Using Animations in Unity

Eyas
8 min readFeb 4, 2023
Photo by Mélanie THESE

In solo game development, you can’t just stick to your strong suit. If you’re a Software Engineer trying out solo game development, being a solid developer will only get you so far; even if you’re using assets made by others, you’ll still need to know how to integrate them into your game tightly.

Animation is a great example. Imagine a character model has animations for walking, running, standing, talking, interacting, and more. In that case, you will still need to define how a character object triggers and transitions between these animations. These animations might also dictate what your object does; for example, an enemy that punches characters might want to deal damage at the precise moment the model’s arms are fully extended.

Today, we’ll discuss the essential concepts of using Animation in Unity. We’ll also go over a few examples using the incredibly cute Modular Animal Knights PBR asset pack from the Unity Asset Store. A free version that includes only the Dog is available here as well.

Concepts

Animation Clip

An Animation Clip (Animation for short, AnimationClip in code) is an asset that describes a series of keyframes for each property on a Game Object over time.

In other words, an Animation Clip asset describes, for a given Object, the change over

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Eyas

Software Engineer living in Brooklyn, NY. MIT Computer Science S.B. ’13, M.Eng. ‘14. From Amman, Jordan. Interested in politics, current affairs, and technology