A frame-by-frame animation system for Unity.
First, get your sprites ready. Slice them, name them something that makes sense to you.
In a folder somewhere in your project, right click and navigate to 'Gabe's Tools\Frame Animation'. Once you click that, a FrameAnimation file will be created; this file holds all the important information for your animation.
The things you'll need to set up are as follows:
- Animation Name: This will be how you reference this animation both in code and in the FrameAnimator component. This name does not have to be unique project-wide, but it must be unique per object. AKA: Don't give animations in the same object the same name.
- Sprites: This is a simple list of images to cycle through. Set its size to however many frames of animation you need and drag & drop each frame image into the slots. Order is important (duh); the animation will start from 'Element 0'.
- Speed: This represents how many frames per second the animation will cycle at. If your animation only has one sprite, I recommend setting this to 0 to avoid needless counting.
I know, it can be confusing to have a FrameAnimation and a FrameAnimator, but they couldn't be more different. As we mentioned before, a FrameAnimation is a file that holds the data for one (1) animation. The FrameAnimator is a component that you must add to a game object in order to control the animations and hold all animations for that object.
First, create a new component inside an object that has a Sprite Renderer. If the object doesn't have a Sprite Renderer, one will be created.
The slots to set up a FrameAnimator are as follows:
-
Animations: This is list of all the FrameAnimations this object will play at some point. Just set its size to however many animations you need and drag & drop them into their respective fiels. In this case, order is not important*.
-
Default Animation: This is the name of the animation to default to. If none is provided, the FrameAnimator will default to the first animation loaded.
* As mentioned above, if no default animation name is provided the component will use the first one in the list. To avoid problems, I recommend always setting the first animation as the idle or default animation. Any other animations can go in whatever order.
First, create a FrameAnimator component reference in your script:
FrameAnimator animator;
void Awake() {
animator = GetComponent<FrameAnimator>();
}
Then, wherever you want to change the animation, just set the currentAnim property of the animator to an animation returned from the GetAnimation(string name) function:
animator.currentAnim = animator.GetAnimation(ANIMATION NAME);
Don't forget to replace ANIMATION NAME for an actual string that matches an animation name!
That's it! This is all you need to know in order to use this animation package. If you have any feature requests just reach out to me on Twitter at @elDaddyGabe.
Have a great day!
- Gabe