Book excerpt: A recipe-based guide to give you practical information on Unity 5.x animation techniques and tools About This Book A straightforward and easy-to-follow format. A selection of the most important tasks and problems. Carefully organized instructions to solve problems efficiently. Clear explanations of what you did. Solutions that can be applied to solve real-world problems. Who This Book Is For This book is for Unity developers who have some exposure to Unity game development who want to learn the nuances of animation in Unity. Previous knowledge of animation techniques and mecanim is not necessary. What You Will Learn Importing animations to Unity Work with different animation assets and components Create, visualize, and edit animated creatures Animating game cut scenes Design character actions and expressions Create gameplay by animating characters and environments Use animations to drive in-game logic In Detail This recipe-based practical guide will show you how to unleash the power of animation in Unity 5.x and make your games visually impeccable. Our primary focus is on showing you tools and techniques to animate not only humanoid biped characters, but also other elements. This includes non-humanoid character animation, game world creation, UI element animation, and other key features such as opening doors, changing lights, transitioning to different scenes, using physics, setting up ragdolls, creating destructible objects and more. While discussing these topics, the book will focus on mecanim, the Unity 3D animation tool, and how you can use it to perform all these tasks efficiently and quickly. It contains a downloadable Unity project with interactive examples for all the recipes. By the end of this book, you will be confident and self-sufficient in animating your Unity 3D games efficiently. Style and approach This practical no-nonsense guide is recipe-based with real-world examples of almost all the techniques mentioned.