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3 types of Animation in Unity (and other Game Engines)
- XR_XharpRazor
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Intro
Moving objects in your Game or Worlds or Avatar is a nice thing to have, but most of the time users will limit themselves the way to animate things. In this article, we will explain the 3 methods we have so far to make things move ~
Dope sheet animation
The most well-known way to animate things. When people talk about animation, we immediately refer to this type of animation. We can treat the dope-sheet like a time schedule for all objects. Here is an example more related to "normal" lives :
8:00 | 8:30 | 9:00 | |
Phox-Kun | Wake Up | make breakfast | nom nom |
Kytzune-Chan | Sleep | Wake Up | nom nom |
Hibiscus-Chan | Sleep | Wake Up | make breakfast |
Hibiscus-Chan | Sleep | Sleep | Wake Up |
This may not be accurate but this demonstrates the idea : every row refers to a GameObject or a parameter, from left to right shows the flow of time. In the timeline we can mark "Keyframes" to specify how should the GameObject behave at a certain time.
if you need more tutorials, you can search :
"Unity Animation", a lot of great tutorials can be found.
Particle System
Most of the time when people hear particle systems, they immediately think it is something extremely difficult to use, and when you look at the inspector, it looks like all the buttons and meters in a cockpit on a plane.
However, we can dissect the particle system into different modules, and we can try to describe how the particle should behave, module by module.
In this case, the Particle system makes "random but repetitive" animation extremely easy.
if you need more tutorials, you can search :
"Unity Particle Systems", a lot of great tutorials can be found.
Back in 2016, we launched our first Music Video "V001 - If I can fly", which we used Flash-CS3, to generate floating particles in the background, can only create randomized scattered circles, then group them, and Motion-Tween them :
On 2023-04-09, we launched our very first Unity Music Video, heavily focusing on Particle Systems, the video is created within a day, compared to the one using Flash-CS3, that probably took a week to make :
Code Animation
When you start making your own Unity Game or Mechanisms of any kind, chances are you came across the native Unity Event : `OnUpdate`. The Event `OnUpdate` will be triggered for every frame, which is perfect for animations, afterall, one of the main idea of animation is to update the state of a GameObject as time goes.
Here is an example to make an object move at a constant velocity with a certain direction :
using UnityEngine;
public class PlayerController : MonoBehaviour
{
[SerializeField] public Vector3 velocity;
void Update()
{
transform.position += velocity * Time.deltaTime;
}
}
Of course, other than moving, we can do all sorts of things ~ Rotation, Orbiting, etc.
In one of our music videos, "R01B - Nonsense Party" heavily uses "Animation by Code" . In the video, the Bee plushie moves in 3 ways :
constant velocity + spinning
circle orbit
sinewave jumping
if all animations are done by dope sheet, it would be worse than a hassle XD
ALL OF THEM TOGETHER
starting since 2023, we have been heavily using Unity as our animation workflow. Now most of our music videos have these 3 types of animations combined : Dopesheet, Particle systems, and Code.
So the next time when you want to start animating things, try not to limit yourselves to only dope-sheets. OwO/ have fun ~
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