Character Animations in Timeline

Animating a human character in the Timeline is essentially no different from animating a cube in theory, but as the saying goes, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they’re different.” Let’s do a simple case. I’ve set up a plane and a humanoid character downloaded from the Unity Asset Store.

I then imported a collection of Capoeira animations from Mixamo and used AnimTool to ensure that they’re using a Humanoid avatar.

I created a Timeline and I can simply drop animations in.

Hmm… there are some minor issues here. There’s a jump in position between clips for one. For two, the animation kind of jumps from one to the other. The first, we can fix by using Match Offsets to Previous Clip on the second clip. The latter, we basically need to ease the animation in, and overlap them a little.

There’s still a little bit of skating, but nothing that we can’t adjust. As it turns out, the issue is partly that I set that Offset from previous clip before I merged the two. Removing that, things get a lot more smooth.

There are a few other tricks you can do. For example you can override the animation for a few frames using a Overide Track.

Yeah, kind of resets it in the middle, and then goes back, but you can ease it in.

Or you can do a mask, saying that the override only applies to the upper body, for example.

Hmm… let’s try something that doesn’t usually involve inversion.

Not bad. One last thing, you normally can’t edit the position of a saved animation, but sometimes you need to move the person, especially if your animation doesn’t have root motion. In that case, you can create a second animation track, and use it to modify position.

An animator I am not… but you get the idea.