Unity’s built-in Animator Controllers has long been a point of frustration for many developers. It can feel clunky to set up, hard to debug, and visually overwhelming when projects get big. One indie developer, Diego Bravo, decided to skip the headache entirely and build his own solution: ReAnimator.
Instead of wrangling with state machines, ReAnimator lets you animate purely through code. Think of it like using DoTween, but for Unity’s animation system. The result is a workflow that is faster to implement, easier to debug, and far more flexible across both 2D and 3D projects.
What Makes ReAnimator Different?
ReAnimator focuses on simplicity and flexibility. Each animation clip can be configured and chained directly in code, giving developers precise control without the Animator’s cluttered UI. Early testing from the developer shows that it
- Speeds up implementation.
- Makes debugging far easier.
- Works seamlessly in both 2D and 3D contexts.
Although still in active development, the creator says they haven’t touched Unity’s Animator since starting work on it, relying entirely on ReAnimator for their projects.
What 's Next?
For now, ReAnimator is not yet publicly available. As the developer explained in the comments:
“For the moment it’s not available cause it’s still pretty much very very raw and I’m still developing it, but pretty soon I’ll be releasing a preview for people to test it!!”
So while you cannot grab it today, a public preview build is coming soon for developers eager to ditch the Animator for good.
In the meantime, other Unity developers have created alternatives that let you implement animation through code, such as Animancer (available in Lite and Pro versions). Unity once offered a Simple Animation Component as a code example, but it’s deprecated and doesn’t work in newer Unity versions. Finally, you can use the Playables API directly, which is lower level but also harder to set up.
✨ Keep an eye out for the upcoming preview release.
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Check out our incoming book!
We invite you to explore "Character Customization with Unity 6", a comphensive book on the concepts and fundamentals seen in this post.
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