What Unity feature is primarily used for creating interactive and animated visual elements?

The Animator Controller in Unity is a crucial feature for creating interactive and animated visual elements within a game or application. It allows developers and artists to manage animation states for characters, objects, or other visual elements, enabling smooth transitions between different animations based on user inputs or game events.

By utilizing the Animator Controller, you can set up complex animation systems that respond dynamically to gameplay, such as triggering a running animation when the player moves or an attack animation when an enemy is engaged. The ability to orchestrate and blend multiple animations through this controller makes it a powerful tool for ensuring that visual elements behave in ways that are both appealing and intuitive to the user.

In contrast, while shaders manage how objects appear visually in terms of surface properties and lighting, and the Timeline helps with sequencing animations over time, they do not directly control the interactive nature of animations in the same way that the Animator Controller does. The Asset Store is a platform for acquiring additional assets but does not focus specifically on animation or interactivity functionalities.