What is the best animation workflow for my purpose?

Unity Engine
1

Hello!

I am currently working on an unity art installation featuring an oculus rift. I am new to unity but i managed to learn quite a bit in the last weeks/months, and now i am struggeling with my own animation workflow. Currently, i am only using keyframe animations and some very basic scripts and i am finding myself confused about the amount of single animations in my project. The setup is pretty simple, currently its all about activating/deactivating certain gameobjects after a time, translating/rotating them and about changing materials and properties. My way was ok for the first few prototypes, but now the project is growing and i find it hard to time the animations appropriately with the keyframes. I would love to have a global overview of all my animations, so i can time them accordingly and relative to each other. I have the feeling i am missing some feature in Unity which can help me with the timing. Or maybe there is some nice workaround for that?

I am not a programmer, but i could imagine, that there are some scripts which could say: All the Gameobjects with this animation attached to it, start after x seconds. This alone could save me a lot of time. So yeah, i am asking you: What is the best animation workflow for my purpose? I dont need ai, no character animations, no animated guns or something, i just want to alter the surroundings and the environment. I appreciate every suggestion, links or tips!

Thank you and greetings from germany,
artur

Bonusquestion: The project will feature some technical glitch aesthetic. Is there a way to actually force some real glitches in unity? Or the other way round, how can you achive a glitch aesthetic with other methods? I am speaking of random translations of gameobjects, losing their properties/materials, displacements, noise effects, color variations, wrong physics, mesh deformations and mesherrors.

2

i am still looking for a solution…

3

You can use Mecanim’s animation state machines for non-characters in Generic mode. This might help you organize your animations, and the transitions between them, into visual maps. Trigger parameters are useful to switch between animations.

If you have Unity Pro, you can use staffantan’s Glitch post-processing effect.

Remember to add sound glitches, too!

4

If all you are doing is simple movements, try using a tweening library like HOTtween or iTween. You’ll still need a bit of programming knowledge, but it’s a lot easier than making animation curves and setting keyframes for every movement.