Using the Unity Animation System

Speaking about yet another aspect of Unity’s Emmy award-winning animation technology

Objective: Speak about Unity’s animation system and some more things we can do with it.

Starting Point for Today

For today’s article, I will be using my project The Great Fleece to demonstrate how to work with Unity’s animation system. This is our starting point:

As can be seen, our player moves but they aren’t animated. In today’s article, we will add animations to our character through the use of Unity’s animation systems.

Introducing the Animator Controller

To get started, I created an Animator Controller as shown in the Project window screenshot below.

If you double click on that animator controller, you then open up the Animator window, alongside the content currently within that animator.

As can be seen, I added an idle animation to the entry state of the animator. Now, let’s connect this animator to our player’s character model by adding an Animator component to it and attaching the Animator Controller we just created. In the end, this is how my Inspector looked.

Below is the result — just a nice and simple idle animation.

This is just one quick example of what can be done with the Unity animation system. The GIF in the intro shows how animations can be mixed to create the movements we expect for each state of the character. Thanks for reading today’s article!