Animations & Blend Shapes

The Animations & Blend Shapes module is a sophisticated diagnostic tool designed to help you bridge the gap between DCC tools (like Blender or Maya) and RealityKit.

RCP Compatibility Diagnostic

Reality Composer Pro (RCP) has specific requirements for what it considers an “animatable” model. Preflight automatically performs a technical evaluation of your asset:

• Animatable Status:
  • ● Animatable: The model contains the necessary components (Skeletons/Animations) and is structured correctly for RCP.
  • ● Static: The model is either missing animation data or is not structured in a way that RCP can recognize.
• Surgical Fix: If a model is marked as Static, a button labeled “Make RCP Ready” appears. Clicking this applies a customized USD “surgery” that restructures the prims (adding necessary components or fixing skeletal paths) to make them compatible with Apple’s ecosystem.

Playback Controls

• Auto-Play: Enabling this tells the renderer to automatically start the default animation when the asset is loaded.
• Playback Mode: Controls the looping behavior (e.g., Loop, Once, Ping-Pong).

Blend Shape Controls

If your model contains Blend Shapes (also known as Morph Targets), they are listed here with individual sliders.

• Direct Override: You can manually adjust the weight of any blend shape (0.0 to 1.0) to see its effect in the viewport.
• Reset: Quickly reset all blend shapes to their default values.

Performance

While you can manipulate blend shapes manually for testing, for real-time performance, ensure your blend shapes are efficiently mapped and that you don’t have an excessive number of active shapes on a single mesh.