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Lesson 4.3 - Configure Humanoid Rigs and Add Animation Clips

We've got cars, security cameras, and stray cats moving about in our Scene. Now it's time to add some pedestrians walking along the sidewalks. In this lesson, we will explore the Humanoid rig to add and animate two characters in our Scene. 

As mentioned in Lesson 4.2, Humanoid rigs can be shared across different characters with similar proportions. As such, they can be reused for common animations like walk cycles. This allows animators to animate only one walk cycle and apply it to many characters. Shared rigs are the underlying principle behind custom characters in multiplayer games and crowd systems in feature films. However, we'll explore it on a much simpler level for this lesson.

Lesson Overview

There are many lively characters for us to animate in this Scene. In this step, we'll demonstrate how to set up the tourist and citizen characters, but as the provided rigs can be shared across humanoid characters, you can follow along with any of the characters that catch your eye. The characters for this lesson can be found in the project under 

as Character_Tourist_01 and Character_Citizen_01. Let's prepare both of these characters now. 

 Select one of the humanoid characters in the Project window. In the Inspector, navigate to the Rig tab. 

 Under the Rig tab, set the Animation Type to 

 — this will tell Unity to look at our character for the rig information that we’ll need to animate it (

(The assets provided in the Starter Project are already set up for you, but if you are bringing in other characters you will need to follow these instructions.)

 Drag the character into the Hierarchy and you should see the character in the Scene (

 Now repeat these steps for the second character. 

Prepare the Humanoid Assets (the two characters)

It’s a good idea to create a Prefab from the character so we can reuse it easily in the future, just as we did for the cat in Lesson 4.2.2. 

 Select the character in the Scene Hierarchy. 

 Drag and drop the character into the Prefabs folder of the Project window. 

 Unity will ask if you wish to create an Original Prefab or a Prefab Variant for the character. Click 

 For ease of reference, let's rename the character in the Hierarchy to 

Creating a Prefab From Our Tourist 

Now that our character is configured and in the Scene as a Prefab, we can configure the Animation Clips that we want to use, much like we did for the cat. For this step, let's use another walk cycle. 

 model package and, in the Inspector, select the Rig tab. 

. As before, this tells Unity where to look for the rig information for our animation.  

 to save the changes to our model package (

Prepare the First Character's Animation Clips

Now that our character and its Animation Clips are ready to use, we can sequence them together in the Timeline. 

Navigate to the character in the Scene Hierarchy. 

 Drag and drop the character onto an empty area in the left panel of the Timeline window. 

 On the drop-down that appears in Timeline, choose 

). Select the character and move it forward to the yellow line in the street. 

 In the Project window, navigate to the Animations folder and expand the 

 model package. In the package is a file named Humanoid_WalkCycle. This is the Animation Clip that we will use in the Timeline (

 Animation Clip onto the new track that we’ve created in the Timeline and place it at 

).  You will notice that the character now jumps back to the coordinates of X=0, Y=0, and Z=0. To get the character back to the location it was originally in select the character’s 

. This will prevent the Animation Clip’s baked in location from overriding the character’s location. 

You will notice that, unlike the cat we placed earlier, our first character walks in a straight line. This is because the Animation Clip includes root motion, which means the motion and direction of the animation is baked into the clip. 

While this can be helpful in circumstances where characters will always be fixed in a certain place, we sometimes want to course-correct a character so we can have more control over 

 the character will go when root motion is included. 

In this lesson, we want to have the character walk down the street. To do this, we'll create an Override Track to set the character at the correct starting position. 

 Right-click on the Animation Track for the character and choose 

. As before, this will add a child track to the character’s Animation Track (called Override 0) (

 Scrub the Timeline playhead to Frame 0 and click the 

 button on the Override Track to arm it for recording (

 With the Override Track, we want to redefine 

 the character walks. Select the character in the Scene Hierarchy and position him along the right side of the sidewalk by the SynCola sign. Then, in the Inspector, right-click on the Transform component's Position and choose 

 and translate the character forward on the z-axis either in the Inspector or the Scene view so he arrives at the intersection on the left side of the road. Press the 

As before, we must loop the Animation Clip to have the tourist animate as he walks.

 Animation Clip on the Timeline. In the Inspector, choose 

 from the drop-down to update the Post-Extrapolate setting for the Animation Clip (

Add the First Character to Our Timeline and Apply the Animation

Next, we will apply the same process to have another character walk down the opposite side of the street. We will need to add more than two keyframes to our Override Track to allow the character to turn a corner. We will demonstrate this using the Citizen character, but you are again welcome to choose from any Humanoid character in the project for this lesson.  

 Drag and drop the character into the Project window’s Prefabs folder. 

 For ease of reference, let's rename the character 

Add the Second Character to Our Timeline and Apply a Walk Cycle

 From the drop-down that appears in Timeline, choose 

 In the Project window, navigate to the Animations folder and expand the Humanoid_WalkCycle model package. In the model package is a file named Humanoid_WalkCycle. This is the Animation Clip we will use on the Timeline (

 Animation Clip onto the new track that we’ve created in the Timeline and place it at the start of the Timeline (

. As before, this will add a child track to the character’s Animation Track (called Override 0). (

 With the Override Track, we want to have the character walk down from the intersection, then turn the corner to walk on the same street as the tourist character, except in the opposite direction. Select the character in the Scene Hierarchy and position her along the right side of the sidewalk. Then, in the Inspector, right-click on the Transform component's Position and choose 

Now that we have our starting position, we need to animate the character turning the corner. For these next steps, let's click the top button on the gizmo in the upper-right corner of the Scene view to see the Scene from bird's eye perspective. This will help us position and rotate the character at each key. 

 and translate the character to the start of the corner, then rotate her slightly in the direction of the turn. A new key will automatically be added to the Override Track (

 and translate the character to the center of the corner, where the roads intersect, and rotate her even further into the turn (

 and translate the character to the end of the corner so that she is now on the intersecting street. Rotate her so that she’s nearly parallel to the street (

Now your Timeline's Override Track should have four frames like so (

As before, we must loop the Animation Clip to have the character animate as they walk.

 on the Timeline. In the Inspector, choose 

Add the Second Character to Our Timeline and Apply the Animation

To further tidy our Timeline, we can create another Group Track to contain the three characters (the stray cat and two pedestrians) we've added to the Scene. 

 Go to the Timeline, navigate to the plus sign and add a Track Group. A new empty Track Group will appear (

 Click and drag the three tracks we created for the characters into the new Characters Group (

Organizing the Timeline and Conclusion

In this lesson, you learned how to prepare the Humanoid model, create a Prefab, prepare the Humanoid Animation Clips, add the characters to the Timeline, animate them, and, finally, organize your Scene. 

As we mentioned previously, Humanoid Animation Clips can be shared across Humanoid characters. So if you find a library of Humanoid Animation Clips, you can use those clips to animate your character. If you feel confident with the skills you learned in this lesson, we encourage you to try adding additional Humanoid Animation Clips to your characters. You can get clips through Adobe Mixamo (easy) or from motion capture libraries like 

 originally from Carnegie Mellon University’s Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database (harder because you need to know more about preparing animations for humanoid characters.)  

Unity Version 2019.4