In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up animation clips in Unity after they have been imported from an external application, such as Maya, 3ds Max, or Blender, via an FBX file.

Animation and rigging is a specialized craft in the development process. Creating animation rigs is a time consuming process and sometimes it takes several people to create a rig that meets all of the needs of a project. With Unity’s Animation Rigging tools, the amount of time and manpower is reduced because of the flexibility and robustness of these tools.

In this workflow, you’ll learn about baking animation. Baking is a necessary step to be able to export your animations as FBX. This is because control rigs contain Maya specific nodes that are not compatible with FBX. Therefore we must bake our animation onto just the nodes that are compatible with FBX: joints and blendshapes.

3D modeling software applications, such as Maya, provide a number of ways to create a rigged character for animation in Unity. A rig consists of a series of joints that mimic actual bone structure and provide natural pivot points between bones. The character’s mesh is connected to joints through a process called weight painting so the joints and mesh will move together. In order to import and animate a character in Unity, the bone hierarchy and skinned mesh need to be set up properly

In development at Unity is a 2D Animation package that allows you to rig Sprites as one might rig a 3D model for animation. In this tutorial, you will go through the process of importing the 2D Animation package and rig a sprite ready to be animated. You will learn about all the features of the 2D Animation package, including Bones, Weights and Sprite Skins.

Animators use control rigs to control assets used to create animations. In this workflow, you’ll learn guidelines and best practices for creating control rigs in Maya. These guidelines will help you create custom control rigs that can be cleanly exported as FBX files for use in Unity.

Creating rigs for compatibility with Unity is not without technical challenges. While the process is pretty straightforward, there are several edge cases that a rigger should be aware of.

Ragdolls are variants of animated objects whose bones are completely taken over by the force of physics. They’re most often used when a character is defeated, like in an action game when a player’s health depletes, or when you want a character’s movement to appear to be driven by physical forces. In this tutorial, we’ll create a Ragdoll using Unity’s built-in Create Ragdoll window. We'll use the Eva character in our examples, but you can use any character you want.

An overview of the Alembic file format used for importing animations into Unity and an alternative to FBX animations.

Cinemachine lets you to craft shots, build camera rigs, and dream up camera behaviors without any programming. In this tutorial, you'll add a Cinemachine Camera and Brain to your project.