Animation Concepts

Beast animation is organized around two ideas: channel animation and clip animation.

Channels

A channel controls one animated part family. For example, the eye channel controls eye look and eyelid opening, the ear channel controls ear flap motion, and the tail, mouth, and neck channels control their generated rig pivots.

Channel APIs are useful when the application owns the behavior. A game can look at a target, blink at a chosen time, open the mouth for a sound, or react to gameplay events by moving ears and tail without starting a full locomotion clip.

Most channels expose two kinds of control:

• procedural animation methods, such as AnimateEarFlap, advance a looping motion every frame;
• pose methods, such as SetEarPose, set a direct value and let the application, Unity Animation Clips, Timeline, or Visual Scripting decide how that value changes over time.

A procedural animation and a pose normally should not drive the same channel at the same time. Choose one owner per channel, then reset or stop it before handing control to another system.

Clips

A clip represents a creature action. Idle, Walk, Rush, Search Run, Wait, Stunned, Takeoff, and Landing are examples of clips. A clip can drive multiple channels at the same time so the creature action remains coherent.

Clips are useful when the application wants a higher-level action: start walking, stop animation, return to idle, or change locomotion speed.

Each clip exposes an enabledChannels mask. This lets an application keep the locomotion clip for legs while reserving another channel, such as eyes or mouth, for gameplay-specific expression.

Demo Code Boundary

The demo controllers show possible application-side usage. Their inspector fields are not Creature Kit Beast settings and are not required by the runtime API.

You can copy and adapt demo scripts freely in your own Unity application.