Animation Preview for Unity allows you to get an idea about how a character looks like in your scene in different poses. You get an overview of all the animations available for a character or you could just mix a specific character with animations of another asset.
Top quality assets like the ones from Malbers Animations have a 100+ animations. A demo scene can’t possibly cover them all. So in order to get an overview of what’s available this asset was developed. But it turned out to become more over time.
Once the preview was in I wanted to see how characters look in different environments. For example I created a desert racing scene in which I wanted to have a giant worm rise when the hover bike was driving by. Repeating hitting play, see how it looks, adjust transform (position, rotation scale), start the whole process again was getting time consuming. I rather spend the time on working on a tool to reduce time and effort to get to my desired results. So it suggested itself to extend Animation Preview. It allows you to adjust a model’s transform in the scene and play a clip of your preference to get an idea how it looks. Directly inside the Unity Editor without having to enter play mode.
And at some point I purchased the most awesome Kubold animations. I wanted to see how it is to have e. g. a humanoid dragon combined with fighting animations. In a desert scene. Without much time consuming effort on my own, just a quick and easy preview setup. This is what you can do with Animation Preview.
After I showed it there were some more requests like automatic selection of the animator instead of having to drag it around manually. And implicitly came the requirement for an editor window. It’s really nice to work with, here’s an example:
The problem I’m facing now is that having a gameobject editable in the inspector vs an editor window isn’t working quite nicely with Unity, ie I can’t just make the code modular and inject parts of it. The editor window version is way better than the one that’s tied to a monobehaviour. However, I can’t just change it by force, it’ll break existing projects when you upgrade.
So I thought I’d release a Pro version and allow free upgrades for the initial sale period for everyone who purchased Animation Preview so far. I think that’s fair for everyone. I have more features planned and the Pro version is the one to go.
If there are some objections to this way, please let me know. But as you can see from the Synty Pirate Island video this is much more fluent. Apologies for the confusion, but I’m bound to working around Unity’s own limits.
Animation Preview Pro is still pending approval by the Asset Store and the way the Asset Store queue looks it should be live next week. I increased the price, but set the upgrade to be free for the period of the initial release sale.
Please, everyone who supported me with purchasing Animation Preview grab Animation Preview Pro during those 2 weeks period for free. I’d like to THANK YOU VERY MUCH for your support this way!
I have no other means to give it to you for free after that period. And the Asset Store doesn’t give us any means to reach our customers. So that’s why I created this early announcement. I’ll post here once the asset is live. If you subscribe to this thread temporarily, you’ll at least get notified this way.
As to why there was the necessity of a Pro version, please read a few posts above .
@Rowlan I bought your marvelous asset and like it very much. I have a little question. Would it be hard to implement a search feature within the controller animation? Basically I would like to drag all my project animations in the same controller at the beginning of a project search the keyword needed to show only what I would like to preview. I have another asset that scan automatically all animations but I still have to click on them to import them, then click play to play the animation. Perhaps it is no so easy to do but that would really improve my workflow. Just a wish feature of course!
Hi, thank you very much! It’s something I wanted to implement after the release. Basically a text filter that reduces the list of animations shown. I toyed around with the Synty Assets and added all of the Kubold animations I had. So that was very overwhelming to stage a scene, but the scrolling through hundreds of animations can become extensive. It’s simpler to enter eg “crouch” and have it. Basically it quite differes from the original intention to simply show all previews of an asset, now it’s staging scenes. But that’s the nature of software, especially with all that excellent feedback I got
Congratulations for being featured in the best new tools by Code Monkey. Code Monkey is a very clever developer. He builds great assets and he has the knowledge to discover other great assets and talented developers.
Just because you mentionned you like feedbacks… It would be great if the play control section could be locked to avoid scrolling up and down between each clip when having a long list of clips.
Is the Pro version on the store yet? I just don’t want to miss the 2 weeks free upgrade window. Thanks!
