Platformer: Player Animation Part 1

Intro

In this series of player animation article, I will cover how to add premade animations to from Mixamo to character models that have been rigged for Mixamo animations. This article will cover downloading the animations, setting it up and adding an idle animation to the player.

Download Animation

Mixamo allows you to create a free account and allows you to search and download a ton of animations. I just searched idle and choose the animation I wanted. Now, when downloading make sure the FBX is for Unity and it is with the Skin, when it is just the animation rig.

Setup

Drag and drop the downloaded animation file into the folder you desire. Select the animation import and change the Animation Type to Humanoid in the Rig section. Don’t forget to click on APPLY.

Looking at the animation, you will notice we are unable to modify any of the animation settings.

We will need to duplicate the animation in order to gain access to the animation settings.

The 3D model already had an animator component, so we didn’t need to add one, but we will need to create an animator controller. The animator controller stores all of the animation clips and allows us to control when the animation clips should play through script.

To add the idle animation, we can just drag the animation into the animator controller window and it will be defaulted to the entry animation. The entry animation is the animation that is first played when the game starts.

In the Idle animation, we will want to set loop to true, so the animation will continuously loop.

Conclusion

Adding animations makes the game come to life and this is just the beginning of making the player come to life.