🔸Character Animation Component

This page explains the main component in the system.

Overview

The Character Animation Component is the central MonoBehaviour in CAS. It handles:

1. Applying Layered Blending and Procedural Animation.

2. Pose blending.

3. Animation Slots to play clips at runtime.

Character Animation Component.

This component uses the Character Animation Settings asset to update the active Overlay and Procedural Animation modifiers.

Character Animation Settings

Character Animation Settings.

Tip: Create a new CAS asset via Create ▸ KINEMATION ▸ CAS ▸ CAS Settings.

• Blend Time — Ease Mode sets the interpolation; Blend In/Out Time sets the seconds to blend in/out.

• Base Pose — the standing idle animation.

• Overlay Pose — the weapon/item clip. Always assign this; Layered Blending depends on it.

• Overlay Animator — assign an Animator Controller for complex overlay logic (states, transitions, blend trees).

• Procedural Settings — Animation Modifiers that dynamically animate bones.

Tip: This asset can serve as a profile or a preset for a weapon, item or a gameplay situation. It's recommended to create CAS assets for different scenarios and update them at runtime.

You can update Character Animation Settings at runtime:

CharacterAnimationComponent.cs

public void UpdateAnimationSettings(CharacterAnimationSettings newSettings)

Example usage:

ExampleComponent.cs

[SerializeField] private CharacterAnimationSettings torchSettings;

private CharacterAnimationComponent _characterAnimation;

private void Start()
{
    _characterAnimation = GetComponent<CharacterAnimationComponent>();
}

private void OnTorchEquipped()
{
    if (_characterAnimation != null)
    {
        _characterAnimation.UpdateAnimationSettings(torchSettings);
    }
}

Pose Blending

The component supports on-demand pose blending:

CharacterAnimationComponent.cs

public void RequestPoseBlending(BlendTime blendTime)

When called, it caches the current pose on the animation thread, then blends from the cached to the live pose starting next frame.

A common use case is switching Animator Controllers, since Unity doesn’t natively smooth transitions between different Animators.

Note: RequestPoseBlending is called automatically when you use UpdateAnimationSettings.

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The next page explains how to use Animation Slots and play clips from code.