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TriplePete
Inspiring
September 13, 2023

Animating legs with Meta avatars

  • September 13, 2023
  • 17 replies
  • 6167 views

Hi!

We are using the Meta avatars for some projects and now we are researching how to activate the legs on the avatars. On both local and remote we can render fullbody avatars (with legs) perfectly nice but I can't figure out how to animate the legs. 

In the creation info I have activated Leg IK. Except that I can't find anything more about how to activate the IK.

17 replies

Participant
October 30, 2023

Heya! We are starting to look at animating avatar Legs with IK and was wondering if you managed to make any progress on this?

Cheers!

TriplePete
Inspiring
October 30, 2023

Hi!

Sorry to say - but no progress yet. I had to put it aside for the moment to work on other things - but still keeping an eye open on any suggested solutions or updated documentation regarding this.

If you find anything or have some ideas - I am all ears!

New Participant
November 21, 2023

Hi. Were you able to find a solution? I am also in the same boat. 

Inspiring
December 19, 2023

I've been experimenting as well. Today I tried applying a custom ik solution. I attempted disabling animations through the avatar entity. This did not work. Flags that allow the avatar to be shown seem to be required to use animation data from the system and can't be over ridden. Current Leg IK flags do not work. We can not see the internals of the referenced DLLs unfortunately. The custom leg IK solution for a generic model works, but the way Meta Avatars is currently built in Unity, there doesn't seem to be a way around this.  At this point, I'm starting to shy away from supporting this feature. I am leaning towards full custom characters, and maybe have this ready to turn on in the background, whenever actual functionality is available.

Inspiring
December 19, 2023

So, it looks like my initial IK attempt was missing functionality to pipe in the new coordinate data. It is possible, there is an example of such functionality https://communityforums.atmeta.com/t5/General-Development/Meta-Avatars-how-to-feed-custom-input/td-p/940503  and the Sample scripts in the oculus sdk provide a reference as well.  I'll work on an implementation for my use case and share it once I have it working.

Inspiring
December 22, 2023

After starting looking into the examples of the other posts, I looked into the Avatar 24 SDK and upgraded. They changed the internals of the system, so this going to take a little more time to figure out, but I would stand to guess that this functionality will be exposed and functional in an a release in the near future. The rework of the sdk seems to be a lot cleaner, and functions better as well.  I'm not going to spend too much time on it, but if I can make headway with reasonable effort, I will update this thread. Peace.

New Participant
January 26, 2024

decipheroneHi! Do you have any updates on this question? Did you manage to find solution to animate legs of avatar?

TriplePete
Inspiring
February 26, 2024

Anyone found a solution for animating/moving the Meta Avatars legs?

New Participant
May 2, 2024

Any progress on this?

TriplePete
Inspiring
May 2, 2024

No progress from me - still looking for solutions.

Participant
May 13, 2024

Any update on this? I would’ve assumed a mod would’ve seen the post by now

Participant
May 13, 2024

We had some luck by using the Unity skinning rig for the avatars. This exposes the bones of the avatars, which we then saved a copy of and created an animation rig and avatar from their bone layout and then we used the asset FinalIK to ik this up and then copied the transforms of the ik'd rig's bones to the avatar's bones at runtime.

Took a while to do but eventually got there, in the end it turned out to be too performance intensive for our multiplayer application though, so we scrapped it and will just wait for meta's legs ik implementation whenever that comes

New Participant
August 28, 2024

I would appreciate it if you could inform me of any recent developments. Furthermore, are there any other feasible options to animate the avatar's leg?

TriplePete
Inspiring
August 28, 2024

Sorry to say, but still no progress on this. I haven't found any solution to this. Now I am researching other avatar solutions like Avaturn (https://avaturn.me/) instead.