Tail Animator

⚡ Tail Animator Version 2 is package of behaviors simulating elastic tail movement with procedural animation giving many new capabilities to you!

This animator will add much more realism and smoothness to your

keyframed animations of tail or just animate it for you without need of making animations in other softwares.

✍ You can add tail elasticity to anything you want:

capes / plants / tentacles / arms / whole body (it needs bones or other parented game objects) Possibilities are limited only by your mind.

Package comes with tool to create skinned meshes with bones just inside unity and can be used also to skin models in runtime.

(mainly for tail type models, it's not creating full humanoid skeleton for example)

☄️ Component reacts with changes on object's position / rotation / scale.

Just add component to object you want to animate elastic, define root transform

(or bone) and play with parameters.

⚙ Don't worry about performance, you can use a lot of Tail Animators simultaneously without changes on CPU even on mobile!

Package works on all SRPs! It's not shader related package.

(You just need to covert standard Demo materials for demo examples)

Built In ✅ LWRP ✅ URP ✅ HDRP ✅ Custom RP ✅

Also if you use Optimizers you can let yourself use even more of them!

⌛ Save tones of hours of animating smoothly tails, cloaks, or other stuff!

Let Tail Animator do it for you. If you need specific movement animation of tail but it lack smooth motion then attach to it Tail Animator which will really bring it to life!

Community Thread Link

Visual Friendly User Manual Here

Manual Video Explaining Different Parameters

⭐ MAIN FEATURES ⭐

● Very high performance!

● Easy - instant setup

● No programming needed

● Custom inspector window with handy functions and tooltips

● Tutorial videos on my Youtube Channel

● Smoothing and giving more feeling to original animation

● Customize Tail Animator on anything - tails, cloths, limbs etc.

● Different parameters to customize jiggly / stiff / wavy motion

● Collision detection with all type of colliders in world space or just selected ones

● Optional Inverse Kinematics algorithms with adjustable tentacle motion ● Includes interactive demo scenes

● Includes full source code

● Scripts are commented in detailed way

● Blending tail animator with keyframed animation

● Component to create skinned mesh with tail structure from static mesh without need of external tools

Feel free to post your creations made with this package on community thread, I would love to see it!

Release Notes

V2.0.7.4

- Fixed issue of Tail Animator not updating after being disabled, when using Fixed Update Late mode.

- <IK Align End With Target> now is using all 3 axis for rotation

V2.0.7.3

- Implemented <IK Align End With Target> parameter, to make last tail bone be rotated as IK target object

V2.0.7.2

- Fixed dynamic colliders inclusion trigger sphere radius scale

- Dynamic inclusion trigger collider reference is now accessable throught variable "GeneratedDynamicInclusionCollider"

V2.0.7.1

- When time scale is set to zero, tail motion will pause

V2.0.7

- Support for CharacterController collider

- Added IK Invert Order option for Tail Animator IK

V2.0.6

- Reworked wind effect

- Polished "Detach" feature which makes algorithm works up to 6 times faster but IT DOESN'T WORK WITH ANIMATED MODELS! It's good for example for cloth.

- Some optimizations

06.2021: New arrange of asset directories to be in sync with my all other packages, please remove all FImpossible directories, update plugins on the asset store and import them to the project again.

V2.0.5

- Inspector window now is less vertical long, tweak categories are selected in horizontal menu

- Added experimental version for 2D collision detection

- Optimized some collision algorithms

- Added "Animate" Roll toggle (under "Additional Parameters") which will make smooth rotate bones in forward axis (Tail Animator V1 style)

---------- !!! WARNING FOR BIG UPDATE TO V2 !!! ----------

Tail Animator V2 is using only one and new component for all Tail Animator features, old Tail Animators V1 can be converted to V2 component by importing Converter unitypackage.

Tail Animator V2 motion can look different after conversion so it needs some adjustements after conversions.

v2.0.0

- New component containing all other components features (only it should used from V2) - Tail Animator V2

- New GUI

- Language support for inspector tabs titles

- New parameters: "Slithery" -> V2 Slithery setted to 1 / 1.2 will make motion look almost the same like V1 motion

"Curling": Similar to V1 "Sensitivity" parameter

"Sustain" (experimental): Making tail bounce more after moving (more noticable with boosted "Springiness")

"Unify Bendiness" (experimental): Making tail bend in similar way no matter how many bones / how long tail model is

"Reaction Speed" / "Rotation Relevancy" / "Animation Mode": Working in almost the same way like V1 "positions / rotations speed

- Fixed Update Rate mode to make Tail Animator motion look the same in Higher / Low fps domain

- "Prewarm" option to pre-animate tail before first game frame to avoid jiggly start in some cases

- "Root to parent" parameter replaced by "Include" / "Exclude" dropdown next to "Start Bone"

- "Queue to last update" renamed to "Update as last"

- "Blend To Original" renamed to "Tail Animator Amount" and reacting in reverse way than old "Blend To Original"

- New parameter "Limit Axis 2D" to restrict tail animator for rotating around 2D space (please adjust auto waving axis if you using "Auto Waving" - some cases can't be restricted)

- All main parameters now have possibility to spread values separately on each tail segment with curve

- "Use Waving" renamed to "Auto Waving" and putted into new "Additional Modules" tab

- "Fixed Cycle" for syncing tails waving animation for "Auto Waving"

- "Collisions" feature in additional modules tab

- Collisions algorithm upgraded and enchanced with some new paramters

- "Collision Swapping" renamed to "Reflect Collisions" and working in reverse way than V1 parameter

- Experimental "Collisions Slippery" parameter to make tails slide a bit less on colliders

- Selective collision space have new tab "Dynamic World Colliders Inclusion" to dynamically add colliders from scene with trigger collider

- "Partial Blend" as module

- New "Inverse Kinematics" feature using CCD IK

- New experimental "Deflection" feature to make collision affect back tail segments when deflecting it

- New "Disable when Far" feature to smoothly disable tail animator when is far from main camera or other object

- Experimental wind effector

- Upgraded Mesh Skinning API to be used in Editor but also in Playmode

- New demo scenes

- Possibility and examples of cutting tail to smaller ones and generating additional segments dynamically

- Example of generating tail model procedurally and skinning it in runtime

- And much more small improvements

v1.3.7

- Added capsule collision option for World Space collision (not balanced yet)

- Upgraded FTail_Skinner efficiency (spreading weights)

- Now after skinning model with FTail_Skinner, vertex colors for meshes will be unchanged

- Added download link for DynamicBone syncer in "DynamicBone Syncer.txt" to sync DynamicBone's collision system with tail animator and combine motion

(between 1.3.7 and 1.3.6)

- Added new animation parameter "Motion Influence" - if your character moves too fast you can controll influence of position changes for tail motion.

- Added "Animate Root" option, which is applying animation rotations of first chain in bone like "Animate Corrections"

- Small changes and fixes inside inspector window

v1.3.6

- Added "Max Angle" variable to limit maximum rotation of each segment from it's initial rotation

- Using "Max Angle" parameter, enables other parameters to limit selective axis of rotating, otherwise all axes are clamped to "Max Angle"

- Added parameter "Stiff Tail End" in "Experimental" tab which is making last tail segments more stiff for some extra tweak for tail motion

- Upgraded behavior of "Gravity" parameter

- Added new example scene and models for testing behavior of Tail Animator for hair

- There was bug which made "Rotation Speed" parameter change nothing in tail motion

v1.3.5

- Added "Sensitivity" variable to give much more animation customization possibilities for tail motion, this variable making tail being more stiff (when lower) or entangled (when higher)

- Added "Springiness" variable to give much more animation customization possibilities for tail motion, this variable gives tail more jiggly motion when cranked up

- "MaxPositionOffset" variable replaced with "Max Stretching" which is 0-1 slider, on value 1 tail can stretch freely, on value 0 can't stretch a bit, setting this value to about 0.15 is giving the most natural feeling to the motion

- Better support for single bone tail chains (root to parent toggle)

- Cleaning code resulting in few optimization, preparations before next versions optimizations

- New approaches to collisions, now there are three different methods of detecting collisions to choose (only in world space), old one is called "Rotation Offset" (needs bigger sphere tail colliders but works better in collision with mesh colliders), different methods can work better depending on situation etc.

- Now you can choose to use world collision detection (collision space variable) or just include needed colliders without use of rigidbodies (quicker)

- "Collision Swapping" (under Physics Tab) which is making collisions being less reflective in segment rotation (will be polished in next updates)

- Added new demo scene "S_TailAnimator_Demo_CollisionWall"

- Added info inside "ReadMe.txt" which directories you can remove to purge unnecessary files if you don't need demo scenes anyomore

- Some cleaning and changes inside inspector window for quicker navigation

+ (hidden update) Different variations of tail model examples models and scene

v1.3.0

- SmoothDelta changed and upgraded to SafeDelta to support more smoothed motion when fps are very unstable

- Added option "Selective Rotations Not Animated" if some bones in tail chain don't have rotation keyframes in source animation

- 'Rolled Bones' replaced with field where we can select LookUp algorithm, added 'CrossUp' algorithm which can support tail motion more precisely than previous methods and 'Parental' which seems to be the most universal but giving a bit different motion (then crank down positions and rotations speeds variable)

- Added 'MaxPositionOffset' variable to limit stretching of tail when object moves very fast

- Added 'Fuman Elasticness' example scene

- Added 'Curving' and changed logics of 'Gravity' variable in "Experimental" tab

- Some upgrades in the inspector window

v1.2.81-82

- Updated Skinner component to work with newest unity versions

- Updated algorithm for "Rolled Bones" option

- Updated algorithm for 'RootToParent' feature

v1.2.8

- "Advanced" option for waving animation, waving which is using perlin noise to calculate rotation of optional root animation

- Some fixes for inspector windows

- Added icon on the right inside hierarchy to easily indicate objects with attached tail animator

- Added menu items under "Add Component" > "FImpossible Games" > "Tail Animator" > Tail Animator Components

... Character limit for changelog exceed: Skipping some update logs

V1.1.0

- Added new examples and components to animate transforms with tail animator in 2D space- UI and Sprites

- Custom inspector to see all parameters more clear

- New example scenes

- School of fish example scene

-Cleaned up a bit

V1.0.1

- Added overrides for Start() method because in some cases it wasn't executed for some reason, probably different .net targets

- Updated fSimpleAssets resources to V1.1