Mesh Animation in Unity?

Hi!

I have seen one of the amazing “Coding Adventures” by Sebastian Lague on Youtube. In the second part on his geography game he makes a parachute that unfolds for the packages dropping to the ground - here is a timecoded link.

I am interested in how he made the animation for tha parachute since I might have a usecase where animating a mesh could be useful. He says “I made a simple animation”. Being relatively new to Unity I don’t know of a way to animate a mesh actually deforming/rearranging in Unity and wanted to ask on here about any ideas on how he did that or other pointers.

To be specific: I want to make a trampoline that bounce a ball and I want to have the trampoline deform halfway realistically (in accordance with the force the ball hit it at).

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

You don’t really create animations or assets in general inside Unity. Unity essentially supports two different animation types: Bone / skeleton based animations or morph target animations. However those have to be created in a modelling application like blender or 3dsmax. I’m not an artist so I can’t really help you here. Also that’s outside the scope of Unity. Textures, models, sounds and animations are generally generated with other applications and just imported into Unity.

It’s of course possible to create very simply geometry and animations procedurally. However that usually restricts you to some simple shapes and requires you to have a good understanding how meshes work.

Hi! Thank you very much for your elaborate answer. That was helpful.