You can animate skinned characters directly in the editor using Movie Maker. This tutorial covers:
Movie Maker's skeletal animation tools are enabled if you have at least one SkinnedModelRenderer in your movie with a Bones sub-track. When enabled for a renderer, you'll see its skeleton.
You'll also need to be in the Motion Editor to do the modifications described in this tutorial.
Animating skinned objects from scratch can be time consuming, so you'll usually want to start with an imported or generated base-level animation that you can tweak later.
For simple sequences you can just load an animation from your model.
Root motion will be included by default, you can disable it by locking the LocalPosition / LocalRotation tracks of the object you're animating.
You can save a lot of time by letting AnimGraph generate an animation for you. You'll just need LocalPosition and LocalRotation tracks describing how your character moves. These can be created in any way you like: keyframes, recording, or motion editing.
If you've only got a LocalPosition track, you can generate a LocalRotation track that always looks in the direction of movement. Just select the time range you want to generate rotations for in the motion editor, then right-click and select Rotate with Motion in the context menu, and apply if you're happy with it.
Before moving on to the next step, feel free to tweak the generated LocalRotation track if you want your character to side-step or walk backwards at any point.
When you have LocalPosition and LocalRotation tracks for your SkinnedModelRenderer, you can generate AnimGraph parameter tracks based on that motion. Select the time range you want to generate the track data for, and select Motion to AnimGraph Parameters in the context menu.
You can find the generated tracks nested under Parameters in the track list, and again they can be tweaked using keyframes or motion editing before moving to the next step.
If you want to have more fine-grained control over how your character moves, you'll need to bake its animation into bone tracks. As always, select the time range you want to bake, then select AnimGraph Parameters to Bones in the context menu. Now you're ready to move on to the Manipulating Poses section.
Another way to generate initial bone track data is to record it in play mode. You'll just need to create tracks for the bones you want to record before you start. We've included a sub-track preset for the built-in player controller as an example.
Before we had dedicated bone track support, the best you could do was to enable Create Bone Objects on a SkinnedModelRenderer and add all the created objects to your movie. If you have an existing animation using that method, you can upgrade it to the new-style bone tracks with this context menu option. After doing the upgrade, you can manually delete the old tracks and disable Create Bone Objects.
We have some basic tools to help you tweak how your characters are posed during your movie. This is fairly minimal currently, but should be enough to do things like layer upper body motion on top of a walk animation generated using the above methods.
You should know the basics of Motion Editing before getting started here.
First, select a time region in your movie that you want to animate a pose change for. Next, click and drag from a joint. We'll simulate an IK chain going from the dragged bone to the root to try to find a sensible pose. While dragging, you can press Esc to cancel. Press the green Apply button when you're happy to commit the change to your animation.
When dragging a bone, you can hold the E key to start rotating it in place.
Bones can be locked or unlocked in the context menu, or by holding Shift and clicking on them. This can be especially useful for things like finger posing by locking the hand.
Currently this will only animate correctly if you lock an ancestor of whichever bone you're manipulating. You can lock descendant bones like in the example below, but the lock is only considered for the current playhead time while posing.