Animation tools are needlessly difficult to navigate

I've been able to easily use the entirety of features that Unity has to offer without any difficulty. Why are the animation tools so inconvenient? I don't do my animating inside of Unity, obviously, unless I have a very simple animation for maybe a prop. Adding the animations into the game, and getting them to work on the other hand is just downright inconvenient for newcomers.

I understand that I just don't have the experience needed to properly utilize the Unity animation tools like I do with several other engines, but I never had to google so many tutorials, and look over so many examples for learning something that should be straightforward and simple.

They aren't all bad, I do like the blend trees, and the convenient layering. I just find the interface to be incredibly clunky, no matter how I set it up, and any time I want to add an animation to an object, I feel like I'm performing some daunting task that is going to stop development of my project for the next several days.

One of the biggest problems that I have with the animator (And I'm sure there is a good reason for it), is making a simple animation loop. For instance, I make an animation using the unity tools, just something to make the object move left/right and rotate a little. In order to make that loop I either need to create an animator controller and make it the default animation state (I find that to be incredibly inefficient for single use props). OR I can set the animation to legacy, and add an animation component, and set it to loop. As a newcomer to this, my first thoughts are "Why?". I still have not looked into "Why", nor do I care. I just know that it works, and its just another thing that makes it just slightly more inconvenient to use animations in Unity.

 

Yes, for something simple, it is an extra step. There was mention a while back that the flow will improve in the 5.x cycle. In fact, in the UI button it will auto generate your controller and anims in one click. I suspect we will something similar over time.

That said, the current process isn't "incredibly inefficient". It's a couple extra clicks at best. You shouldn't be losing more than 3-4 seconds.

Now, if you are creating so many one shot anims that the few extra seconds really add up, editor scripts are your friend. Some times those little tiny things you do over and over suck up time.

For simple stuff like this, create an editor script to in one click that will prompt for a name then generate the controller and anim, set the anim as default and save both.

Editor scripting is sweet, it's a great way to really optimize your dev environment

 

I will have to look into that, thanks for the reply!