Getting Animated - Mastering Unity 2D Game Development - page 80

Setting up animation controllers
So, to start creating animations, you first need an animation controller in order to define
your animation clips. As stated before, this is just a state machine that controls the execu-
tion of animations even if there is only one animation. In this case, the controller runs the
selected animation for as long as it's told to.
Note
If you are browsing around the components that can be added to the game object, you will
come across the Animator component, which takes a single animation clip as a paramet-
er. This is the legacy animation system for backward compatibility only. Any new anima-
tion clip created and set to this component will not work; it will simply generate a console
log item stating The AnimationClip used by the Animation component must be
marked as Legacy . So, in Unity 4.3 onwards, just avoid this.
Creating an animation controller is just as easy as any other game object. In the Project
view, simply right-click on the view and select Create | Animator Controller .
Opening the new animation will show you the blank animator controller in the Mecanim
state manager window, as shown in the following screenshot: