Simple Timeline Animations

Objective: Create your first Simple Timeline Animation!

In this tutorial we are going to create a simple animation in Timeline. Let’s start off with a plane and a sphere. We are going to have this sphere do a circular pattern in the scene. We are going to play this animation on the timeline_01 sequence.

In order to do that we can either choose to press the plus button on the Timeline window or we can grab the object from the Hierarchy and drag in into the Timeline window. We will have four choices.

We have an activation, Animation, Audio and Signal track. With what we are creating we are making an animation track.

Now we have a sphere in the Timeline, and this automatically creates the animator with the sphere. We can now start animating with this sphere. Make sure you are at the zero second mark and press the record button.

You’ll notice that everything has turned red. Select the sphere in the hierarchy and right click on the transform and select add key. This is going to key your position at the start of the animation.

Now I’m going to go to the spot on the Timeline that I want the animation to be over and add another key. This way the beginning and ending are positioned identically.

Now around the 3 second mark I’m going to move the sphere to a new location, and this will create another key frame.

I’ll do the same for the 6 second mark.

Now this will create a loop. If you play the Timeline window you will see the sphere move in the loop created.

If you are happy with that you can turn off the record mode. In the Timeline window you can see your animation track. If you double-click that track it will take you to the animation window.

Now we can individually adjust this if we like. For instance, you could grab the key frames and bring them closer to the beginning to speed up the animation.

You could also grab all of them together. You’ll notice these pens at the beginning and the end, you can grab those and adjust the speed of the whole animation.

If you want to you can right-click on this and select convert to clip track. What that does is it turns this into a clip and you can adjust the speed multiplier in the inspector. You can choose two and watch the animation play in 2X speed.

Another thing you can do on this Timeline to make your life more convenient is something called ease in and ease out. If you hold the Control button and drag on the sides, you can adjust the ease in and ease out duration.

You can see in the beginning there is no animation, and it slowly builds up to where it is supposed to be. This will help you out when it comes to stitching in a whole bunch of animations together.

This is a quick overview of how to create animations in Timeline. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your animations and I’ll see you in the next tutorial.