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Feedback Animation events usability

Discussion in 'Animation' started by Storm4_, Apr 30, 2019.

  1. Storm4_

    Storm4_

    Joined:
    Mar 2, 2016
    Posts:
    14
    Animation events are an extremely useful feature, giving a convenient way to see at what exact moment of the animation something should happen. I use them extensively with sprite-based animations. But at the same time I often find them annoying. Here's my feedback:

    1. It's hard to select the method I need from the dropdown because it lists everything, even private methods and properties, often resulting in a multiple-screen long dropdown. A good solution in my opinion would be an attribute that tells the animation events what they can call. This would also conveniently indicate what's supposed to be called from an animation when you're looking at the code afterwards.

    2. It's strange that it's possible to even pass objects as an argument but not bool. Methods that take bool argument don't appear in the list, and properties only have their getter listed. It could've been a simple checkbox, but currently I have to write boilerplate workarounds that add even more to the clutter.
    Related: https://answers.unity.com/questions/786404/why-dont-animation-events-allow-you-to-call-functi.html

    3. Not a huge deal, but I don't see a way to select and move both the events and keyframes in the animation window simultaneously, requiring me to manually align them every time.

    4. Event graphic is too small and hard to click on, becomes worse if there are multiple events on a frame - sometimes the second, third etc. events do not respond to a click even when I'm pretty sure the cursor is on top of them.

    It's very efficient to work being able to see when exactly an event will be fired, and this makes animation events way superior to checking current frame number myself in code. But with suggested improvements they could be even more powerful, so please consider implementing them.