Animating UI via scripts in Unity/C#

Let’s see how to use C# coroutines to animate UI canvas elements!

What about Unity animations?

When you work on your UI, you might be tempted to use “normal” Unity animations to update the various parameters of your elements. And it’s a valid and user-friendly of doing it.

For example, it allows you to quickly setup a basic fade-to-black scene transition; I’ve talked about this in more detail in a previous tutorial (available in text or video format), if you’re interested in learning more :)

But!

Despite being a great way of prototyping UI animations, this technique is not the most efficient.

The problem is that Unity’s animator engine was originally crafted and tuned for character rigs animation — so they sort of expect continuous movement that keep on updating ever so-slightly the positions of a whole bunch of bones in a complex skeleton. And this is pretty different from what you’re doing when you’re just interpolating some colour alpha between 1 and 0, right?