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Overview

Character Animation System relies on three systems:
  1. Layered Blending component for naturally blending overlays and locomotion.
  2. Procedural Animation component for dynamically modifying bones after the blending.
  3. Property Bindings System for linking gameplay data with the animation system.
Character Animation Component directly manages these components:

🔸 Layered Blending

🔸 Procedural Animation

Tip: All custom animation logic is implemented based on the Playables API.

Playable graph structure in CAS.

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Base Pose and Overlays

Base Pose is the standing idle animation. This pose will be subtracted from the Animator output and added to the character Overlay as a dynamic additive animation. Overlay Pose is a weapon, item, or action character pose. In other words, it is a pose that we want to animate dynamically at runtime.
Example: A character holding a rifle can be used as an Overlay.
An Overlay Animator Controller serves the same role as an Overlay Pose, and adds states and transitions for blending multiple overlays.
Example: To add sword draw, idle, and holster overlays, we can create a new Animator Controller that will support these states

Overlay Animator Controller example.

To access active Overlay Animator Controller in code, use:
Tip: Use this logic to update parameters in Overlay Controllers.

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Overlay Animation Slot

This is a point in the playable graph where animations are played from code. You can learn more about slots and how to play animations from code here:

🔸 Animation Asset

🔸 Character Animation Component

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Animator Output

This is the output pose from the Animator Controller. CAS doesn’t access the Animator directly — it uses the current character pose.
Tip: It’s possible to use CAS with custom Playables packages, like Animation Rigging, for example.

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Procedural Animation

To find out more about procedural animation in CAS, see:

🔸 Procedural Animation

🔸 Animation Modifiers