Animation Composer System - ACS

The Anim Composer System is inspired by Unreal Engine's Anim Montages. It removes the requirement to use Unity’s Animator and provides a powerful way to modify, preview and attach logic to animations.

AnimComposers are wrappers for animations that let you:

• Configure key details of the animation.
• Bind functionality to specific frames using ActionBlocks (similar to Unreal’s Anim Notifies and Anim Notify States).

Key Benefits

• You can create different AnimComposers for the same animation if you want slightly different behaviors.

• For Humanoid characters, animations are automatically retargeted, so you don’t need to worry about mismatched rigs.You can reuse the same AnimComposer across multiple characters to minimize asset duplication and reduce project size.

• AnimComposers make it easier to manage animations without cluttering your AnimatorController with states, transitions, and parameters.

• Similar to Animancer, AnimComposers allow you to link animation directly to gameplay logic.

• 👁️Offers much more advanced previewing than Unity’s default Animation Preview Window, including:
• VFX
• Sounds
• Environment
• Preview Objects
• Hitboxes
• Materials

While a standard Unity animation clip only defines how bones move, an Anim Composer takes care of blending between animations, and provides other key options like setting the anim to loop, changing the rate or previewing attached items. It also allows you to add timed behaviors (ActionBlocks ) right onto the timeline.

This is incredibly useful for a variety of use cases, such as:

• Weapon Swings: Play a "whoosh" sound effect or enable sword damage collider.
• Motion Warping: Moving the character by a set amount during a dodge or attack.
• Vfx and Sfx: Playing specific visual effects or sounds for a special ability.
• Footsteps: Detect ground below and play corresponding footstep SFX and VFX.

The AnimComposer custom editor is created using the UI Toolkit, which gives you direct access to all its visual elements and style sheets, making it easy to modify the interface. To begin editing, simply select the file AnimComposerEditor (Visual Tree Asset).