With rigged characters like humanoids you could indeed “use root motion” which is supposed to move the character similarly to the animation. If you have a ball you wouldn’t need to use animations at all to move it forward. You could just move the ball forward by script using something like Transform.Translate : https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Transform.Translate.html or you could also just use physics to apply a force to a rigidbody on the sphere.
Even easier, you could just use the Characters package which has character controllers already built in.
