Animation Workbench

A Unity Editor toolkit for browsing, previewing, editing and organizing animation clips. It started as an animation browser and grew into a full workflow suite: a keyframe editor with authoring layers, in-scene pose editing with IK, an event & SFX pipeline that ships with your build, and library organization that keeps up as the library grows.

The mental model

Four sentences that save a lot of guessing later:

It reads your project, it does not restructure it. Animation Workbench scans for .anim clips and builds an index. Your folders, naming and asset layout stay exactly as they are.

Clips stay ordinary clips. Even a clip authored across several layers is written back as a normal .anim file. Nothing in your Animator, your Timeline or your build depends on this tool being installed.

Your prefabs are never modified. Previews and pose editing run on a temporary stage character. Edits land in the clip, never in the rig.

One runtime component, and only if you use audio. Everything else is editor-only. Audio events need AWSFXManager in the scene - that is the entire runtime footprint. See Audio Integration.

Where it puts things

Location	Contents	Version control?
Assets/Settings/AnimationWorkbench/	Settings, animation library, audio library & channels, rulesets, palettes, generated controllers, the baked runtime audio database, the version history	Yes - this is your shared configuration
Library/AWAnimationPreviewCache/	Rendered thumbnails	No - machine-local, rebuilt on demand

What is in the box

Area	Highlights
Animation Browser	Animated thumbnails, search & filters, grid and list, virtualized for thousands of clips, multi-clip compare with ghost mode
Keyframe Editor	Timeline and curves, retiming, mirroring, onion skinning, clipboard, clip versioning, event track
Animation Layers	Stack a clip in passes - weight, additive/override, masks, mute & solo - flattened on save
Pose Editing	Pose in the Scene view with FK and IK, pin end effectors, mirror, motion trails
Events & SFX	Audio and spawn events on the timeline, an audio library with variations and channels, a runtime pipeline for builds
Palettes & Rulesets	Colour and group your library by rules instead of by hand
Integration & Export	Asset Inventory bridge, FBX skeleton export, humanoid bone mapping

Requirements

• Unity 2021.3 LTS or newer
• A humanoid character prefab, for previews and pose editing
• Three Unity packages, offered automatically on first launch:
  • Animation Rigging (com.unity.animation.rigging) - IK
  • FBX Exporter (com.unity.formats.fbx) - skeleton & clip export
  • Editor Coroutines (com.unity.editorcoroutines) - async scanning

Where to go next

Setting it up? Installation, then Quick Start.

Wiring audio into your game? Audio Integration.

Wondering what your edition includes? Lite & Pro.

Just updated? Patch Notes - one page per release, newest first.

Something not working? Troubleshooting, then Discord.