Unity Mecanim or Autodesk Motion Builder?

        I have determined that Unity's animation retargeting system in Mecanim can be very powerful, but that it is ideal if you already have finished animations. If I were, say, doing a project using primarily or almost entirely animations from the Unity asset store or some other online marketplace or community, then Unity Mecanim alone would be perfect. I would just funnel in the animations from all of these outside sources into my project and character.

        Straight away, it's pretty cool, you just drop your character rig into the project, and it automatically recognizes if if your character is in t-pose. You may need to configure the avatar, but you don't need to go through the tedious process of characterizing your character like in Motion builder. You can also correct your character, rotating the joints to fit t-pose, much like Motion Builder, but that's where the similarities end.

        I found this video training comprehensive overview of Mecanim very helpful, much of it was review, but still made certain things like Blend Trees easier to understand. Much of it was not review.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf6vtCgLk6w

        Most of what I needed to know was in the first half-hour. At 51:00, he mentions root transform offset and some other helpful things. At 1:15:00, mentions useful State Machine Behavior script components. Damping, 1:21:00.

        I discovered that one can do many interesting things in Mecanim, such as setting up muscle space, which is pretty much limiting the rotations on the character's joints, which can come in very handy if you want to make your character more or less flexible.
        I also hit Unity's documentation this week, exploring different things I can do in Mecanim.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/animeditor-AnimationEvents.html

        While Mecanim is very powerful, editing animations in Mecanim seems to be very manual, setting keys and editing curves in a dope sheet much like Maya, Blender, or some other 3D package. My key-frame animation skills are not very good. In concept, I can manually edit animations in Mecanim. Even so, I feel that that would be very time consuming and inappropriate for this project and out-of-scope, considering the remaining time frame.

        Immediately after shooting MoCap, the animations are not ready to go into the engine. The MoCap rig rarely ever matches up perfectly or adequately with your character rig. So, editing always required, to ensure that the animation is in-place, and that the positioning of the limbs are correct so that there is no clipping. For this project, I need the extra functionality that Motion Builder has because it allows me to edit animations efficiently, via animation layers. The MoCap animations that I have are not finished, they are not in-place, and not yet suitable for use in Unity. For this project, I need to use Motion Builder.

         I can definitely see myself using Unity Mecanim in the future, so I do want to continue familiarizing myself with the capabilities that Mecanim has to offer, as I am very excited now that I have discovered these. I could possibly use it next quarter in New Media Project, or further along in the future, in place of Motion Builder, because Unity is free, Motion Builder is not.