Chapter 3. Getting Animated

In Unity V4.x, the new Mecanim animation system was introduced, bringing with it a whole raft of new features to the already feature-packed Unity editor. With Unity 4.3 (and beyond), this system has had a minor overhaul for the new 2D animation system to give developers even more fine-grained control along with many fixes, tweaks, and performance improvements.

In this chapter, we will walk through all the features that are important to the new 2D system and go over several tips and tricks to irk the most out of what is available.

Note

This chapter isn't going to cover everything you can do with the Mecanim system as it needs an entire book in its own right. In fact, there is one in the PacktPub library already, namely, Unity Character Animation with Mecanim, Jamie Dean.

The topics that will be covered in this chapter are as follows:

• Sprite animation
• State machines and Mecanim
• Curves and fine control