Custom Animator Controllers on humanoid avatars
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Hugo Zink
There is a Custom Overrides system for avatar animations. However, this system is quite limited. It only lets you override the game's animations. It does not let you change how these animations work, or how they interact with each other. You are stuck with the default "flow". If you want to make longer hand gestures or have them separated between your left/right hand for example, this is not possible.
I propose a solution to this problem: give us access to our own Animator controllers. Add an extra option in the Avatar Descriptor component that allows us to specify our own Animator controller entirely.
The VRChat SDK already contains a sample asset, called "AvatarControllerTemplate". This seems to be a fully functional Animator controller, but with all the animations replaced with placeholders. As you can see here, this animator controller seems to contain all the necessary parameters to make it work within the game: https://i.imgur.com/DnUofXG.png
These parameters are set by the game itself. They tell the animator which direction we are moving in, which gestures are being pressed, etc. With our own animator controller, we could let our avatar freely interpret these parameters in any way we want. There are many possibilities, all we need is access to our own controllers.
To sum up, here are some possible things we could do with our own custom animator controllers:
* Separate gesture overrides between left/right hand, giving us 7 more gesture slots
* Make gesture overrides longer than 2 frames
* Add animations for landing from a jump
* Add more different walking animations
* Add AFK animations
* Add spawn animations (animations that trigger once after loading)
* Use emotes and/or gestures to make advanced state machines
As for security issues, generic rigged avatars already have custom animator controllers. Therefore, giving them to Humanoid avatars should pose no extra risk. Generic rigs are very limited in their own ways, and they do not work well with VR. Therefore, I would like to see custom animator controllers being supported on humanoid avatars.
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Ruuubick - Designer
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StormiTheAvali
Is most of this what Avatars 3.0 is doing?
Dj Lukis․LT
Yes
Demirramon
Please please please don't forget about this. The community would fix so many problems with the current animator by themselves if anyone could use a custom one.
☆Cupcake☆
i only recently learned to use animators for state machines and came to the same conclusion as this post pretty quickly.
it would be an amazing addition to the game and in theory realtively easy to add.
on top of the benefits you already wrote down it will clear out a lot of animation hierarchy problems and also it will optimise the avatar by removing the need for more than one animator component.
although... i see this was posted in august.
i really hope this one has not been forgotten or perhaps theres an issue that i just dont see.
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aytimothy
This would be even better, especially for desktop players of there was custom key binds as well.
Made a separate canny post with the extension: https://vrchat.canny.io/feature-requests/p/custom-animator-controllers-and-custom-key-binds
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Hugo Zink
With the recent removal of legacy animations, I feel like this deserves to be looked at some more. Custom animator controllers would be able to solve all the problems that legacy animations initially solved.
UnknownAK
Would love for this to be added, having separate gesture sets for each hand would be a massive improvement!
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addtovrchat
This is a feature that should not be ignored, this should be implemented in the next update to allow for better creativity of people actually keeping your providing content to your game.
Denwa
Please allow this for humanoid avatars as you allow it for non-humanoid. This opens up man possibilities as the OP mentioned.
Also, the recent update broke a work around using VRIK to add a custom animation controller which is saddening as it was our own way to do custom animators up till the update.
Zennshi
I agree with all of this, we had split gestures for a minute then it was swept away.
Even for just a moment I had them and it was amazing.
That is kind of a problem that something so basic feels that way - we need this.
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