How to do (legacy) animation mixing in Mecanim?

I understand that with the Mecanim Avatar Body Masks certain body parts can be masked from animations on specific layers. However in the legacy animation system, you could specify exactly which bones would be used for the “Animation Mixing”. From what I understand so far, the body mask system does not allow this fine level of detail and only works with its body part presets. So how then if I would like to mask a specific bone or a few bones only (not an entire body part) would I be able to do this?

eg.

Such as one bone on the index finger of the left hand and the ankle bone on the right foot at the same time. Is this possible with Mecanim Body Masks, or should I revert to the legacy animation system?

I’ve figured out the answer to my own question, here goes:

To use Body Masks like Animation Mixing and be able to target specific bones one has to look at the animations themselves not the scripts using the Body Mask. For example, when masking a simple hand wave animation with a walk cycle, the hand wave needs to have animated only the required bones in the arm. When the masking occurs and the two animations (walk & wave) are blended together only the bones with animation data in the hand wave animation will override those bones of the walk cycle. This is true even if body parts other than the waving arm are selected in the Body Mask. You can test this by adding the legs to the Body Mask. Even though in the hand wave animation the legs are in a t-pose, because those bones don’t actually have any animation data they are ignored and the walk cycle animation only blends the waving arm bones irrespective of what is selected in the Body Mask. This may seem a little confusing at first but now that I’ve realised this it is actually quite common sense, in fact I’m quite surprised that no one else pointed this out since my first post.

Hope this is useful to someone with the same dilemma!

Thanks for answering your one question :slight_smile: This was what im looking for the mecanim animation system. I’ll try it these days and give you a post if i was successfull with that.

addition: i think the documentation of unitys mecanim is also helpfull http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/AvatarBodyMask.html

using body masks und animation layers should solve the dilemma.