Creating background characters and critters with animation-driven behavior

In this recipe, we are going to createanimated characters that will serve as decorations in the game. Such characters' behavior is driven only by animations; thus, we can have quite a large number of them in the game.

Getting ready

Before we start, we need to have a character with a few animations. In this example, we are using a bird. It has Idle, StartFlying, FlyingInCircles, and Land animations. The Idle animation is looped and played when our birds sits on the ground. The StartFlying animation is a transition between Idle and FlyingInCircles, which is a looped animation of the bird flying around. The last animation, the Land animation, is a transition between FlyingInCircles and Idle. We don't use root motion for those animations because we want the birds to always land in the same position (we don't want to check where the ground is, it's just a decoration).

You can also download the provided example Unity project...