🦾Skeleton & IK

This page explains assets and components generated after the setup.

Overview

After applying the preset, you will see these scriptable objects and prefabs creates in the current directory:

Assets after the setup.

All these assets are briefly explained in After Setup.

Character Skeleton

One of the created prefabs has a "Skeleton_" prefix. This is a variant of your character model, which contains components such as:

• Character Animation: Central component that manages other components.

• Layered Blending: Blends your Animator with weapon Overlays.

• Procedural Animation: Applies animation modifiers, like Sway or Ads.

• Character Skeleton: Stored skeleton information.

The preset tool creates IK game objects that are used by procedural animation.

IK Feet

IK foot_r and IK foot_l are used as IK targets for character legs. They are parented to the top bone in the hierarchy (e.g., root, armature, skeleton).

Example of how bones are used in Procedural Animation Settings (PAs).

IK Weapon and Hands

These bones are used to position the gun and hands with IK:

IK weapon_bone represents the weapon animated pose parented to the head. Use this bone as a parent transform for weapons.

IK hand_r and IK hand_l are sed as IK targets for character arms. They are parented to the IK weapon_bone, so when weapon is animated (e.g., by recoil or sway), hands will follow the gun correctly.

Tip: Both weapon and hand bones are parented to the head to inherit rotations applied when looking around.

IK weapon_bone_aim is used for procedural aiming, and it defines the weapon idle pose. This game object has a Dynamic Bone component attached to it:

Dynamic Bone.

The ik_hand_gun object is the weapon bone that we assigned in previous step. Simply put, it contains weapon movement.

The Dynamic Bone component will help preserve the weapon animated transform relative to the head bone. The Update Mode set to Preserve Overlay will ensure that this bone only uses the base idle pose.

IK weapon_bone_r

Additionally, the preset tool will create these game objects:

Extra IK bones.

IK weapon_bone_r is a dynamic bone that contains weapon animated pose relative to the right hand.

It is used to drive the IK weapon_bone:

Copy bone data.

Tip: This setup lets us keep the animation relative to the right hand, then pas that to the IK weapon_bone (parented to the head bone) and inherit rotations from the neck or spine bones.

IK hand_l_r

IK hand_l_r is another dynamic bone that represents the left hand pose relative to the right hand:

This bone is used to attach the left hand to the weapon:

How it's used in the Attach Hand Modifier.

Tip: The IK hand_l_r gets the left hand pose relative to the right hand, and then it gets passed to the Attach Left Hand modifier.