Dynamic Animation using the Animator

Unity Engine
1

Can you make a dynamic animation using the animator?

I’ve made a sequence of animations which are just loops using the animator, but now I’d like to make one that changes based on a condition.

I essentially want the arms of my character to follow the mouse cursor, and while I can do this without the animator, I haven’t found a way to use the animator along side of this. This is because the animator overrides the changes I make to the position of the arm since that whole object is being animated. If I turn off the animator, I can get the arm to trace the position of the mouse via the script, but if I do that, the rest of my animations are broken since the animator is not enabled.

Basically, I’d want an animation that traces from the current position of the arm, towards the position of the mouse cursor. So the first keyframe would be the current position of the arm, and the second keyframe would be new position of the arm equal to the position of the mouse.

I’m considering separating the arms from the body and animating it separately, but if I were to do that I foresee two problems.

  1. Either I do it all in the script, and most likely end up with a static looking arm that doesn’t really have idle animations or anything
  2. Or, I run into the same problem of being unable to put information into the animation clips (such as the current mouse cursor position)

Any ideas?

2

Figured out a work around. I just separated the arms from the body in the hierarchy and can now animate them alongside of my normal movement animations using Lerp in the script.

3

You might be able to pull this off using an Avatar Mask and a layer in your Animator Controller that is set to Override. Then you could possibly use IK Targets to drive the positioning of the arms. I’ve done something that sounds similar to what you are trying to accomplish using this technique.

1 Like