General question about custom animation and speech

ciro_camera

Hi everyone,
AC 1.70.0 + Unity 2019.2.17f1 on a 2d game.

I'd like to ask what are the best workflows to have a custom animation and, at the same time, the character speeches. An example: I'd like my character jumps, but, while jumping, he can speech or cry something.
In my mind I can solve with a custom animation where I animate also the mouth (to tell the phrase I need) and, in the action list, I call the custom animation + Dialogue:Play Speech (with Don't animate speaker checked). With Engine:wait I can
"synchronize" the speech with the custom animation.
Is it the right (or the best) workflow or there are something more accurate?
2d animation with Sprites Unity animation, but I open to other solutions.

Thank you very much.

ChrisIceBox

When you have a 2D character that has any kind of custom animation needs when performing standard tasks (walking, talking etc), you'll want to switch their animaton engine to "Sprites Unity Complex".

With that, standard animation is controlled exclusively with transitions due to Animator parameter values. AC will take control of an "Is Talking" bool, setting it to True/False based on whether the character is talking or not - but how use actually use that bool is down to you.

For example, you could have a separate "Run talking" animation that only plays if the character is talking while running.

If your character's body parts are broken up into separate sprites, you can even use such parameters to control animations on sub-layers - so that you can animate the head's animation separately from the rest of their body.

It's also possible, with the Character: Animate Action, to crossfade animation states by name - and on sub-layers. With this animation engine, it's really more of a case of using these tools in the way that suits your needs - there's no "set way" to use them.

An example Sprites Unity Complex character that supports independent head animations can be found on the Downloads page.