Preface

Please note that Animation Preview Pro got released. For the initial release week you can upgrade to Animation Preview Pro for free.

Overview

Animation Preview for Unity allows you to get an idea about how a character looks like in your scene in different poses. You get an overview of all the animations available for a character or you could just mix a specific character with animations of another asset.

The Idea

Top quality assets like the ones from Malbers Animations have a 100+ animations. A demo scene can’t possibly cover them all. So in order to get an overview of what’s available this asset was developed. But it turned out to become more over time.

Once the preview was in I wanted to see how characters look in different environments. For example I created a desert racing scene in which I wanted to have a giant worm rise when the hover bike was driving by. Repeating hitting play, see how it looks, adjust transform (position, rotation scale), start the whole process again was getting time consuming. I rather spend the time on working on a tool to reduce time and effort to get to my desired results. So it suggested itself to extend Animation Preview. It allows you to adjust a model’s transform in the scene and play a clip of your preference to get an idea how it looks. Directly inside the Unity Editor without having to enter play mode.

And at some point I purchased the most awesome Kubold animations. I wanted to see how it is to have e. g. a humanoid dragon combined with fighting animations. In a desert scene. Without much time consuming effort on my own, just a quick and easy preview setup. This is what you can do with Animation Preview.

Animation Preview vs Animation Preview Pro

The very positive feedback Animation Preview had was an impact which I honestly didn’t expect. Thank you so very much for your support! After the release you guys had comments and feedback which was really good. So I listend and implemented more features.

The Pro version has these additional requested popular features:

Frame Step: navigate the animation clips frame by frame
Editor Window: the interaction is done via dialog instead of a monobehaviour
Auto Assignment: optionally the current selection is used if it has an animator; it’s all about saving clicks, getting comfort in using the asset, being quick and saving time