Question Same animations for multiple sprite variations

I'm fairly new to Unity and haven't been able to figure this one out yet. I've created an enemy which has various animations - idle, attack, injured etc. These animations were created in the Editor by dragging a bunch of sprites into the animation window and then spacing them out so that over the course of about half a second, 10 different sprites gets cycled through giving the illusion of an animation. All good so far...

I now want to create a bunch of enemy variations that all use exactly the same animations but cycling through different sprites. I assumed there would be a very easy way to do this but unless I'm mistaken, the sprites become part of the animation file and can't be swapped out? This creates a bit of an admin nightmare because if I have 20 enemy variations with let's say 5 different animations, I now have to create 100 animations. Further more, if I later decide to change an animation or add a new one, I have to do it 20 times.

I was hoping I could simply have a bunch of variables on the enemy class to hold the sprites and in code assign them to the animation somehow. Before I give up trying for an elegant solution and go ahead creating all those animations manually, I thought I would ask here. I really hope I'm missing something very simple here.

 

Unity doesn't have an inbuilt way to do that, but I recently implemented a bunch of Tools for Animancer which can do that and a couple of other things you might find useful:

• Rename many Sprites at once.
• Generate animations from selected Sprites based on their names.
• Remap a Sprite animation to use different Sprites.

They're included in the Animancer v6.0 Alpha, but only in Animancer Pro so you would need to buy it first.

 

As it happens, I figured out a way to do this about an hour after posting. Typical.

For anyone interested, I used animation events. So where I had my animation cycling between 10 different sprites, I removed the sprites from the animation timeline and replaced them with 10 animation events at the same points.

An animation event allows you to run a method whenever the animation reaches that event in the timeline, so I created a method in my enemy class to change the gameobject's sprite from a variable and then I'm just calling that in the animation events.

Creating an enemy variation is now quick and easy, I just need to duplicate the enemy gameobject and set the variables to the new sprites and since I can set the variables in code, it also means I can change enemy variations at runtime as well if I want to.