Working with Unity Timeline

Learning how to apply Character Animation to Timeline

Simon Truong
3 min readSep 26, 2022

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Now that we have learned every basic feature about the Unity Timeline, we can now apply character Animations to the timeline. Character Animations are slightly more complicated than working with regular tracks on the timeline because we will need to utilize features that we have learned previously.

Working with Character Animations:

For all the animations and body rigs, I will be using the free assets from Mixamo.com. They have a massive library of different types of humanoid animations.

To start, I created an new empty game object which will house the Playable Director. Then from the Mixamo assets I will drag and drop the yBot humanoid rig into the scene and will make it a child object of the Director.

Remember to change all of the Rig Animation Type to Humanoid from Generic.

Next I will need to duplicate the Mixamo animation clips so I can apply them to the Timeline.

After duplication, the Animation Clip should look like this.

Next in the Timeline we will be adding an new Animation Track with the yBot as the target.

With the Rig set to Humanoid and with the Animation Clip duplicated and renamed, we are now freely able to drag and drop the animation clips into the Timeline to create the Animation Track. Once you applied the first Animation clip (I used an Idle animation clip) you will see that the yBot automatically conforms to that animation.

Here we can start adding in more animation clips to string together an unique sequence.
Some issues you might come up with while adding multiple different animations clips is that the Rig would suddenly jump from one clip to another clip due to the quick transition. To fix this, we can simply ease in and out both animation clips like the example below.

An Example of easing in and out between these two Animation Clips.

Another issue you may encounter when working with Animation Clips is having the position of the yBot jump from place to place due to lack of positioning offset.

An example of the character jumping around due to the different animation clips.

To fix this issue we simply need to match the offset of the previous clip. This can be achieved when you right click on the animation clip and the menu should be available.

This will allow you to endlessly string various types of animation clips together to create a very long and complex sequence.

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Simon Truong

A Designer, an Illustrator and a massive tech geek aspiring to become a professional Unity Developer.