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Animate with the Animation panel

The Animation panel previews an entity's clips in the Scene and lets you add keyframes to a clip you wrote yourself. Open it from Window > Animation; it docks beside the Console.

Make a clip and give it to an entity​

  1. In the Assets panel choose New > Animation > Animation Clip. It creates a .clip.zon file with one second and no tracks.
  2. Select an entity, add an Animator in the Inspector and drop the clip on its Clip field. Or select it and press Make a clip in the Animation panel, which does both. A model's own animations show under the model in Assets; drop one on Model clip.

Preview​

Select the entity and open the panel. Play runs the clip, the buttons either side of it jump to the previous or next key and those at the ends to the start or end, clicking or dragging along the ruler scrubs it and Loop wraps at the end. The ruler counts frames (30 a second) and the head's frame shows beside the buttons. Everything the clip moves follows in the Scene while you do. Reset pose (or selecting another entity with an Animator, hiding the panel or pressing Play on the game) puts the scene back exactly as it was. A pose is never saved into your scene.

The panel stays on its entity while you select others, so you can pose the actors of a cutscene one after another.

If the entity has both a clip and a model clip, pick which one the timeline shows. Model clips are read-only: you can scrub and play them, not key them.

Add keys​

Tracks sit under a row for what they act on, which shows a faint diamond wherever any of them has a key. Each track's row has a diamond for each key, and at the end of its name, buttons to jump to its previous or next key and, between them, one that keys it at the head (filled when the head is on a key). To key a pose:

  1. Scrub to the time you want.
  2. Move the entity with the gizmo (or its Inspector fields) while the panel is posing it.
  3. Press Add track, point at This entity, one of its children or any other entity in the scene, and pick what to animate: Position, Rotation, Scale, a camera's Field of view, a UI scene's Visible, a sprite's frame. The key records it as it is now. What already has a track is greyed out; key it again with the diamond on its row.

Or turn on Record: then whatever you move with the gizmo or the 2D handles, and a camera's field of view changed in the Inspector, is keyed at the head as soon as you let go. Select the entity to move in the Hierarchy; the panel keeps showing the clip.

A model with a skeleton is posed bone by bone. While the panel shows the clip of an entity whose model has bones, the Scene panel draws them over it: click a joint to pick its bone, and the gizmo moves, turns or scales that bone instead of the entity. Every drag is keyed on the bone at the head as you let go, so a walk cycle is a handful of poses at different times. Click anywhere off the joints to put the gizmo back on the entity. A model clip on the same entity plays underneath, and the bones you key take over from it.

What needs a value typed, a UI node's Text, a Sound to start or an Event, opens Key… from Add track. Key… keys any property of any target: pick both, name the UI node where it needs one, give the value and press Add key.

Click a key's diamond to select it; Shift-click adds more, from any track, and Ctrl+A selects them all. Drag selected keys along their rows to move them together: they land on whole frames (30 a second) and on the head when they pass near it, and hold Ctrl to place them freely. Delete removes them, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy them to the head, and Move key to head moves a single key there. Click a track's name to select the track, then Remove track.

A key's ease shapes the move from it to the next key: Ease in starts slow, Ease out settles into the next key, and Ease in-out does both, which suits most camera moves.

Curves swaps the rows for one track's values drawn against time, X, Y and Z in red, green and blue: pick the track above the graph, and drag a key up or down to change its value on that axis. The curve between keys bends by the key's ease. Keys goes back to the rows.

Ctrl+wheel over the timeline zooms in on the pointer and Shift+wheel pans; Fit shows the whole clip again. Duration sets the clip's length; it can't be shorter than the last key. Every change is written to the .clip.zon straight away and Edit > Undo takes it back.

While the panel is posing an entity, edits you make to its transform belong to the clip, and the entity returns to its saved transform on Reset pose.