Unity Animation Essentials

I am fairly new to Unity (full time for just a few months) but have decided to make a personal goal of learning as much as I can over the next few months to see its potential. I have been working on a 2D game for a friend's company, and often got confused as to what capabilities Unity offered for 2D versus 3D in regards to animations. I have gone through many online articles and videos but still had some questions unresolved. I ordered this book since it focused solely on this topic, in hopes that it would clear up some of the confusion.The author has a very easy to read writing style. IN fact, I read through the entire book the same day I got it. I had already learned a lot of the material through my own research, but the book did clarify many things and presented some things I didn't know. I was very pleased to see the section near the end on blend trees which was another source of confusion for me until now.Having over 20 years of IT experience, I am fairly good at judging technical books. I believe this book is ideal for beginner to intermediate Unity programmers who want to better understand how animations work in Unity. The writer's style seems to fit those readers in particular. I am currently in the middle of another book by same author (Mastering Unity Scripting) which appears to be even better. I will write a review on that one soon.

I had hoped that this book would in fact cover the "essentials", for example the confusing differences between Unity's legacy and mechanim animation systems, or the way Unity handles imported animation sequences. These are areas that a lot of people seem to struggle with. The book in fact simply covers a bunch of example cases -- how to animate a door for example. That kind of stuff is better left to tutorials in my opinion. Between skipping the extremely basic opening pages and the examples that were not applicable, there was not much left to this book.

I don't have a tremendously long review to contribute-- this is a helpful, extremely concise book that deals with various types of Unity animation in a very cursory way. But it's cursory in a compelling, to-the-point way. I primarily picked the book up for help learning Mecanim, and it provides a much more well-written and informative introduction to the subject than the other Packt Unity animation book, 'Unity Character Animation with Mecanim'.But when I say short, it's shockingly so-- I was able to work through the whole book in an afternoon. At the end though, I had a pretty decent starting point from which to keep on learning on the subject.Again, since folks care about these things and I'm not sure it's really discussed in the description, all code examples in the book are in C#.

Alan Thorn has quickly become my favorite Unity author. I have purchased four Unity books developed and written by him including this one. Alan's instructional style and easy to follow projects actually teach me something, unlike others who say, "do this" and "do that" without explaining why and when to use a particular function in Unity. Alan takes the time to explain the "why" and "when" in easy to understand language. The sample files provided at the PackT is large, but well worth it! This book walks you through the fundamentals of animation, including sprite (2D) animation; plus, chapters on the fundamentals of mecanim and character animation. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in learning animation within Unity. In fact, I recommend any of Alan Thorn's books on Unity programming.ALSO, PackT books transfer nicely to the Kindle and Kindle Apps.

Not a bad book. Actually pretty good. Has a lot of good, quick recipes and solidified a lot of the basics for me. Well written for the person who is just trying to understand Unity animation. But I had to give it 4 stars because he only touched on Blend trees. Although he did do a very good job of it blend trees deserve at least 2 chapters.

Good introduction to Unity Animations. Author provides step by step instructions for each facet of Unity Animations that are easy to follow. Sample files also include before and final projects so you can jump straight to end stage if you want. Rated 4 stars as felt in a few places could have gone in to a bit more detail as book is quite short at < 200 pages. Also think should have included a chapter on Legacy animations as whilst Mecanim has superceded it there are still a lot of Unity assets on the Asset Store that only have Legacy animations.Would love an updated version to include the latest changes to Mecanim since the books initial release.

I found this book to be extremely disappointing. I would have been better off watching free tutorials videos scattered all over the web for free. The subject matter is not explained very clearly or at all and the author seems to assume way to much for the reader. I bought this book thinking I could get some in depth well taught material on the subject, but instead I found it to be as shallow as many of the paid tutorials courses found online. I would not recommend this book.

This is my first book by Alan Thorn; I primarily learned about him through his old video tutorials in Unity. Like those other materials he has given straightforward and easy to follow instructions on utilizing Unity, this time regarding animations. Another plus for the book is that it covers the latest version, Unity 5, but you can still use it for Unity 4x which includes Mechanim. The sample code provided on the Packt website may be very large but it is advised to download it to really appreciate the lessons that you can get from this.

I found the book frustrating as the one of the first chapters used a unity pro only feature (animation curves). I would have thought that a book that implies from the title that it covers the "essentials" wouldn't involve me having to buy a proversion of the software in order to follow along.

Una buena introducción a los sistemas de animación disponibles en Unity, merece la pena comprarlo. He visto bastantes libros y es el único que me ha ayudado, claro, conciso y directo.