Rig tab

The settings on the Rig tab define how Unity maps the deformers to the Mesh in the imported Model so that you can animate it. For Humanoid characters, this means assigning or creating an Avatar. For non-Humanoid (Generic) characters, this means identifying a Root bone in the skeleton.

By default, when you select a Model in the Project view, Unity determines which Animation Type best matches the selected Model and displays it in the Rig tab. If Unity has never imported the file, the Animation Type is set to None:

Generic animation types

Generic Animations do not use Avatars like Humanoid animations do. Since the skeleton can be arbitrary, you must specify which bone is the Root node. The Root node allows Unity to establish consistency between Animation clips for a generic model, and blend properly between Animations that have not been authored “in place” (that is, where the whole model moves its world position while animating).

Specifying the root node helps Unity determine between movement of the bones relative to each other, and motion of the Root node in the world (controlled from OnAnimatorMove).

Humanoid animation types

With rare exceptions, humanoid models have the same basic structure. This structure represents the major articulated parts of the body: the head and limbs. The first step to using Unity’s Humanoid animation features is to set up and configure an Avatar. Unity uses the Avatar to map the simplified humanoid bone structure to the actual bones present in the Model’s skeleton.

Including extra Transforms

When you enable the Optimize Game Object property, Unity ignores any Transform which is part of the hierarchy but is not mapped in the Avatar, in order to improve CPU performance. However, you can mark specific nodes in the GameObject hierarchy to include in calculations using the Extra Transforms to Expose section:

(A) Enter the full or partial name in the search box to filter the list of Transforms. This makes it easier to navigate through characters with a large number of bones.

(B) Enable each Transform (bones of a skeleton) you want Unity to include in calculations.

(C) Use the buttons to help select specific Transforms. For example, the Toggle All button selects or deselects everything at once (regardless of the current selection, including filtered items).

(D) Use the Revert button to undo your selections or the Apply button to apply the exceptions to the Model.

Note: In optimized mode, skinned Mesh matrix extraction is multi-threaded.

Legacy animation types

For more information about legacy animation, see the documentation for Legacy Animation System.

• Skin Weights added in 2019.1 NewIn20191
• Materials tab added in 2017.2 NewIn20172