Unity Animation Events

Bringing Your Game to Life

Unity Animation Events provide numerous benefits to developers by enabling them to synchronize animations with code and achieve seamless interactions in their games or applications. By linking animation events to specific code functions, developers can trigger actions precisely at specific moments during an animation, allowing characters to have perfect feedback and responsiveness. This capability empowers developers to control the logic of characters or objects, such as initiating attacks, activating particle effects, playing sounds, or even triggering complex gameplay events. With Animation Events, developers can create dynamic and immersive experiences, tightly integrating animations and code to enhance the overall quality and interactivity of their projects.

The following is an example fight from our game Neon Moon, which heavily relies on animation events to link movement to audio, AI brain decisions, and special VFX.

Music by Keiichi Okabe for SINoALICE. Not from the game!

Let’s start!

Create the Animation

Begin by making the animation in your preferred software, such as Blender or Maya, Spine2D, or Unity. Design and animate the character or object, considering the specific keyframe that you want to trigger events during the animation.

*An image of Unity's Animation panel with an example Idle animation ready for work*

Implement the Animation Event Script

Download and import the provided script that handles animation events into your Unity project. This script will serve as the foundation for managing the events within your animations. Ensure that the script is properly added to your project's assets. In this example script, we are using local delegates and events to perform animation events.

public void AnimationEvent(string eventName)
{
    if(animationEventCategories == null
        || animationEventCategories.Length  == 0) { return; }

    animationEventDelegate?.Invoke(eventName);
}

Get An Example Script!

You are free to use this script however you want. There is no need to credit me or AHAKuo when using it, it’s a gift from me to you!

Define Animation Events in the Script

Open the script you downloaded and locate the animation events array. Within this array, add the names of the events you want to trigger during the animation. These events should align with the actions or moments you designated in Step 1.

Here, I’m adding a cute “BouncySound” event that I want to fire every time the idle animation is bouncing.

Set Keyframe Events in Unity Animation Panel

Open the Unity Animation panel for the specific animation you created in Step 1.

Identify the desired keyframes where you want the animation events to occur.
Select the keyframe and access the dropdown menu for event functions.
Choose the AnimationEvent method and enter the name of the corresponding animation event from step 3.

And that’s it!

The event should fire during the animation at the point you decided. For more events, just repeat the process from Step 3 and add even more. Add as many events as you want, and since the provided script example contains categories, you can use that to organize events according to what you need.

Unity Animation Events | احداث الانميشن في يونيتي