Animation Clips

Animation Clips are one of the core elements to Unity’s animation system. Unity supports importing animation from external sources, and offers the ability to create animation clips from scratch within the editor using the Animation window.

Animation from External Sources

Animation clips imported from external sources could include:

Humanoid animations 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 3rd-party libraries (eg, from Unity’s asset store)
Multiple clips cut and sliced from a single imported timeline.

An example of an imported animation clip, viewed in Unitys Inspector window — An example of an imported animation clip, viewed in Unity’s Inspector window

Animation Created and Edited Within Unity

Unity’s Animation Window also allows you to create and edit animation clips. These clips can animate:

The position, rotation and scale of GameObjects
Component properties such as material colour, the intensity of a light, the volume of a sound
Properties within your own scripts including float, integer, enum, vector and Boolean variables
The timing of calling functions within your own scripts

An example of Unitys Animation window being used to animate parameters of a component - in this case, the intensity and range of a point light — An example of Unity’s Animation window being used to animate parameters of a component - in this case, the intensity and range of a point light

2017–10–02 Page amended with limited editorial review
Integer properties within scripts can be animated in 2017.31 NewIn20173
2D Button added to animation previewer 2017.3

Animation System Overview

Animation from external sources

Manual

Animation Clips

Animation from External Sources

Animation Created and Edited Within Unity