Tips & limits

Things that are useful to know up front — not bugs, just how Animatica works today.

#Your character vs. the ready-made character

If you use a self-hosted server on your own machine, it works best with Animatica's ready-made character or a rig that matches it closely.

Animatica Cloud can generate onto many of your own armatures. If the rig is very different from the model's skeleton, results may vary — try the ready-made character first to learn the workflow.

#Body only

The model animates the body. It does not move the face, and it does not move fingers: each hand gets one of three shapes laid over the take (Relaxed, Gripping or Straight, in the Pose panel).

#Every frame is keyed

A take is written as a key on every frame for every bone. That is exact, but it is dense to edit by hand in the Graph Editor. Sparse keys are not available yet. Use Set Keyframe and Jump to Key Pose to work with your own poses among them.

#Control rigs

Takes can be baked onto a control rig only for Rigify and the Mixamo Control Rig. Other control rigs get the motion on their deform bones.

#Loop needs one block

Loop works on a single prompt block. With more than one, it greys out and says so. It also appears only when the connected model supports it.

#Linked characters

A take on an action linked from another file, or on a library override, can't be edited in place: In place and key poses leave it alone. Make the action local first if you want to change it.

#Generation takes a moment

Blender stays responsive while the server works. On Animatica Cloud, the first run after a long break can take a minute or more while GPUs wake up; later runs are usually faster. Use Cancel if you need to stop.

#Online access

Everything except a self-hosted server on localhost needs Blender's Allow Online Access (Edit → Preferences → System). See Privacy and network.