Gesture Animations Pack documentation

Gesture Animations Pack gives a Humanoid character 17 hand gestures — thumbs up, pointing, heart, OK, shush, facepalm and more. Each gesture comes two ways:

• a masked animation clip that plays over whatever your character is already doing — idle, sitting, talking, walking — on an Animator layer with an avatar mask;
• a full-body take, in two FBX files: the gesture combined with a sitting idle and with a standing idle.

Both idles and a sample scene are included. The animations need no scripts.

Requirements

• Unity version: 2022.3 or newer.
• Rig: Humanoid. The clips rely on Mecanim retargeting, so generic and legacy rigs are not supported.
• Render pipeline: any, for the animations, masks and controllers. The sample scene and the sample character’s materials use URP — see Render pipelines for Built-in and HDRP.

Video

• Gesture Animations Pack for Unity — every gesture, seated and standing.

The gestures

The mask column says which avatar mask a gesture’s layer needs. The three timing columns are the transition settings the included controller uses — copy them when you build your own layers.

What is in the package

Everything lives under Assets/DevEloop/GestureAnimationsPack/:

Try the sample first

Open Scenes/GestureSample.unity and press Play. Click a gesture in the library and both characters — one seated, one standing — play it over their idles.

• Search filters the gesture library.
• Mirror gesture plays the gesture with the left hand.
• Auto sequence cycles through every gesture. Selecting a row stops it; Replay selected gesture plays your selection again.
• In the preview area, right-drag orbits, middle-drag pans and the wheel zooms. F or Reset view restores the camera. Scrolling over the library scrolls the list without moving the camera.

The scene needs nothing beyond URP: its interface is built-in IMGUI with Unity’s own font, so there is no TextMeshPro, UI package, Input System package, post-processing or external art to install.

For the soft shadows and antialiasing the scene was lit for, you can assign Settings/Sample Pipeline.asset in Project Settings → Graphics (and clear any Quality-level pipeline override). This is optional and changes how your whole project renders; the scene never switches your pipeline by itself.

Try your own character

You can preview every gesture on your own model in the same scene:

1. Make sure the model is imported as Humanoid — model import settings → Rig → Animation Type: Humanoid.
2. Open Scenes/GestureSample.unity and select Your Character in the Hierarchy.
3. Drag your model or its prefab into Model, and choose which sample character it replaces: Standing, Seated or Both.
4. Press Play. Your model uses the same controller, so every gesture, Mirror gesture and Auto sequence work on it.

You can change the model or the target while in Play mode. If the model is not Humanoid, the preview area says what to fix and the sample character stays in place. Seated poses use the sample seat, so a very tall or very short character may sit above it or sink into it.

Masked gestures on your character

A masked clip animates only the parts of the body the gesture uses — one or both arms with the fingers, plus the head when the character looks at its hand. The clip starts and ends in the gesture pose; blending in from your animation and back out to it is the job of the Animator transitions.

There are two ways to set that up.

Option A: use the included controller

Controllers/gestures_sitting.controller already has:

• a Base Layer with an Idle state — the sitting idle;
• one layer per avatar mask (Gestures right_arm, Gestures right_arm_head, …), each resting in an empty state;
• a Trigger parameter per gesture, named after it (thumbs_up, heart, …);
• a Bool parameter, Mirror, that plays gestures with the other hand.

To put your own base animation under it, create an Animator Override Controller from it and replace the sitting_idle clip with yours. That is exactly how gestures_standing.overrideController swaps in the standing idle.

Then trigger gestures from code:

animator.SetBool("Mirror", false);   // true: left hand
animator.SetTrigger("thumbs_up");

The gesture fades in, plays once and fades back out to your animation on its own.

Option B: add gesture layers to your own controller

1. Add a layer. Set Weight to 1, Blending to Override and Mask to the gesture’s mask from Masks/ (see the table).
2. Create an empty state with no motion and make it the layer’s default state.
3. Add a state with the gesture clip from Gestures/.
4. Add a Trigger parameter and a transition from the empty state to the gesture: no exit time, fixed duration = Fade in, condition = the trigger.
5. Add a transition from the gesture back to the empty state: exit time = Fade out starts at ÷ Masked clip (normalized), fixed duration = Fade out, no conditions.

Gestures that share a mask can share a layer — one empty state, several gesture states.

Left hand (mirroring)

Humanoid clips can be mirrored, so the left-hand versions need no clips of their own:

• In a controller: enable Mirror on the gesture state, or bind it to a Bool parameter, and use the mirrored mask — left_arm instead of right_arm, left_arm_head instead of right_arm_head. Two-hand gestures keep their masks.
• On an FBX take: enable Mirror in the take’s import settings, on the Animation tab.

The included controller already does this through its Mirror parameter: every one-hand layer has a twin with the left mask and mirrored states.

Full-body FBX takes

FBX/gestures_sitting.fbx and FBX/gestures_standing.fbx hold every gesture combined with sitting_idle and standing_idle respectively. The body follows the idle while the arms and head perform the gesture, and every take starts and ends in the idle pose, so it cuts cleanly to and from the idle. Takes are named <gesture>_sitting and <gesture>_standing.

Both files are imported as Humanoid, with the avatar copied from the sample character and root motion baked into the pose. Use them when your character already uses these idles, when you want complete clips without layers — for a Timeline cutscene, say — or in another 3D application. The FBX files contain the sample character’s mesh as well.

Idle animations

Idle/sitting_idle.fbx and Idle/standing_idle.fbx are looping Humanoid idles. The gestures were made on top of them, but the masked clips work over any other animation too.

Render pipelines

The animations, masks and controllers work in every render pipeline. Only the sample scene and the sample character’s materials are URP (URP/Lit and URP/Unlit):

• URP — works as is.
• Built-in — select the materials in Character/Materials and Materials and switch their shader to Standard. The albedo, normal and metallic-smoothness textures are kept.
• HDRP — switch the same materials to HDRP/Lit and assign the textures from Character/Textures.

Sample scripts

The scripts in Scripts/ exist only for the sample scene. Your characters need none of them.

Skills for AI coding assistants

Four skills ship inside the package, under Assets/DevEloop/GestureAnimationsPack/AI/Skills/. Each is a plain SKILL.md that describes one part of the pack in the terms an assistant needs to act on it — the real asset, mask and parameter names rather than plausible guesses.

Point your assistant at that folder, or copy the skills to wherever it reads them from. They are ordinary Markdown and depend on no particular tool.

Support

Questions, bug reports and suggestions are welcome. Include your Unity version, your render pipeline, and whether you are using the masked clips or the full-body takes.

dev.eloop@outlook.com

← Back to Gesture Animations Pack