Animations and Animators — Animating in Unity!

Visuals are a core component for the creating of videogames, especially in Western developers. Fortunately, Unity offers easy to use windows to create basic animations for your next project!

Let’s take a look at a new powerup; the Triple Shot. Currently, the powerup capsule is just a static sprite. We can enhance this visual and make it more prominent to the player with a simple animation sequence.

Boring, stale image.

Inside of Unity, go to Window>Animation>Animation.

Opening the Animation Window.

Next select the sprite you want to animate. The animation window will look like this:

Press the Create button to continue!

Unity will ask for a location to save the animation you are about to create. I would recommend keeping things organized and making a dedicated animation folder

Organization is key in all projects, but in large scale ones it is paramount.

Name this new animation to your desired name. I used the Triple_Shot_Powerup_anim as seen above.

Now on you animation window, you will see a timeline.

If you do not see this, select the object you want to animate in the Hierarchy again.

Drag all the sprites you want to rotate through to create your animation (2D animations are just rapidly changing pictures called sprites) and drop them onto the timeline.

The Sample options dictates how many times per second the animation will change state. The default is 60, or every frame.

Now press the record button and hit play in the animation window.

You should see your selected sprite animating!