A subscriber asked me how to build a 2.5D controller for a dinosaur. I used the actual asset they were working with, ran into its old animation setup, worked around it, and then pushed the experiment far enough to see how it behaved in a browser build.
Why I made this
A generic third-person controller is usually demonstrated with a humanoid character and modern animation assets. The subscriber's request introduced two practical complications: a dinosaur needed a useful 2.5D movement model, and its older animation clips did not drop cleanly into Unity's Animator Controller workflow.
The developer needed more than a code fragment. They needed to see how the controller, camera perspective, asset, legacy animation, and playable result fit together—and where the workaround belonged.
What I did
I interpreted ‘generic controller for a dinosaur’ as a concrete 2.5D design problem rather than forcing the asset into a standard humanoid example. The tutorial builds the movement behavior against the real dinosaur and keeps the desired perspective visible throughout.
I also address the animation boundary directly, showing a workaround for using legacy animation clips with an Animator Controller. That is the kind of integration detail that often prevents an otherwise straightforward tutorial from producing the same result for the viewer.
The original description included the controller source, the dinosaur asset, and a playable itch.io build. Those supporting links connected explanation, implementation, and verification instead of leaving the audience with video alone.
Later the same day, I published a short follow-up. What began as a simple controller export became a browser test with high-resolution textures, real-time lighting, depth of field, ambient occlusion, and other post-processing. The second artifact shows the result under more realistic delivery constraints.
A note on the archive
These recordings use Unity, browser export, legacy animation, and asset-store workflows from April 2017. The original controller gist and itch.io build were part of that historical teaching package, but their continued availability and compatibility should not be assumed.
The source videos do not have usable captions, so I didn’t add invented chapter times. Use current Unity documentation if you want to recreate it. The old page is here because one developer asked a good question and the answer turned into something other people could use too.