Character Override Animation

Objective: Understanding the power of Override Tracks and Avatar Masks!

Here the scenario, we want our character to play an animation while committing to another animation. For example, we have our character idling, at some point we want them to play another animation and maintain some aspects of it. This is called a character animation override.

I have my character walking and let’s say I want to throw a punch. We could always just throw the animation into the Timeline. But we are going to do this differently. There are two methods to accomplish this.

First, we can add an override track. This is going to create a second track on our Timeline.

Let’s drop the punch animation on the override track.

Since this is an override, we don’t get the option to match offsets. So, we are going to have to do this manually. If you select the punch, you have clip transform offsets. If you click the arrows, you can manually move the animation to where the clip offset will be.

You can then do and ease in ease out to smooth the animation transitions.

This is how you can do a manual override; however, this is overriding the entire animation. What if we just want him to punch but then we want them to keep walking. To do this we need to create an avatar mask and apply to the override channel. To create an Avatar mask, click the plus in the Project view, create, avatar mask.

If you select the mask, you have two options, Transform and Humanoid.

Select Humanoid and I’m going to turn off the legs IK.

This is basically saying for our animation in this track, use everything above the hip. Ignore the legs, and position and override everything else. Select the override track and apply the avatar mask.

Now when you play it back the character throws the punch, but the legs keep walking backwards.