The animation tools in editor frankly, suck.

[Igor Q. 519]

I know it's not nice to say bad things people work hard for, but considering I am one of the few people who take the animation tools seriously I think it's appropriate to give my 2 cents on this since I was the first one to introduce real animations within the Ylands Editor.
If you don't believe me, you can look at my youtube page -> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJYROFrcoXhSQXhh7Mn-_8g

Anyway let's get started.

1) Smoothing

Smoothing is capped at 1, which really doesn't make any sense because acceleration should be fully adjustable (from o to 999999). When I made animations, I frequently used animations that had incredibly slow initial velocity and accelerated immensely.

Smoothing does not accept negative values. What this means is I cannot have an object move from point A to point B while slowing down. (Imagine a Car approaching a Red Light)

2) Rotation

Everything about this is a mess.
First take into account that some objects don't even have rotation centered around their middle, but the corner of their model.

a) I consider Rotation "Align with Translation" to be effectively useless.

The incredibly niche use for it (rotating something relative to its movement such as a turbine) can be effectively and easily replace by

with MUCH easier manipulation.

 

b) Rotation "Around Reference Point" is incredibly difficult even for me (someone who has experience with these things) to easily manipulate objects.

First, the reference point doesn't even align properly. It should rotate relative to the arrow of the reference point.

3) Having a chain of different animations happening simultaneously is too difficult to do using the tools provided.

Animations in general are not mathematical, but visual.

The most common form of animating in 3D programs such as 3DS max is by allowing the user to create "screenshots" of difference poses, and instead have the machine compute how the limbs, objects,etc will travel in space to reach their end point. This is called "Blocking to Spline". I'm not expecting for some amazing, but it would be easiest way to get people to have access to animating.
 

4)  The animation tool isn't useful for feedback movement such as a flying vehicle because the game cannot smoothly transition from one type of moment to another.

 

I'll keep trying to work with the animation tools provided but at the given moment...they are just too difficult to be able to make something more interesting than a bird with flapping wings.

Edited September 9, 2019 by Igor Q.

[Adam Snellgrove 1451]

I have talked to the designers and it goes like this: We have observed that creators were using Time triggers to create moving platforms, rotating objects or projectiles, however, the problem with timers is that they consume a lot of network traffic and they were never intended for a purpose like this. So the initial goal was to actually create something simple, that will allow creators to create similar behaviour, but in a much more effective way. So, although the term "Animators" suggests some complex animation system, in reality, the goal was to create something much simpler. Probably the name "mover" would be more appropriate, but we didn't like it
As for the future, we have some ideas on how to improve animators, for example, to include animation graphs, but do not expect this to be a "real" animation suite.

As for the issues
1) This is the value of smoothing of whole movement - 0 = linear progress, 1 = quadratic progress
2) Yes this is a real pain, but this is given because of the way how Unity handles angles
a) Align with translation is useful when using follow or path translations
b) Yep, not very convenient. We'll try and figure something out.
3) This is actually where you are trying to use the system beyond its capabilities. For chaining the animations, it is better to use instructions and not animators, but that is still very limiting. This is not 3DS Max and software like that have dozens of developers and years of development behind them.
4) That is not what the system was intended for.
I think you should think of Animators more on the level of a designer's tools than a programmer's tools.

So, in conclusion, we are trying to improve the tools as we go, but it has its limits, that we'll probably never quite overcome.

[bojo2736 1016]

I just love it when the nerds talk shop. 

[Igor Q. 519]

Man this is a bit dissapointing, and here I thought we would be able to animate 3D models such as a robot lol.