Moving your character with root motion and Blend Trees

The Mecanim animation system is capable of applying Root Motion to characters. In other words, it actually moves the character according to the animation clip, as opposed to arbitrarily translating the character model while playing an in-place animation cycle. This makes most of the Mixamo animation clips perfect for use with Mecanim.

Another feature of the animation system is Blend Trees, which can blend Animation Clips smoothly and easily. In this recipe, we will take advantage of these features to make our character walk/run forward and backward, and also strafe right and left at different speeds.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we have prepared a Unity package named Character_02, containing a character and featuring a basic Animator Controller. The package can be found inside the 09_02 folder, along with the FBX files for the animation clips you need.

Note

There are two ways to import animations in Unity. One approach involves having each...