Does Needle have any way of allowing multiple Animation Timeline tracks to affect the same object?

🌵 Needle Engine
1

Hello again! We’re trying to animate some characters with separately-produced **facial **and **body **animations, and historically we’ve used override animation tracks to do this for Unity WebGL. The Needle documentation notes clearly that neither Animator sub-states nor Timeline sub-timelines are currently supported, which is understandable, so we’re preparing to make our peace with that and start manually combining .anim files.

But I had to ask anyway - is there any workaround we haven’t thought of, or any hope for Override Track support in the next few weeks? For example, we’ve tried multiple animation tracks with non-intersecting avatar masks, but that didn’t seem to do the trick. Thanks as always!

Original Post on Discord

by user 248501710404845568

2

About Override tracks: they have been requested on github once i think (i think there is an open issue) but they are currently not planned to be implemented anytime soon (if ever to be honest, if there is enough interest but probably not in the near future)

3

we do plan to convert hundreds of timeline tracks which rely on them eventually :sweat_smile: but the animation-merging workflow might not make that too painful

by user 248501710404845568

4

still, very much appreciate the insight into the timing!

by user 248501710404845568

5

Will you write some tool for that in Unity or something that’ll merge and blend at runtime?

6

was thinking I’d write a tool in Unity, but also a somewhat “dumb” solution like this one might be faster/cheaper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtETMFUyPNk

by user 248501710404845568

7

(using a Unity Recorder track and the FBX exporter to just generate a new .fbx)

by user 248501710404845568

8

You might be able to do it with the GltfRecorder tooling too cc @herbst🌵

9

Isn’t timeline control tracks supported by now @marcel :cactus:? Thought pfc uses that heavily

10

Yep totally. GltfRecorderTrack for the rescue, have converted many timelines with that already :slightly_smiling_face:

11

Control tracks are supported yes but animating the same object with multiple timelines will most likely still not work since every timeline has their own mixer. I dont think i have tried that tho

12

whoa! so my google-fu is weak - where can find that GltfRecorderTrack?

by user 248501710404845568

13

@sjkl since UnityGltf is a dependeny of our integration - :drum: - you have it already! Simply make a GltfRecorder track in your timeline, add a recorder clip, set root & path and press play. You’ll have to turn off “override enter playmode” in Needle Engine settings so it can be baked

14

excellent! we’ll give that a try and report back, then. Thanks again!!!

by user 248501710404845568

15

Or do it in a scene without ExportInfo :slightly_smiling_face:

16

Yep, let me know how it goes. If you want to do it in a project without Needle Engine you can add our registry (https://packages.needle.tools) with scope (org.khronos) and package (org.khronos.unitygltf)

17

As an example, all the scenes here have been converted from fully fledged Unity timelines to plain single animations: https://nachhaltigkeit.deutschebahn.com/de/dialog/apps/umweltrallye/station1

18

For the future, we thought about adding a “bake Timeline to clip” of sorts to timeline export as option in Needle, but haven’t done that yet

19

hey, so, reporting back - I’ve given this a try, but it’s not going great :grimacing: the recorder does things to the model which are… not ideal! and the animation file produced doesn’t seem to actually move

image.png
image.png1313Ă—840 91.3 KB

by user 248501710404845568

20

I’ll need a repro to look at :slightly_smiling_face:
Ideally you open an issue at https://github.com/prefrontalcortex/unitygltf with an assetbundle and repro steps.