Chain Animations.md

Tutorial: Chaining Animations

You can easily chain animations so one starts after another finishes -- all without writing code. Here’s how:

Example

This example shows a text playing an entry animation, immediately followed by an exit animation:

Steps:

1. Create the entry and exit animations, refering to documentation on creating effects.

   • ⚠️ the animation type for the 2 animations must be One Time.

2. Add a Text Effect component to the TMP text object.

3. Add 2 effects to the global effects list: the entry and exit animations.

   • For the entry animation, set Trigger When to On Start.
   • For the exit animation, set Trigger When to Manual, since we want to manually trigger it when the entry animation has finished.
   • Add an event to the On Effect Completed event of the entry animation, and set it to trigger the exit animation. Since it is an Unity event, you can simply drag the Text Effect component in and select the StartManualEffect method and pass the tag of the exit animation. (in the example, the tag is exit)

💡 Tip: To see chaining in Edit Mode, set the events to Editor and Runtime.

📝 Note: The On Effect Completed Unity event is versatile and can trigger any method in any script, enabling synchronized game events with text animations.

Adding a Delay

If we don't want the exit animation to start immediately after the entry animation, we can add a delay to the exit animation.

We can think of the delay as an animation that is doing nothing, bascically a "Dummy" animation.

Steps:

1. Create a Dummy Animation:

   • Use any animation type (e.g., "Color") and set Start and End values to the same.
   • Set:
     • Time Between Chars to 0.
     • Duration Per Char to the desired delay time.

2. Chain Animations:

   • Link entry → dummy → exit animations in the same way as before.