Animating characters in Unity - not all models are the same

There are some brilliant models on the Unity Asset Store website. We've already invested quite heavily in Unity (over just the last few weeks, it's quite alarming at how quickly $10 and $30 there soon adds up to a few hundred dollars!) and in doing so have found a wide range of quality in the Unity models.

There are plenty of 3d models available online, not necessarily designed for Unity, but with animations and poses that can be (relatively) easily imported into Unity. Then there are some which are an absolute nightmare to get working!

Originally we were really impressed with the Mixamo website.
It offers loads of character models, and some really cool animations (albeit at $5 per animation, which could quickly end up being quite a pricey way to put together a simple game!). Their online rigging tool is particularly impressive.

Simply upload a mesh (even without a skeleton or any complicated rigging or bones) and give the system a few cues -  where to find major joints like elbows, knees and wrists - and let it run for a few minutes. The resulting rigged character is surprisingly easy to animate; just select one from hundreds of different actions, and apply to the rig. It's as easy as that!

Mixamo looks like a great way of quickly producing characters for your games. Except, it doesn't always play nice with Unity.

Now, we only new to Unity, but already we know what a decent model looks like. You import it, drag-n-drop a few controllers and, hey presto! you get a working model. The StarDude characters are great examples of this.

Mixamo claim to have worked with Unity for a number of years, so we were quite looking forward to quickly and easily assembling a zombie horde for another of our game ideas (we've tried importing models into Blender and 3DS Max, and applying some pre-built mo-cap animations, but it's a lot of work, and a bit hit-and-miss as to whether it'll ultimately be successful or not).

But the Unity/Mixamo integration isn't place nice - either with Unity4 or Unity5, we get the same results. Now it might just be that we're doing something wrong - but it's no different to how we've successfully managed to get a number of animated characters from other suppliers, so perhaps there's just something we're not quite getting.

Here's how we tried animating our Mixamo free character (screenshots are from Unity4, but we get the same results using Unity5):

After installing the Mixamo plug-in for Unity, a screen very much like the Asset Store appears in the Window menu. We simply downloaded the (free) zombie model from Mixamo and dropped it onto the screen.

The Mixamo plug-in allows you to try out their animations in your project window. Simply select an animation then drag-n-drop your model onto it and click "preview". The animation is downloaded and a clone of your character acts out the animation in both the game and scene windows.

So far so good. In the screenshot above, we can see the original zombie character, dropped into the scene, as well as the clone character, carrying out the walk cycle animation. But this is where things start going a bit weird.

We downloaded the Mixamo (free) zombie walk cycle (by "buying" it at $0.00) and imported it into our project. Just like we have done with so many other models, we then created an animation controller and dropped it onto the model.

We then opened the Animator windows and dropped the (newly downloaded) animation into it, setting "walk" as our default animation - just as we have done so many times, with so many other models from so many other providers.

Then simply set the game playing, to marvel at our shambling zombie walking animation. Ta-da!

Oh.
And this is where we got stuck.
Well and truly stuck.
Stuck like there's no answer to this! We tried all the online tutorials and followed them to the letter. Then we tried the forums and made sure that our model was rigged as "humanoid" (it was) and the animation was set to "humanoid" (not legacy). We tried running the animation as "legacy" and even tried dropping the animation straight onto the model (instead of using an animation controller).

It got so bad that we even entered Unity in debug mode and changed the animation type from 1 to 2 (as suggested in one of the online forums). Nothing worked.

No amount of deleting, restarting, reinstalling, tampering, tinkering and hacking got us any further than this weird, slightly cramped pose. The Mixamo preview animation was exactly as we wanted it, but we can't find

a) what we're doing wrong, to get the zombie to behave like this and
b) what we need to do to make it animate properly.

It's really frustrating - because Mixamo have a massive library of characters and animations which it says are designed to simply drag and drop into Unity, to allow you to get on with the fun stuff of writing your games.

Which is exactly what we want to.
If anyone can shed any light on why this doesn't work, please leave a comment below!