A tool helping artists make assets compatible with animation
I created a tool which lets the user position a hand the way they want the item to be held, and then changes the structure of the asset to make it animate correctly. By also being able to preview the animation directly in Maya, it's easy to quickly tweak it until it looks perfect, without going back and forth between Unity and Maya.
Grip helper tool showcase
Why was this needed?
Item interaction showcase
In Toca Days there are lots of different items you can hold and interact with in different ways, like eating and drinking different types of food and beverages, waving flags and signs, blowing bubbles, and so on. Items can be picked up, used, put in and retrieved from your backpack, placed on the ground, directly gifted to another player. Some of these actions have custom animations for the type of item, and others have more generic animations for the left or right hand.
Item assets need to have their pivot in a logical place (generally bottom centre) to be easily placed in the world (either by level designers, or players themselves), but this pivot doesn't animate well. First of all, animating from this pivot only really worked if all items of that type were the same general shape and size, which didn't fit our vision of a huge variety of different things to interact with. Secondly, with the scale of items being regularly animated, a pivot closer to the point of contact with the hand looks much better.
The obvious solution was to use two separate pivots! Each item has two parent objects: one with its pivot placed for optimal animation, and the root object with a pivot optimal for being placed in the world. Items are animated from the animation pivot, and when placed in the world, the offset between the two pivots is reset to its original value. Placing this animation pivot, even with a reference, was not intuitive (especially since the optimal pivot usually involves rotations!) and would have taken far too much trial and error to be doable for more than a few assets.