Can the start of a new loop in an animation be delayed?

bill_renk

I think this isn't really AC-specific, but I was wondering if there is a way to delay the start of the next iteration of a looped animation by a specified number of seconds? I have an idle animation for a character that I want to play repeatedly, so I have the Loop Time? checkbox checked, but there doesn't appear to be a way to set a delay. It does not seem like the Cycle Offset field was not intended to set a delay. In the animation controller, there is a Speed setting for the animation I can fiddle with and also another Cycle Offset field, but no delay start field I can see.

Is there a way to do this, or do I need to make this a custom animation instead of the idle animation, and then just trigger it via ActionList?

ChrisIceBox

To help understand the context: is the intent for this to provide variance to the idle animation, e.g. a "waiting" animation that plays if the idle animation has looped for a while?

The Animator doesn't have a means to do this by itself - but you can set up a transition from your regular Idle animation that goes to the next animation once a given parameter (e.g. a Trigger named "NextIdle") has been invoked.

You'd then just need a custom script, attached to your character, that invokes this Trigger parameter once they've been in the idle state for the given number of seconds.

Here's one, named IdleChanger.cs:

using UnityEngine;
using AC;

public class IdleChanger : MonoBehaviour
{

    public float changeTime = 5f;
    public string triggerName = "NextIdle";
    private Char character;
    private float timer;

    void Awake ()
    {
        character = GetComponent<Char> ();
    }

    void Update ()
    {
        if (character.charState == CharState.Idle)
        {
            if (timer < changeTime)
            {
                timer += Time.deltaTime;
                if (timer >= changeTime)
                {
                    character.GetAnimator ().SetTrigger (triggerName);
                }
            }
        }
        else
        {
            timer = 0f;
        }
    }

}

bill_renk

Oh wow, thank your posting that snippet! So the intent is to not play another a different animation, just to have a pause in the loop. Do idle animation, pause X seconds, repeat.

ChrisIceBox

With the way Unity's Animator system works, you can't associate a "delay" with an animation state - instead, you'll have to play a different animation as above, but have that animation just be a loop of the regular Idle animation's first frame, lasting for as long as you want the delay to last.