Animation clips

Animation clips are one of the core elements of Unity’s animation system. Unity supports importing animation from external sources. You can create animation clipsAnimation data that can be used for animated characters or simple animations. It is a simple “unit” piece of motion, such as (one specific instance of) “Idle”, “Walk” or “Run”. More info
See in Glossary with the Animation window.

Animation from external sources

You can import the following types of Animation clips from external sources:

• Humanoid animationsAn animation using humanoid skeletons. Humanoid models generally have the same basic structure, representing the major articulate parts of the body, head and limbs. This makes it easy to map animations from one humanoid skeleton to another, allowing retargeting and inverse kinematics. More info
  See in Glossary captured at a motion capture studio.
• Animations created from scratch by an artist in an external 3D application (such as Autodesk® 3ds Max® or Autodesk® Maya®).
• Animation sets from third party libraries from Unity’s Asset StoreA growing library of free and commercial assets created by Unity and members of the community. Offers a wide variety of assets, from textures, models and animations to whole project examples, tutorials and Editor extensions. More info
  See in Glossary.
• Multiple animation clips cut from a single imported motion file.

Create and edit animation clips within Unity

You can also create and edit animation clips in Unity’s Animation window. These clips can animate:

• The position, rotation, and scale of GameObjectsThe fundamental object in Unity scenes, which can represent characters, props, scenery, cameras, waypoints, and more. A GameObject’s functionality is defined by the Components attached to it. More info
  See in Glossary.
• Component properties such as material color, the intensity of a light, and the volume of a sound.
• Properties within your own scriptsA piece of code that allows you to create your own Components, trigger game events, modify Component properties over time and respond to user input in any way you like. More info
  See in Glossary including float, integer, enum, vector, and Boolean variables.
• The timing of calling functions within your own scripts.

Additional resources

• Animation From External Sources
• Animation Window