Unity Animator.Play how to transition to another a

Question

I currently have a sprite-based animation in which the player is running. I also have another animation where the player is running and holding a gun out and shooting, that plays at the exact same speed as the player running without the gun. The catch is, I'm using Animator.Play();

What I want is to start the player running with gun animation at the frame that the player running animation is currently at. For instance, if player running animation is at frame 20, and the player presses the shoot button, play the running with gun animation at frame 20.

Here is a rough example of my code so far:

if (!shooting) {animator.Play("PlayerRunning");}

if (shooting) {animator.Play("PlayerRunningShoot");}

I think the best example would be one of the NES megaman games' megaman shooting animataion, where when you press 'B' while running, his arm will immediately pop-up to shoot.

If any of this is confusing on what I am asking, let me know.

Answer 1

It looks like actually using Animation Layers would be way more interessting for you! I can not recreate a complete manual here - look into the docs and this tutorial.

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However, Animator.Play has an optional parameter

normalizedTime: The time offset between zero and one.

so you can start the new animation with the offset the current animation is at

you can use Animator.GetCurrentAnimatorStateInfo to get the current state and the normalizedTime the current clip is at

and Animator.GetCurrentAnimatorClipInfo to get the information (e.g. length) of the clip.

And either reference your target clip (I would prefer that) or you can use Animator.runtimeAnimatorController to get all AnimationClips and than use LinQ FirstOrDefault to find the one with the target name:

(typing this in on my smartphone so no warranties)

using System.Linq;

// ...

if (!shooting)
{
    // assuming layer 0
    var state = animator.GetCurrentAnimatorStateInfo(0);
    var clipInfo = animator.GetCurrentAnimatorClipInfo(0);

    // so the time you want to start is currentNormalizedTime * current.length / newClip.length
    // if your clips will allways have the exact same length offcourse you can
    // simply use the currentNormalizedTime
    var currentNormalizedTime = state.normalizedTime;
    var currentRealtime = currentNormalizedTime * clipInfo[0].clip.length;

    var newClip = animator.runtimeAnimatorController.animationClips.FirstOrDefault(c => string.Equals(c.name, "PlayerRunning"));

    var newNormalizedTime = currentRealtime / newClip.length;

    // for some reason it seems you can not use the optional parameters as you usually would
    // like ("PlayerRunningShoot", normaizedTime = newNormalizedTime)
    animator.Play("PlayerRunning", -1, newNormalizedTime);
}

if (shooting)
{
    var state = animator.GetCurrentAnimatorStateInfo(0);
    var clipInfo = animator.GetCurrentAnimatorClipInfo(0);
    var currentNormalizedTime = state.normalizedTime;
    var currentRealtime = currentNormalizedTime * clipInfo[0].clip.length;

    var newClip = animator.runtimeAnimatorController.animationClips.FirstOrDefault(c => string.Equals(c.name, "PlayerRunning"));

    var newNormalizedTime = currentRealtime / newClip.length;

    animator.Play("PlayerRunningShoot", -1, newNormalizedTime);
}

---

You could also create a smooth transition on runtime using

Animator.CrossFade or Animator.CrossFadeInFixedTime

if (!shooting) 
{
    // ...       

    // here the transition takes 0.25 % of the clip
    animator.CrossFade("PlayerRunning", 0.25f, -1, 0, newNormalizedTime);
}

if (shooting) 
{
    // ...

    // here the transition takes 0.25 seconds
    animator.CrossFadeInFixedTime("PlayerRunningShoot", 0.25f, -1, 0, newNormalizedTime);
}