Migrate from Dialogue Animation

Replace the retired Dialogue Animation components with Convai Body Animation and delete the Animator Controller assets it replaces.

SDK 4.5.0 retired the Dialogue Animation module and deleted the nine documentation pages that covered it, with no redirects. If a bookmark or a search result brought you here instead, this page is the replacement: it maps every removed component and asset to its Convai Body Animation equivalent, and it says plainly that the Animator Controller workflow those pages taught has no successor — it is deleted, not migrated.

Component and asset replacements

Removed in 4.5.0	Replaced by	Add through
ConvaiDialogueAnimationController	ConvaiBodyAnimationController	Add Component > Convai > Embodiment > Body Animation
DialogueAnimationLibrary	ConvaiBodyAnimationSet	Create > Convai > Embodiment > Body Animation Set
DialogueAnimationRuntimeConfig	ConvaiBodyAnimationConfig	Create > Convai > Embodiment > Body Animation Config
ConvaiDialogueAnimationProfile	ConvaiBodyAnimationProfile	Bundles a Set and a Config for the controller to read together
DialogueAnimatorContract, its four Animator Controller layers, the ping-pong states, and every ConvaiDialogueSlot_* placeholder clip	Nothing — ConvaiBodyAnimationController builds its own layered PlayableGraph in code	Delete the contract asset and its layers; see the next section
AnimationRiggingGazeBridge	Nothing — Convai Gaze writes bone rotations procedurally	Remove the component and its constraints

DialogueClipEntry, IAnimationClipLibrary, IDialogueVariantSelector, VariantSelectionContext, EmotionWeightedRandomSelector, DialogueAnimationClipPicker, AnimatorLayerBlender, AnimatorSlotOverrider, and AnimatorStatePingPong are also gone with the module. If your project implemented IDialogueVariantSelector to control which clip variant played, that seam does not exist on Body Animation — open an issue with Convai describing what your selector decided, so the replacement covers it.

Delete the Animator Controller workflow entirely

Dialogue Animation played idle and talk clips by driving a four-layer Animator Controller you authored yourself. ConvaiBodyAnimationController replaces the Animator's output with its own PlayableGraph while active, but it does not remove a leftover controller for you — an Animator Controller left assigned fights the graph for the same bones.

Delete the DialogueAnimatorContract asset, its four layers (base idle, idle overlay, body talk, head talk), the ping-pong states inside them, and every ConvaiDialogueSlot_* placeholder clip the layers referenced. Nothing in Body Animation reads any of them. This is the important part of the migration: you are not porting the animator contract to a new format, you are deleting it, because content now lives in a ConvaiBodyAnimationSet and behavior tuning lives in a ConvaiBodyAnimationConfig instead of Animator Controller states.

If the character's Animator still has a Runtime Animator Controller assigned after you add ConvaiBodyAnimationController, the component's own inspector reports it as a finding and offers a one-click fix to clear the reference.

What carries over automatically

Idle and talk variants, emotion-weighted selection between them, and upper-body talk coverage all carry over conceptually from Dialogue Animation to Body Animation — the ideas are the same, only the authoring surface changed. Move your idle and talk clips into a ConvaiBodyAnimationSet's Idle and Talk pools; the set reuses the same weighted, emotion-aware selection Dialogue Animation used, and the talk layer still restricts itself to the upper body when a mask is assigned.

Gender filtering and emotion affinity tags have no migration path

Two authoring concepts from Dialogue Animation have no field-level replacement, and their data does not migrate:

• Per-clip gender filtering. CharacterGender, authored on the character and on each clip entry, is gone. Author one ConvaiBodyAnimationSet per character type — one set for your female characters, a separate set for your male or creature characters — instead of authoring a single mixed set and filtering it at runtime.
• Per-clip emotion affinity tags. DialogueEmotionAffinity and the EmotionBiasStrength that weighted it are gone as an authoring surface. Body Animation and the Emotion module coordinate through the embodiment context instead of through tags on individual clip entries — there is no equivalent field to fill in on a ConvaiBodyAnimationSet entry.

Neither concept was dropped silently: both are named in the 4.5.0 migration notes as having no field-level equivalent, so treat their absence as a deliberate design change, not a gap to work around.

Convai Gaze needs no rigging package

If a character used AnimationRiggingGazeBridge to drive Unity Animation Rigging MultiAimConstraint weights from gaze, remove the bridge component and its constraints. Convai Gaze writes bone rotations procedurally and needs no rigging package at all — delete the com.unity.animation.rigging package reference too, if nothing else in your project depends on it.

Verify the migration

• Enter Play mode. The character idles and plays talk gestures while DialogueState is Speaking, with no Animator Controller assigned.
• Open the character's Animator component and confirm Controller is empty — a leftover controller is the most common cause of legs or arms twitching against the PlayableGraph's output.
• Confirm the project has no remaining reference to ConvaiDialogueAnimationController, DialogueAnimationLibrary, DialogueAnimatorContract, or AnimationRiggingGazeBridge — Unity reports a missing script or a missing reference on any GameObject or asset that still points at one.
• Open Convai > Body Animation Editor, the Setup mode, and confirm the character shows no error-severity finding.

Next steps

Body animation quick startBuild an animation setTroubleshoot body animation