 100%, but i haven't polished it perfectly yet.

[lavish spade]

Would be prudent to check from the Animator live update that the clips are truly fully in effect

[buoyant osprey]

well i still need to fix the issues first or this is a deadend

[lavish spade]

Important to verify that the issues are what you think they are
The result we see could be caused by partial blending

[buoyant osprey]

I know for sure the arm isn't, and thats assurely a problem with ik.

[lavish spade]

And remember breaks
I think you've been grinding at the same issue for a few hours and learning new things all the way, both mentally extra strains to a task

[buoyant osprey]

My only goal for today was to just get this stuff working, i thought it would be as simple as just pasting the stuff in

but its never that simple

aauugh

[lavish spade]

You are making an animation system that's not as simple as most, to solve a problem that may turn out to be more complex than anticipated

[buoyant osprey]

Putting two animations together, i thought that was the standard! i thought that would be fine!

[lavish spade]

No task at all in development is truly simple
Just happens we've got tools that can skip all that underlying complexity, provided they are used exactly as intended

[buoyant osprey]

Its always simple until you hit an edge case

and for some reason i hit one every 5 seconds

How was i supposed to know additive animations don't just work, how was i supposed to know player controllers don't usually have rigid body physics and kinematic at the same time, it just keeps happening

[lavish spade]

Emphasis on "exactly as intended"
What is real development if not edge cases, when we combine features and systems that alone might seem rather simple to use

[buoyant osprey]

lol

yea

[lavish spade]

I find it better to consider things going smoothly an exception, even when if it were to happen most of the time

Problem solving is what we do, whichever side of the keyboard the problem ends up originating

[buoyant osprey]

But these problems aren't from us.

They're from the engine being needlessly dumb

[lavish spade]

Misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions cannot functionally be blamed on the tools
Whether the difficulty is a result of the engine being "dumb" or not, ultimately it's you who has to somehow dispel them by research, purposeful testing and practice
Ideally in a way that gives you the experience to avoid more of the same issues

[buoyant osprey]

I mean, even after all this this is still practically a dead end. My only options are to rebuild the IK inside of unity every time i reimport or bake 20 animations

Rebuilding the IK is a bit more practical, but still not ideal.

[lavish spade]

That's assuming my theory is right about the IK being necessary
But even then it's not a dead end because then it might be one of the better ways to solve the problem

[buoyant osprey]

Rebuilding the IK is a better way to solve the problem?

[lavish spade]

I'm not really aware of many good alternatives because it's such a fundamental challenge

A simpler option might be to use simpler movement animations which you don't try to blend so accurately, and live with them not matching the movement precisely

[buoyant osprey]

That isn't a solution, thats just the bake 20 animations approach.

[lavish spade]

Why 20?

[buoyant osprey]

Walk, Walk-Back, Run, Run-Back. (Walk-Left, Walk-Right, Walk-Back-Left, Walk-Back-RIght, Run-Back-Left, Run-Back-Right, Walk-Combat, Walk-Back-Combat, Run-Combat, Run-Back-Combat. Walk-Left-Combat, Walk-Right-Combat, Walk-Back-Left-Combat, Walk-Back-RIght-Combat, Run-Back-Left-Combat, Run-Back-Right-Combat,)

And thats if we ignore jumping

[lavish spade]

Doesn't your combat animation involve just the arm, not hips

Jumping or any mid-air movement probably doesn't need pace-perfect diagonal movement animations either

[buoyant osprey]

It still uses IK, and its still broken since my custom rig can't really use avatar masks

[lavish spade]

Transform masks can be used instead

And IK can be used just as well, and blended in and out when needed

Also could be worth the trouble to go looking for inspiration and solutions in other games, since many have had to deal with this issue in some way

[buoyant osprey]

my avatar isn't an option for some reason

[lavish spade]

Likely they've made some heavy compromises which we don't even notice

[lavish spade]

You need to create a generic avatar first, afaik

[buoyant osprey]

This was the solution i came up with, i could've sworn other games did this exact thing!

[lavish spade]

(as long as you don't look at triple-A games which do have 40 animations easily)

The cheapest running setup I could come up with that solves this problem would get by with 7 running animations

[buoyant osprey]

I've already made so many, since my first try using 10 way didn't work.

[lavish spade]

By compromise I mean sacrificing accuracy to make it simpler

[buoyant osprey]

I'm already doing what i thought the bare minimum was.

two animations combine, how can you screw- and they screwed it up.

I could bake movement animations but id still need to get holding items to not suck by getting masks and Ik working.

Theres no way around this.

[lavish spade]

However many you bake you will have to solve the blending or transitioning between strafes with incompatible leg and hip orientations
What your blender previewing doesn't reveal is how the player might be able to mess up the leg positioning by freely changing strafe direction

[buoyant osprey]

Leg position never changes though thats the thing, the master bones are the only things that rotate.

So this should've been completely impervious to being screwed up, like there's nothing else i can do.

[lavish spade]

Master bones?

[buoyant osprey]

Yea, the turning animation just rotates the master bones.

[lavish spade]

What are "master bones" in this case

[buoyant osprey]

Master (controls everything except head), master foot (buffer between master and the foot targets)

https://streamable.com/m1fu8l

The pose is just those two and some slight foot rotation to get better bends, thats it.

we could do without the foot rotation, and thats how i would bake the animations.

but it would still kinda suck.

This is the most simple setup i could've thought of and it didn't work.

I'm at a loss

[lavish spade]

If the "master bone's" effect is driven by constraints rather than hierarchy, it would not have the same effect after exporting

[buoyant osprey]

but they aren't

again, the only idea i can think of is that IK isn't exported and thats a guarentee, these formats don't retain that info.

[lavish spade]

So, master bone is the parent of all other bones, and the head instead is kept in place by constraints?

[buoyant osprey]

its kept in place by the don't inherit rotation check

I didn't want rotating the torso to rotate the head

[lavish spade]

Well, likewise that's a feature that's not exportable
But it wouldn't have an effect on the walking since it's just the head

[buoyant osprey]

aaaagh, why do i even use blender if none of this stuff is exportable.

[lavish spade]

Exportable via baking is usually plenty good enough

[buoyant osprey]

oh yea, sure it is.

[lavish spade]

Important to note that your issue is two-pronged here

1. There's the technical side of how baking changes things, what kind of IK you would need if any, if additive animations are working as expected, etc
2. The fundamental issue of the diagonal walk blendings, as the fact is that there is no "valid" blend between every direction of strafing that wouldn't cause legs to clip into each other, even with IK, and that becomes apparent if you try to replicate these same strafes in physical reality

A human in real life will combine more than one type of "strafing" and avoid that sort of motion altogether to not trip over their own legs, as clipping is not an option but anatomy makes it just as big of an issue

[buoyant osprey]

what do you mean i legit did the solution right here, its perfect in blender.

just speed up the transition, add some ease in and out, and it would be lovely.

I would have everything i need if it would do the things it said it could

[lavish spade]

It solves the first problem of having no valid way to transition between those "conflicting" angles
Second problem is a system that does the swap properly
Third problem is it responding to the real frantic and uncoordinated input movement players will do

[buoyant osprey]

I'm down to do pure procedural animations if i can figure out how

But id rather the current system work

since we would still need ik

[lavish spade]

Same challenge there, I'm afraid
Even if your leg IK positions are determined fully dynamically, you still need a system that makes them avoid going through each other
Or do "chicken steps" in place if the player again chaotically changes directions

Best not to expect that you're on the cusp of solving it quite yet
Even if that were true

[buoyant osprey]

uuuuuggggghhhh

[lavish spade]

I wrestled with the same issue sometime around 2021
I thought I fixed it but apparently I just went with reusing the wrong direction's movement animations for backward diagonal strafes as they blended better with orthogonal strafes

Nobody ever pointed it out

[buoyant osprey]

Well, if you ever wanna help me figure out how to rebuild the IK in unity id be down for that.

[lavish spade]

If I am present here I probably will

But I do recommend going back to the drawing board, even if temporarily, to explore all the options, and references
Locking into a specific solution, especially one that requires a lot of setup and learning, is a big investment for something that'll only maybe work

[buoyant osprey]

Having IK work in general would just be nice

and either way its learning

I'm also certain its an ik issue

since the legs only point towards a direction if theres IK, so rotating the master in game does nothing.

the legs will still point in their usual direction

thats why they animating like they're inside each other

It would also be less work in the long run

since i have to bake less stuff

and don't need to learn something else to get the arm combat animation working

the bandaid solution is usually the worst one, rather than just fixing the root issue.

[lavish spade]

A complex solution with speculative benefits can be a tiresome misadventure

I always do tests before undertaking any big or new challenge

[buoyant osprey]

the only thing thats speculative is you saying it is lol

Again, fixing IK has other benefits

so i wanna fix it regardless

Maybe later tho, has it really been 6 hours of just tryna fix this stuff?

man.

[lavish spade]

If you have not done something before then it would be wise to consider the results speculative
If I recall correctly, not the first time today you've been certain of something that turned out to be not as expected

[buoyant osprey]

It's not my fault! That is unity being stupid and weird! Nobody could have known that!

[lavish spade]

Fault or not, stupid and weird or not, all challenges of the process

Resting should also be a part of the process, indeed ^^

[buoyant osprey]

Why do you talk like a philosopher

[lavish spade]

It is just another tool to make problem solving more efficient
And to have more fun

[buoyant osprey]

Ik doesn't seem to be working, oh boy.

I just looked up a simple tutorial for adding IK

[lavish spade]

On the off chance the tutorial was too simple, check from the documentation that the gameobject and component structures are exactly right:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.animation.rigging@1.4/manual/RiggingWorkflow.html

The constraint demos you see in the documentation are also all importable as samples from the package manager, which are extremely helpful if you need a reference

[buoyant osprey]

okay i'm lost, there seems do be a distinct lact of bone rendering im my scene.

[lavish spade]

Dis you place the bones in the Transforms array

[buoyant osprey]

transform array?

did i miss something in the documentation?

[lavish spade]

"Transforms" expandable field in the component as seen in the screenshot

[buoyant osprey]

I didn't realize i needed to touch that part

Shouldn't the stuff in transforms be the same in the other spots?

[lavish spade]

Stuff in spots?
The Transforms array should have all the transforms of the bone hierarchy that you want to visualize

[buoyant osprey]

Wha- it doesn't just render the bones on the rig?

you have to manually select each one?

I- I THOUGHT IT WAS BROKEN!

[lavish spade]

It renders transforms in the array with bone gizmos
You don't have to "manually select each one" but you do have to place all bones to render in it

[buoyant osprey]

Well alright, atleast the bone renderer works

still gotta figure out whats going on with the constraints

[lavish spade]

For example you can use the lock button on the inspector to keep the bone renderer component visible
(Or right click and select Properties to open another inspector window for it)
Then fold out the bone transforms in Hierarchy, such as by alt+clicking the arrow to expand the whole transform tree
Then shift+click or ctrl+click to select / deselect multiple transforms at once and drag them all into the Transforms field

Some shortcuts you may have not discovered yet

[buoyant osprey]

interesting

[buoyant osprey]

I can't work with this.

I give up. (again)

[buoyant osprey]

I just don't know whats happening at all, ever.

[lavish spade]

Don't use chatbots

[buoyant osprey]

Its right there in unity

[lavish spade]

It should not be

[buoyant osprey]

i couldn't derive much from the documentation

And you weren't around

Like- what options do i have?

[lavish spade]

You can describe the issue in the channel also

[buoyant osprey]

Its like "use your problem solving skills" and the problems make 0 sense

[buoyant osprey]

Sigh, alright.

[lavish spade]

Did you check out the importable examples?

[buoyant osprey]

3d files don't retain ik in imports though

Also no

[lavish spade]

Which is why you'd recreate them

[lavish spade]

So you haven't quite used all your problem solving skills

[buoyant osprey]

I tried to get ik working!

It just doesn't wanna!

Unity is supposed to be something i build on top of not fight or fix every 2 seconds

Even if it works it has little overlap, my rig is very custom.

[buoyant osprey]

like, the chatbot even says that my setup is correct

Nobody actually knows the issue, you just tell me to keep trying random stuff and to see if i can fix it by brute force

[lavish spade]

There are basically no game engines that would be that way, unless they implement heavy guardrails
Like PS Dreams or something

[buoyant osprey]

Making a good engine is hard, but is it really that hard for your engine to make ANY sense?

blender makes sense, and its great!

[lavish spade]

My experience with Blender is waaay worse than Unity in that regard