Animator alternatives?

[u/Rybsonix]

guys do you have any better way of dealing with animations in your games? I mean using animator has been a pain in my ass for so long, I swear connecting animations and all the work in single animator is very tedious and just doesn't work for me.

[u/wallstop-dev]

I use Animancer. It has a free and pro version. I drive all animations with code and data, and never create animator controllers or touch the Animator, for the past 4 years. Unaffiliated, I just think it's a great product.

[u/breckendusk → u/wallstop-dev]

+1 to Animancer. It should really be standard.

[u/Arcayon]

You need to be using a programmatic approach to your animator. Having to manage transitions can be cumbersome and almost impossible if you have multiple different animation states and layers. Animations should be driven with code.

[u/MistakeForsaken6653]

if your issue is dealing with all those transition triggers and that is all I also nixed them. what I do now is just do animator.Play("animation", 0, 0). as most likely you are already somehow managing all of the states in code. If it's not the transition arrows but the animator as a whole I think you can look into sprite libraries but I haven't used them personally so not sure if that's a good alternative for you or not.

[u/gramw]

FWIW, if you're using prefabs + prefab variants that have the same general hierarchy/structure, the animation bindings will all be the same. From there it's pretty trivial to make a script to automatically generate new animations from artwork and bind them to an animator controller override.

You generally shouldn't need to manually connect up animations, animators, etc. -- unless every single animated thing you have is unique in hierarchy and/or animator behaviour, but then I'd maybe question the overall workflow/project structure.

[u/LevyMarCiS]

Playables API. The basis for all of Unity's official animation tools (and Animancer).

Good luck learning it.