Pre and Post Extrapolation in Timeline

Good morning! Today we’re going to do a fairly simple post about pre and post extrapolation with a timeline clip in Unity. You can think of these as how Unity treats the beginning and end of the clip depending on other factors. Maybe the time allotted for the clip is too short for the full animation, what will Unity do then?

Here we have the same animation side by side, Unity will perform one, then perform the other.

Click on your clip and here you can see pre and post extrapolate in the inspector of our clip.

As you move the clips apart from each other you’ll notice the post extrapolate time adjusts to a higher and lower amount depending on the distance between the clips. This time is simply the wait until the next clip. We’re going to look at each of the post extrapolates in this post to explain how they work.

Auto will automatically end the animation. You’s see that I shortened the clip for the first animation and instead of finishing the animation the cube immediately jumps at the end rather than a smooth transition.

Hold will hold the position of the animated objects until the start of the new clip. Since the clip time is still shortened, you’ll see the cube stops part way through its animation and then jumps ahead when the next clip starts.

Loop will make the animation happen again from the beginning even if the clip time stops! This is a very useful choice as it keeps things looking more natural.

PingPong will reverse the animation back and forth when the clip time ends!

Continue will let the animation finish even if the clip time has been drastically shortened.

Some of these are a bit more advanced and useful than the others but with every situation you’ll find different solutions! I hope you’ll find these useful in your future projects and I’ll see you again soon.