Body animation

Find guides for giving a Convai character idles, talk motion, walking, and gestures with the code-driven Body Animation module.

Body Animation is the Convai embodiment module that plays a character's idle, talk, locomotion, action, and pointing motion. One component, ConvaiBodyAnimationController, builds and runs a layered PlayableGraph directly against a Humanoid Animator — there is no Animator Controller asset to author. Content comes from a ConvaiBodyAnimationSet you assign, and behavior is tuned in a ConvaiBodyAnimationConfig.

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What body animation gives a character

Behavior	What it looks like
Idle	The character shifts between authored idle variants instead of holding one static pose.
Talk motion	Upper-body gesture clips play while the character speaks, scaled by live speech energy.
Locomotion	NavMesh-synced walking and jogging, with directional starts, stops, and turns when the set authors them.
Actions and gestures	Named clips such as wave or dance, triggered by Convai actions or by your own code through PlayAction.
Pointing	The character raises an arm toward a world position or a moving target and holds it.

Add ConvaiBodyAnimationController to a character through Convai > Embodiment > Body Animation. The SDK ships a default animation set, so a new character moves without you sourcing any clips first.

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No Animator Controller asset

Every other Unity animation workflow you may already know — states, transitions, parameters wired in the Animator window — does not apply here. The controller builds its PlayableGraph entirely in code from the ConvaiBodyAnimationSet and ConvaiBodyAnimationConfig you assign, and rebuilds it when either changes. How body animation works covers the layer stack this graph runs.

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Where to start

Body animation quick start

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Explore body animation

How body animation works The layered graph that plays idle, talk, action, and pointing motion, and how dialogue state drives it.

Body animation quick start Add the component with the shipped animation set and see idle and talk motion in Play mode.

Build an animation set Assemble your own ConvaiBodyAnimationSet from a folder of clips or field by field.

Configure locomotion Add ConvaiNavMeshLocomotion, or wire a custom locomotion source, and tune walk and jog speeds.

Play actions and gestures Trigger named actions, anchored actions, and pointing from your own code.

Body animation config reference Every ConvaiBodyAnimationConfig field, grouped by section, with defaults.

Body animation scripting reference The ConvaiBodyAnimationController public API: methods, handles, and events.

Body animation usage examples A guided walk, a gesture on cue, and pointing at a scene object.

Troubleshoot body animation No motion, T-pose, locomotion desync, and how to read the trace log.