Location: Samples/01 Basics/01 Quick Play

Recommended After: learning how to use Unity (animation experience not required).

Learning Outcomes: in this sample you will learn:

How to play an animation using Animancer.

How to write a simple script.

How to set up component and asset references using the Inspector.

Summary

These samples each start with a Summary section which quickly lists the main topics covered. This aims to give some overall context to the individual steps and allow you to skip over things you already understand or aren't interested in.

This sample demonstrates how to write a very simple script which tells Animancer to play an animation. It involves the following steps:

1. Write this script:

using Animancer;
using UnityEngine;

public class PlayAnimationOnEnable : MonoBehaviour
{
    [SerializeField] private AnimancerComponent _Animancer;
    [SerializeField] private AnimationClip _Animation;

    protected virtual void OnEnable()
    {
        _Animancer.Play(_Animation);
    }
}

2. Attach it to your model and assign its references in the Inspector.

3. Enter Play Mode and watch the animation play.

So where do you want to go from here?

Overview

Here's what the general code structure of the scene looks like:

These diagrams show the relationships between scripts and other objects:

• PlayAnimationOnEnable is the script written for this sample.
  • It references an AnimancerComponent which it will control and the Humanoid-WalkForwards animation which it will play.
• The AnimancerComponent references an Animator component which is required for playing animations.
• The Animator component doesn't have an Animator Controller asset, that's what Animancer is replacing.

The following sections explain how to write each part of the PlayAnimationOnEnable script from scratch and how to set it up in Unity, but if you have trouble understanding the concepts introduced here then you might want to start with some tutorials on the Unity Learn website to learn the basics of programming and using Unity before learning to use Animancer.

New Script

Start by creating a new script called PlayAnimationOnEnable and open it in your Script Editor (such as Visual Studio). Edit the script so that it looks like this:

using UnityEngine;

public class PlayAnimationOnEnable : MonoBehaviour
{
}

The New Script section also explains what each of the parts of the script mean, but you can come back to it later if you just want to see the animation playing.

Fields

In order to play an animation, the script will need two things:

1. A reference to the AnimancerComponent of the object that will play the animation.
2. A reference to the AnimationClip asset for it to play.

So we declare a Serialized Field for each of them inside the class like this:

using Animancer;
using UnityEngine;

public class PlayAnimationOnEnable : MonoBehaviour
{
    [SerializeField] private AnimancerComponent _Animancer;
    [SerializeField] private AnimationClip _Animation;
}

Animancer's samples use Serialized Fields because they make it easy to see what a script is interacting with, but there are various other ways of getting references to things which are explained in the Component Referencing and Asset Referencing sections.

Scene Setup

Now we can save the above script and go back to the Unity Editor to set it up on a character in the scene.

1. If you don't have a scene with a character in it yet, you can follow the Basic Scene Setup instructions to create one.

Playing the Animation

Now the only thing left to do is tell Animancer to play the animation. We could have done that right after writing the Fields, but doing it in this order will hopefully be a bit easier for beginners to understand (write the fields -> assign objects to them -> write the code to play the animation -> see it playing).

For this sample, we want to play the animation immediately when the scene starts so we write a Method called OnEnable inside the class.

    protected virtual void OnEnable()
    {
    }

OnEnable is one of Unity's MonoBehaviour Messages so giving it that name will make Unity automatically call it for us on startup. That page also explains why it's protected virtual.

All that method needs to do is tell the AnimancerComponent (the reference stored in the _Animancer field) to play the AnimationClip (the reference stored in the _Animation field).

    protected virtual void OnEnable()
    {
        _Animancer.Play(_Animation);
    }

Conclusion

Here's what the full script looks like:

using Animancer;
using UnityEngine;

public class PlayAnimationOnEnable : MonoBehaviour
{
    [SerializeField] private AnimancerComponent _Animancer;
    [SerializeField] private AnimationClip _Animation;
    
    protected virtual void OnEnable()
    {
        _Animancer.Play(_Animation);
    }
}

After you save the script and press Play in the Unity Editor, the character will play the animation you gave it.

What Next?