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Overview

Look Modifier is commonly used to apply spine rotation and leaning effects. This is essential to make the character look around without Blend Trees.

Look settings.

  • Pitch Input — pitch or look-up angle in degrees.
  • Yaw Input — yaw or look-right-left angle in degrees.
  • Use Yaw As Delta — whether to accumulate yaw input every frame or use it as the final yaw rotation value.
  • Roll Input — roll or leaning angle in degrees.
  • Pitch/Yaw/Roll Offset Elements — bones that will be affected by rotation.

Turn in place settings.

  • Enable Turn In Place — whether to use procedural turn in place.
  • Angle Threshold — if this yaw angle is exceeded, character will turn in place.
  • Turn Curve — ease curve for turning.
  • Turn Speed — turn speed multiplier.
  • Bones To Preserve — these bone poses will be preserved regardless of the root rotation. Used with Humanoids only.
  • Turn Right/Left State — Animator Controller states that will be played when turning left or right.

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Use-cases

Look Modifier is used to make the character look around and turn in place.

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Look

Look rotation is applied to all bones using the pitch and yaw input properties. It’s very common to bind player values directly to this modifier to control the rotation:

Using character controller value to drive the pitch input.

By default, Yaw Input is a world rotation value, meaning you can bind the player’s global rotation directly to this property:

How to Look using player's global aiming rotation.

If there isn’t a global rotation value, it is recommended to use the player’s horizontal delta input instead:

How to Look using player's delta horizontal/yaw input.

Tip: Using the player’s delta input is easy to implement, but it doesn’t give that much control as global rotation. For example, if we were to add look smoothing, we would use the global rotation variable instead.
Look angles are evenly distributed between all bones to match the 90-degree target:

Auto-angle distribution.

The usual setup involves adding spine bones to Pitch, Yaw and Roll offset elements. It’s fine to experiment to find what works best for our specific character. The same priniciple applies with look angles.
Tip: Just type in the value, and the system will automatically compute the right angles for the rest of the list!

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Turn In Place

Turn in place feature rotates the character root bone against the player main rotation to keep feet in place when looking around. When a yaw angle threshold is exceeded, the character will turn in place.

Turn in place settings.

It’s recommended to set the “Angle Threshold” to a value between 45-90 degrees. Once exceeded, this modifier will try to play Turn Right or Turn Left State depending on the turn direction. You can add turning animations directly to your Animator Controller, and specify those state names in the Turn Settings:

Example from the demo controller.