Is this thread still active? I've been exploring the possibility of integrating UCC and Animacer for some time, so wonder if there's a mature way already to do so.
I'm still learning the way Animacer is working and I see some different ways to integrate them with different benefit and complexity as below:
#1. Keep using Animator Controller
This is not the ideal way as I think but somewhat a quick way to integrate as Animacer can work along with Animator Controller (ie AC). This means one part of the animations is still controlled by AC, the other part by Animacer. This is probably is a good choice if someone has an existing AC already with considerable FSM built up, one is only to add new animations controlled by Animacer. This way is but the best way I think because the most benefit one can take from Animacer is to handle animation without creating an AC or its FSM. Animacer is handling animation most by pure code. So this is why I turn to think about another way.
#2. Use Animacer without creating Animator Controller
Using Animacer still needs an Animator. As components, Animacer sits beside Animator but there's no need to create any Animator Controller (ie AC) nor the FSM graph inside AC accordingly. But this comes to an important problem:
How can we use UCC without creating an Animator Controller for animation? This is important because my understanding of UCC is that its Ability systems (might be other parts as well) work with AC a lot internally, and that why when creating AC for using UCC, the requirement is still we must have the same
parameters as what the demo animator controller uses, all abilities will internally call the AC with proper parameters so that corresponding animations are played.
So I wonder if somewhere in UCC is exposing those 22 animator parameters that we can use directly in code. Well, I mean if still using the existing Animator Controller in UCC (say the demo one), of course I can delete all the FSM stuff only leaving the parameters there, then write some code to get the Animator, reading the parameters once an ability is active and changing some parameters from it, but this is not an ideal way. If I can get the parameters from AC by code, why not just get parameters from the ability directly? It's the abilities that set the parameters for Animator Controller, right?
To sum up, my point is
the key part of integrating UCC and Animacer might be lying in the ability system. If the ability system can expose the parameters used for changing the animator parameters before calling Animator Controller, and instead pass those parameters to Animacer, it will be possible use Animacer much more benificially as there's no need to create an Animator Controller anymore and all animations can be handled by Animacer.
I'm still trying to read more UCC codes to understand how Animator Controller as well as animator parameters is handled inside the ability system (I assume abilites are still one of the core parts in UCC, otherwise why we use UCC?), so if anyone would provide me some more details of the ability system or guide me on how the animator controller/parameters are handled in UCC code, I'll appreciate.
Thanks.