Spinal Animator

⚡ ANIMATORS HATE HIM!

FImpossible Creations discovered revolutionary new algorithm to create spine chain animations for animals and creatures without any effort!

☄️ Spinal Animator is component which animates your skeleton's spine bones accordingly to movement without loosing any keyframed animation motion. It's simulating real animal-like spine movement without any need of additional animating or coding.

⌛ This component will make your animations look much more real and AAA like without spending a lot of timefor making decent animations of walking / running with rotation to sides by your creatures and without spending a lot of money for animator to create this animations.

✍ Another benefit from this procedural animating is that all movement of bones is continuous, when your object is rotating, spine is fitting to movement all the time, so you can finally make your snakes, millipedes and other creatures animate like they're real! What's more, when creature go up on the terrain/ground slope, body rotation will fit to it automatically!

⚙ Don't worry about performance, you can run many Spinal Animators simultaneously without loosing any FPS 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 ✅

Spinal Animator is not related with the "Spine" software in any way.

Spinal Animator is plugin which needs just Unity to work.

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

Community Thread Link

Visual friendly user manual

Manual Video Explaining Different Parameters

⭐ MAIN FEATURES ⭐

● Includes interactive demo scenes

● Includes full source code

● Easy setup and incredible effect

● Fully cooperating with keyframed animations

● Tutorial videos on my Youtube Channel

● Not needed any coding

● Visual friendly inspector window with helpful features

● Highly customizable

● Very high performance

● Blending with original animation

Release Notes

Changed name of the plugin to avoid confusion with other animation software with similar name.

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.

v2.0.2

- Added 'Rotations Fade' parameter to damp spine rotation power separately for rotating to the sides XZ or up / down in Y axis

- Added possibility to use pivot offset on prefabs and generating additional transform in playmode (now it's default)

v2.0.1

- Added IK Controlled Bones Fixer which helps Spine Animator handle animation rigs with disconnected leg end limbs like paws

- Few inspector window fixes

- Few straightening behaviour fixes

- Added "SpineAnimatorQueuer" component to manage updating multiple Spine Animators at once (for creatures which use more than 1 SpineAnimator component)

v2.0.0

!!! Warning for version 2.0.0 !!!

Many variables changed, some of them was replaced by other ones.

If you was using Spine Animator previously, click on objects with Spine Animator to convert them to new version and apply changes.

To avoid compilation errors, remove previous directory of spine animator from project then import V2

- Refreshed inspector GUI

- Added language support for inspector GUI headers: English, Polish, Russian (translator - t), Japanese (t), Chinese (t), Korean (t)

- Upgraded scene gizmos to make setting up spine chain easier

- Refactored code, cleaned and optimized (Now Spine Animator works two times faster and without garbage collector peaks)

- Removed many anchoring parameters, now they're not needed anymore everything now is detected automatically

- No more option for positions and rotations not animated, it's replaced by "Detect Zero Keyframes"

- Now update rate can be defined for more stable motion / optimization in high/low FPS

- Added many new small parameters

v1.0.6

- Added Chain Method "Universal" which is working without any issue with translations in any axis.

Tested on many models which needed to have selected right chain method before.

Probably all chain methods will be removed soon if universal chain method will be tested enough.

- Few fixes inside inspector view and scene view

- Now you can disable collision for selective segment with "Segment Collision" toggle list

- Fixed terrain collision when spine leaves terrain mesh in x and z axes

- Component will try to find correct bones to init chain (first panel) by searching them by names

v1.0.5

- Added experimental physics option where you can choose colliders with which collision of spine segments should be detected

- As physics are implemented, there is variable 'Gravity' which you can use to keep spine on the ground if creature is very long (like millipede)

- Added tips to creating spine chain inside inspector window

- Added alert (red gui color) if there is no animator and component tries 'Connect with animator' to remind about that

- Added new example scenes with use of collision also collision added to 'Fillipede' example scene

v1.0.4

- Reworked main algorithm to work better with complicated bone structure orientations to use under new variable 'ChainMethod' named as 'Axis Based'

- Added MaxStretching variable to limit stretching of model when using position smoother variable

- Added 'Springiness' variable to adjust more bouncy motion for models with 'First bone leading' structure

- Added 'Slithery' variable, when set to value 1 it gives the same motion like in previous version but cranking it down will result in more damped motion of spine

- Added component Spine Bone Connector to repair wrong connection of bones without need of rebuilding it inside modelling software

- Added toggle "Safe Delta Time" to remove chopping motion if fps are very unstable

- Upgraded limiting angles algorithm resulting in more smooth motion for limiting maximum rotation of spine chain's individual segments

- Added warning if bone structure is created and main object don't face forward axis (z:blue axis)

- Above upgrades and fixes made component work better in low fps domain

- Some small updates inside inspector window

v1.0.3

- Added icons on the right inside hierarchy to easily find objects with attached Spine Animator

- Added menu items so you can find Spine Animator also by clicking "Add Component" > "FImpossible Games" > "Spine Animator"

V1.0.2

- Added support for physical clock, if you need to have enabled "Animate Physics" in animator, "Physical Clock" variable will make Spine Animator work right with it

- Added humanoid demo scenes and "Fockatrice" demo scene (monster reminding Cockatrice)

- Added variable "Distances Multiplier" and few others in "Advanced" tab, they can be used to get different results, for example for humanoid spines

- Variables which does nothing in playmode will be visible only in editor mode

V1.0.1

- Changed "Pivot Offset" variable name to "Segments Pivot Offset"

- Added variable "BasePivotOffset" for adjusting center of rotation placement

- Added text file with manual in text version so anyone who couldn't use it with translator now can