How do you time jump animation with uneven landing surface?

Question

Say my player jumps off from a certain point on a 2D surface. Say my surface is uneven, and has varying y positions along the level, how would I then be able to time my jump animation accordingly? (The issue being is that the animation might get cut off half way through, or vice versa - the animation would be already finished while the player is still jumping/landing)

Answer 1

Usually, when working on jumping mechanics, instead of relying on the duration of the animation, the motion is split in 3 (sometimes even more, but most of the times 3 is enough) animations:

• Jump from the ground animation
• in air /falling animation
• landing animation

In Unity, you could merge these three animations inside a blendtree while changing its state (jumping/in air/landing) based on a boolean parameter which is usually called isGrounded.

IsGrounded, as the name implies, checks if the player is grounded. To set this variable properly, there are two main ways:

• you could either shoot a Raycast from the character origin to the ground(it has to be parallel to the global y axis);

• or a sphere Cast(the same a raycast, but it's using a sphere mesh, to get a bit more precision).

You can see the two different approaches described in more detail here

Via the player script, you can just set isGrounded's value inside with:

Animator anim;
bool value;

void Start()
{
    anim = GetComponent<Animator>();
}

void Update()
{
    // set 'value' to true if the player is grounded, set it to false if it's not
    //then set the isGrounded bool inside the animator
    anim.SetBool("isGrounded",value);
}