Muscle setup

Unity’s animation system allows you to control the range of motion of different bones using Muscles.

Once the Avatar has been properly configured, the animation system “understands” the bone structure and allows you to start using the Muscles & Settings tab of the Avatar’s Inspector. Use the Muscles & Settings tab to tweak the character’s range of motion and ensure the character deforms in a convincing way, free from visual artifacts or self-overlaps.

Use the Muscle Group Preview to manipulate the character using predefined deformations. These affect several bones at once. Use the Per-Muscle Settings and Additional Settings to adjust individual bones in the body.

Translate Degree of Freedom (DoF)

In the Additional Settings, tick the Translate DoF option if you want to enable translation animations for the humanoid. If the checkbox is unticked, Unity animates the bones using only rotations. Translation DoF is available for Chest, UpperChest, Neck, LeftUpperLeg, RightUpperLeg, LeftShoulder and RightShoulder muscles.

Enabling Translate DoF can increase performance requirements, because the animation system needs to do an extra step to retarget humanoid animation. For this reason, you should only enable this option if you know your animation contains animated translations of some of the bones in your character.