Play your animation

In order to play your animation in your open experience, as well as store it for reuse in other projects, you must publish the animation to the cloud. This process creates a unique animationID for your animation that you can reference in scripts, which is especially important if you want to replace any of Roblox's default character animations.

In this chapter, let's go over how to export your animation by publishing it to Roblox, then swap out the template's default walk animation with your own creation.

Export new animation

If you were to close Studio right now, you would lose all of your work on your animation because your animation doesn't have an animationID that Studio can reference for your projects. To fix this, you must export your animation to Roblox so that Studio can connect the animation to your account.

To export your new animation:

1. In the Animation Editor, click on the ... and select Publish to Roblox. The Asset Configuration window displays.

   

2. In the Asset Configuration window, give your animation a name and description, then click the Save button. After a few moments, the window confirms your animation was successfully submitted.

   

3. Copy your animation's animationID by clicking the icon next to the ID. A green "ID Copied!" text pop-up displays when you have done this step correctly.

   

4. Click the Close button.

Replace default animation

Every player character includes a set of default animations that play whenever the character performs specific in-experience actions, such as running, climbing, or jumping. Roblox provides these animations out-of-the-box for every experience without any additional coding effort.

You can swap out default animations with your own custom animations so that they play for every player that joins your experience. For this lesson, let's swap out the default walking animation with your swim animation so that you can see how it looks with your avatar as soon as you start playing.

To replace the default walking animation with your custom swimming animation:

1. Find the default walk animation.

   1. In the Explorer window, go to the search bar, then type walk.
   2. In your search results, click on WalkAnimationID.

   

   If you don't see the Explorer and Properties windows, you can open them by going to the Home tab and clicking the Explorer and Properties buttons.

   

2. In the Properties window, click the Value field and paste your animation ID by pressing Ctrl + V or ⌘ + V, depending on your computer.

   

   Need to Get the Animation ID?

   If your animationID didn't paste into the Value field, you need to get your animation's animationID again. To do this:

   1. Go to the Creator Dashboard.

   2. In the horizontal navigation, select Development Items, then click the Animations button. All animations you have ever published display here.

      

   3. Select your animation. The animation's Configure page displays.

   4. In the left-hand navigation, click the vertical three dots icon, then select Copy Asset ID from the contextual menu.