Contact
If you can't find what you're looking for in this documentation, there are several places where you can get help:
GitHub
Issues
Unity
Discussions
Email
Support
Other general resources:
- Unity Discussions and the Unity 3D Subreddit are very active communities if you need help or just want to show off your work.
- The C# in Unity site introduces the fundamentals of programming in Unity and is referenced throughout this documentation.
- Stack Overflow is good for general programming questions.
Frequently Asked Questions
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| 1. Can non-programmers use it? | Controlling Animancer requires some programming just like every other animation system. It does involve a bit more code than Animator Controllers, but that code controls everything instead of needing to communicate back and forth with an Animator Controller so the overall logic ends up being much easier to understand even for less experienced programmers. The C# in Unity site introduces the fundamentals of programming and the Samples contain detailed explanations of how things work. Don't hesitate to use the Contact links above if you need to ask questions. |
| 2. Why replace Mecanim? | The Mecanim vs. Animancer section explains the problems with the Mecanim Animator Controller system and the ways Animancer solves them. |
| 3. What are Playables? | Unity's Playables API is the low level system which both Mecanim and Animancer are built upon. As mentioned above the Feature Comparison table, it allows you to build animation systems but is too low level to be easily useful on its own. |
| 4. What is the difference between Pro and Lite? | Animancer Pro includes the full source code and has more features which the Lite version only allows you to use in the Unity Editor for trial purposes. See the Feature Comparison for the actual list of differences. Note that the Animancer.Lite.dll files in the Animancer Pro package are empty dummies which are only there to overwrite the ones from the Lite version so that you can upgrade seamlessly. Animancer Lite only includes the source code of some things such as the Finite State Machine system, but not the core of Animancer. |
| 5. Is it compatible with X? | Probably. Animancer is based on the Playables API, which means most systems developed for regular Mecanim Animator Controllers should work normally alongside Animancer, with a few exceptions. See the Conversion page for more details. |
| 6. Is the performance good? | Yes. Animancer is notably faster than Mecanim at Instantiation and very slightly faster in Average Frame Rate, though the differences are small enough not to matter. See the Performance Benchmarks for more details. |
| 7. How can I control the speed or time of an animation? | [Pro-Only] Use the AnimancerState returned by the Play method as shown on the Playing Animations page. |
| 8. Can I still use Animator Controllers? | [Pro-Only] Yes, the Animator Controllers page explains how you can use them with Animancer. |
| 9. Can I mirror animations? | As explained in the Feature Comparison table, you can mirror Humanoid animations in their import settings but not per state. If you need both mirrored and un-mirrored versions of a particular animation, you will need to duplicate it and mirror one of them. |