2.1 The Animation window: features and settings

2.2 Editing Animation Clips

2.3 Model-specific animation import settings

2.4 Cutting imported Animation Clips

2.5 Setting the Root Motion of imported Animation Clips

2.6 Finishing an Animation Clip: additional settings

2.7 Creating and configuring Animation Events

2.8 Configuring Generic Rigs

2.9 Configuring Humanoid Rigs

In this tutorial, you’ll review key features and settings of the Animation window in context. 

Overview

Before you begin

Recap: Data on Animation Clips

Review an example animation

Editing imported Animation Clips

Animation Clip context

Animation Clip context: StreetLamp example

Review the Animation window modes

Review the Animation window toolbar

Select or create an Animation Clip

Filtering the Animation Curves for an Animation Clip

Adding keyframes and Animation Events

Summary

In this tutorial, you will create and edit simple Animation Clips in Unity Editor 

Add a binding to the LightFlicker Animation Clip

Editing the values of Animation Curves

Edit the values of your new Animation Curves

Review the keyframe settings

Creating animations using Record Mode

Manipulating multiple keyframes at once

Edit a bouncing ball animation

In this tutorial, you’ll review various additional settings that are useful for animating both Humanoid and Generic Rigs. 

Configure the Mirror setting 

Enable the Additive Reference Pose setting 

Adding curves

Editing curves

Additional import guidance

In this learning project, you'll explore how to work with Assets as you create animations using the Unity Animation systems.

Working with Assets

1.1 Welcome to the course

1.2 Core concepts: animation data

1.3 Core concepts: animation blending

3.1 Introduction to the Animator component

3.2 Introduction to animation blending

3.3 Creating and configuring Animator States

3.4 Creating and configuring Blend Trees

3.5 Creating and configuring Transitions

3.6 Creating a State Machine

3.7 Creating and configuring Animator Layers

4.1 Introduction to general animation scripting

4.2 Introduction to Humanoid-specific animation scripting

Introduction to 3D Animation Systems Assets

Review the core concepts underlying Unity's 3D animation systems, and explore practical examples provided in the course Unity project.

Course overview and core concepts

Review the structure of the Animator system

Animator Parameters

The Animator component

Animator component properties and their uses

What is animation blending?

How does blending work?

Which features use blending?

Blending in practice

In this learning project, you'll get to know the Animator as you explore animation blending, State Machines and Animation Layers. 

By the end of the project, you'll have completed a comprehensive overview of Unity's 3D Animation Systems

The Animator

Target Matching and IK basics

Introduction to target matching

Introduction to inverse kinematics

Target Matching

Review a target matching example

Humanoid inverse kinematics

Review the IK methods

In this final learning project, you'll review the basics of general and Humanoid-specific animation scripting.

Introduction to animation scripting

In this course, you'll explore the fundamentals of Unity’s 3D animation systems. You will:

Review the core concepts for the animation systems in Unity

Connect those core concepts to the functionality of the Unity Editor

Apply your learning through creating and modifying simple animations

Review key principles of scripting for animation


By the end of this course, you'll be able to:

Confidently use Unity's 3D animation systems to create basic in-game (or in-app) animations for your own projects

Begin to create custom animation scripts, if you have relevant C# scripting experience for Unity.


This course is for intermediate and confident beginner users of Unity. It will help you develop your understanding of the animation systems in Unity, but will be of limited use to learners who want to create cinematic animations for media experiences or game cutscenes. 

To get the most out of the course, you’ll need basic coding experience in Unity. This will help inform your understanding of the complexity of different animations scripting scenarios.

2019.4

Introduction to 3D Animation Systems

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Cutting and configuring Animation Clips

Open the Animation Clip

Review the animation timeline

Review the loop quality traffic lights

Play the full animation

Review example loop traffic lights

Create your own animation cut 

Enable Loop Time

Enable Loop Pose

Review the Cycle Offset setting

Set the Cycle Offset for your animation

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In this tutorial, you’ll select your own cut from a running Animation Clip. 

In this tutorial, you’ll use animation-specific settings to cut an imported Animation Clip. One of the most common uses for cutting animation is using motion capture (or mocap) data, but it can be used to adjust any imported animation. 

In 2.3 Model-specific animation import settings, you reviewed the settings of an imported model that applied to all the animations of that model. In this tutorial, you’ll be using the settings that apply to animations individually.

This tutorial uses the Introduction to 3D Animation Systems Unity project. If you haven't already done so, download this before continuing.

2.  In the Project window, go to Assets > 2.4 - Animation Import Settings. 

All the assets you’ll need for this tutorial are in this folder. 

Over the next three tutorials, you will cut and configure a humanoid run Animation Clip in Unity Editor. This Animation Clip uses mocap data. 

You can follow the tutorials sequentially or use the prepared resources in the project for this course to do each stage in isolation.

First, open the Animation Clip for this tutorial so that you can review the settings in context:

1.  In the Project window, select the HumanoidRun model. 


2.  In the Inspector, select the Animation tab. 


3.  Change the Name property from “Take 001” to “Run”. (Take 001 is the default when Animation Clips are imported without a name.)  


Changing the name to something specific will help you identify the Animation Clip’s contents more easily.

The Project window has the 2.4 - Cutting Imported Animation Clips folder open and the HumanoidRun model within highlighted.

The Inspector has Model, Rig, Animation and Materials tabs, of which the Animation tab is selected. The Animation tab is called out.

The name property of the current clip is being edited and set to Run.

Now that you’ve renamed the Animation Clip, let’s review the timeline. The animation timeline shows all of the animation data for the current Animation Clip (or take). 

There are handles you can drag to set the start and end of the Animation Clip to cut the take.


For more precision, you can set the frame number for the start and end of the Animation Clip using the fields just underneath the animation timeline. 

A section of the Inspector showing the full potential timeline for the Run Animation Clip. The handles that control the start and end of the Animation Clip within this time are called out.

You can use the tools in the Animation tab to create a nicely looping run animation from the mocap data in this Animation Clip. However, to do this, you’ll need to know whether you’ve identified a good loop to cut. 

To help you do this, there is a traffic light system beside the different settings in the tab:

A green circle next to the setting indicates that there is a good loop

A yellow circle yellow indicates that the loop is reasonable, which may or may not be appropriate for your circumstances 

A red circle indicates that it is a bad loop 



It might seem obvious that both start and end point should have good (green) indicators for all the settings. However, not all settings need to be green for all animations — it depends on what you’re trying to create. In some circumstances, a bad loop may be perfectly adequate for your needs.  

The settings for the Run Animation Clip below the timeline are called out. Each group of settings has a traffic light to their right indicating red, yellow or green.

At this point, let’s review the animation:

1.  In the Inspector, find the preview pane.

Note: Your preview pane may be collapsed. If this is the case, select the bar at the bottom of the Inspector to expand it. 


2.  Press the Play button in the preview pane to watch the full animation. 


3.  When it’s finished, press the Pause button in the preview pane. 


Yikes! The animation data is pretty bad. It’s going to be challenging to make a good Animation Clip out of this. Let’s give it a go though!

All the settings for the Run Animation Clip are shown. At the bottom there is a horizontal bar with the label Run on the left side. The mouse pointer clicks and drags this bar up revealing a small scene showing a preview of the Animation Clip. The preview is paused.

The Animation Clip is previewed in the preview pane. The Animation Clip has lots of parts were the character seems to freeze.

To help you find a good loop, the Model Importer will show you a coloured graph for each of the traffic lights when you drag either of the timeline handles. 

There are several parts of the graph that are just flat lines. These are the points where the animation has frozen, probably because the mocap didn’t record properly. Don’t include these bits in your cut of the Animation Clip. 


At the start of the take, the model is leaning forward more than it would normally in a run. This is not ideal for a normal run animation.


There does seem to be a small section of usable animation about 10 seconds into the take. Let’s find a loop there.

One of the handles of the Animation Clip’s timeline has been left-clicked on and the mouse button is being held down. Each of the settings groups that has a traffic light is hidden and replaced by a line graph per group. The line graphs vary between green, yellow and red and relate to how close a match there is for that setting group between the start and end of the Animation Clip.

To create your own cut of the Animation Clip:


1.  Drag the start handle to a point between frame 290 and frame 330.  


2.  Drag the end handle to make a loop.  


The example above uses frame 317. If you used a different start frame, try to find an appropriate end frame using the coloured graph.  

Tip: Green peaks in the graph are good places to check for loops.


3.  Press the Play button in the preview pane to preview your animation. 


4.  When you’ve finished, press the Pause button in the preview pane. 


If you used different frames and they don’t quite look right, don’t change them just yet. There are some more settings that might help. 

The Animation Clip settings are shown. The Start property has been set to 300. All the traffic lights are either yellow or red

The Animation Clip settings are shown. The End property has been set to 317. The traffic lights for looping, rotation and vertical position are all green.

The Run Animation Clip is previewed and now looks to loop reasonably well.

The first group of settings below the timeline control the looping.  

If the Loop Time setting is enabled, the animation will begin again at the start once it finishes. 

This definitely makes sense for a run animation, so let’s do that: 


This will enable further configuration options.

The settings immediately below the timeline which are for looping. The Loop Time property is not enabled and the other settings are greyed out.

The settings immediately below the timeline which are for looping. The Loop Time property is now enabled and the Loop Pose and Cycle Offset properties are no longer greyed out.

The Loop Pose setting changes the values of the keyframes in the Animation Clip so that they match at the start and end. 

In simplified terms, Loop Pose is used to make sure animations don’t have a sudden change between the start and end that leads to a jitter in the animation. This is especially useful when using mocap data, which rarely matches up exactly. 

Since your animation needs to seamlessly loop, you should use this setting:

The approximate formula used to calculate this is as follows:

newValue = originalValue - normalizedTime * (endValue - startValue)

If the start and end values of an Animation Curve are the same, then the new value for any given keyframe on that curve will be the same as the original value. As the difference increases between the start and end values, the change in keyframes further from the start becomes more apparent.

If you have managed to cut a good loop for your run animation, then Loop Pose will smooth the start and end without changing the overall look of the animation. Generally speaking, if you have an animation that you want to loop smoothly then it is a good idea to enable Loop Pose, as it has no impact on performance.

Cycle Offset adjusts when the Animation Clip actually starts in the frame range you have selected. 

It is measured in Normalized Time, which means that a value of 0.2 would start the Animation Clip 20% of the way into the selected frame range.

There is usually no reason to change the Cycle Offset of an Animation Clip when you think about it independently. However, when blending similar animations, it makes sense for them to be in phase. 

For humanoid character animation, this usually means making sure the legs are in similar positions at the same Normalized Times across all the Animation Clips you want to blend. An easy way to ensure this is the case is to have a standard for where the legs are in their cycle at the start of each Animation Clip.

Let’s set the following standard for this Animation Clip:

The character’s right foot is planted on the floor

The character’s left knee is passing the right one when viewed perpendicular to the direction of motion. 


The character is posed in the preview pane so that the view is perpendicular to the direction the character is running; the character’s right foot is flat on the floor and the character’s left knee is hidden by the character’s right knee.

To set the Cycle Offset and start your cut with the defined pose:


1.  In the preview pane, right-click and drag to view your animation cut side-on. 


2.  Drag the preview playhead to a point where the right foot is planted on the floor, and the left knee is overlapping the right knee. 


3.  Note the Normalized Time shown for this pose in brackets at the bottom of the preview pane.  


If you are using the given example range, then it should be approximately (013.0%).


4.  Set the Cycle Offset to the Normalized Time for your chosen pose.  


In the example, this is 0.13.  This will start the animation loop at the pose you have selected. 

The view of the preview’s camera is changed from a three-quarters view to side on.

The playhead of the preview pane is slowly dragged until the desired pose is found.

The character is posed in the preview pane so that the view is perpendicular to the direction the character is running; the character’s right foot is flat on the floor and the character’s left knee is hidden by the character’s right knee. The normalized time is called out

The Cycle Offset property has been set to 0.13. The preview playhead has been set back to the start. The desired pose is shown in the preview pane.

In this tutorial, you have selected your own cut from a running Animation Clip. This is a fundamental process for working with animation in Unity.

In Setting the Root Motion of imported Animation Clips, you’ll build on this by exploring how root motion can be used to create realistic and engaging animations with a pre-cut Animation Clip.

2.4 Cutting imported Animation Clips

1. Overview

2. Before you begin

3. Cutting and configuring Animation Clips

4. Open the Animation Clip

5. Review the animation timeline

6. Review the loop quality traffic lights

7. Play the full animation

8. Review example loop traffic lights

9. Create your own animation cut

10. Enable Loop Time

11. Enable Loop Pose

12. Review the Cycle Offset setting

13. Set the Cycle Offset for your animation

14. Summary

Complete this tutorial