Official 2D Animation 7.0 released for Unity 2021.2

Thanks Ted for the clear answer.
I'm not directly affected by the licensing issue. I just thought, if Unity had entered some license agreement with the original author, i could use it for totally different purposes ( meshing of my own geometry ) without having doubts about it's legal state. Anyways, i found an alternative triangulation library which i use know for my meshing needs

 

2021.2.8f1 and I'm happy to report you are correct, it is supported! The problem in this case was "user error". PSB files cannot be directly dragged into the atlas "packables" list like a .PNG file can be and I took this to mean .PSB is not supported. Now I just tried a folder of .PSB files instead and YES!

Thank you for clearing that up!

 

Example from Unity: https://imgbox.com/31FO2yPx
Example from Spine2D: https://imgbox.com/owK6dH3y

[The same two example pictures are also uploaded as attachment in the post below.]

In my Spine2D setup, I have two different hair skins. Green hair has some extra bones attached to it. The blue hair has no extra bones. When green hair skin is active during animation, it brings the bones attached to it. When I switch to blue hair skin, the bones from the green hair skin disappear, they don't exist at runtime during animation too. This system helps me make a very big skeleton asset and basically throw every skin and animation into it. Then all my characters, even random generated NPC's with random skins inherit from this skeleton asset. Good thing is that I don't have any performance issues because at runtime, there are only necessary bones and sprites appear and animate for that specific character on the screen.

So I want to make a similar system using Unity's 2D Animation and rig system. When I imported 2D animation package samples, I tried to find a similar but the closest I got was that girl animation with two different hand gestures. When you change the skin at runtime, hand sprite changes but unnecessary bone still exist and keep animating. This would cause a lot of performance issues in my project because I have too many body parts/skins/extra bones etc.

Is there a way I can achieve the same thing in Unity without using Spine2D? Also, do you have any plans of developing a skin system similar to the one inside Spine?

 

Can't you just disable that additional bone(s) through some trigger when the hand pose switches and reenable only once it's needed again? Assuming the animation system does ignore disabled objects.

 

That would be a good opportunity to use the new game object pooling system, wouldn't it?

 

You're moving the "line". But I agree the vertex detection is a little too precise.

 

Indeed it's quite cool and suffices for many things!

Still there is a fair share of potential left.
Dual quaternion skinning would be great for example. It helps preserving volume. An issue I've ran into quite a bit. There is a brief description for that here: https://www.kestrelmoon.com/creature/more_info_2.html

Another thing would be some mask support so we can for example blend a particle system ontop of an animated character (without bleeding over the edge) or misuse the plugin for some special effects.

Hope the staff gets asigned some capacity for this plugin again some day aside of maintenance

 

There is even no FFD in Rodamap (and not planned)
What a "quaternion skinning"...

 

Was thinking of mentioning FFD but think that's a way larger topic. Quaternion skinning should be something that can be added without adding lots of features to the UI side (as FFD would require).

 

OK, Unity 2021 LTS is here and we are considering the upgrade to take advantage of the new features of 2D Animation 7.0 package.

Before we embark on this upgrade, I need to scope how how we can handle this situation (because I believe the 7.0 upgrade makes this possible):

We currently have avatars with swapable clothing, made possible by the SpriteResolver component and the SpriteLibrary that is genrated from a PSB file we have rigged to the avatars. So our players can choose their avatar's shirts, pants, shoes, hair style, and accessories independent of each other. We've set all this up in a wardrobe UI that works.

One thing we would like to do is award/reward new clothing items to our players dynamically.

That is, we could provide a new shirt that is not currently in the rigged avatar's SpriteLiibrary, by loading a pre-created SpriteLibrary with the new clothing options in them, and add/copy the awarded clothing them to the avatar's current SpriteLibrary.

Furthermore are hoping to do this with Addressables so that we don't have to push out an update to our app but only would need to update the addressable content that contains the SpriteLibrary with the new clothing item(s).

Does any of that make sense, and is possible to do, and if so what would it take to do it? We rig a second SpriteLibrary on the same avatar and put/link that asset into an Addressable? (sorry, I am not the Addressables person on this project and only have a rudimentary knowledge of how they are set up.)

Any ideas or tips are appreciated!

 

Thanks so much for monitoring this channel, Ted!

I did a test update of our project last night and I have to say that 2021 LTS editor seems faster and smoother than 2019, on the M1 Mac at least, and I had almost zero problems converting our project and installing the 2D Animation 7.0 package.

Yes, I have looked at the DLC example carefully previously, which is the impetus for converting to 2021.

Planning our asset development strategy: I understand that we can completely replace the SpriteLIbrary referenced, but will it be possible to copy individual sprites from one SpriteLibrary to another at runtime? (It looks like it is possible, and I understand that would only exist during runtime and is not a permanent change to the library we want to copy to.)

Our situation is that we anticipate bring additional clients on board to our app. Our first 2 clients are large resort chains in Florida and Jamaica and there are a number of venues next to these clients (eg. clothing stores, restaurants) that we will offer to represent in our app.

We are designing ability to add new clothing options for our players avatars as rewards that will represent these add-on clients (eg. a digital copy of a real t-shirt offered in a clothing store).

So I envision that we will be able to add clothing items as DLC, and the question is whether or not the DLC needs to include the base clothing choices as well as the new ones in the SpriteLibrary (one large SpriteLIbrary with everthing in it) and we have to swap the whole SpriteLibarary vs. the DLC only contains the additional sprite clothing choices and we can copy only the rewarded sprites to the players existing base SpriteLIbrary.

I hope that explains in more detail and makes sense. Thanks for your additional feedback!

 

It only costs really nothing if you combine it with your pixel art idea. Higher resolution frame by frame animations would quickly consume a lot of memory.
With coding experience it should not be too hard to write a tool for this in Unity however. In the end it DOES work frame by frame (how else?). So just render onto a Rendertexture instead of the screen and copy or save that texture every frame.

As for the pixel art approach, that's waaay trickier. Vertex-based animation wouldn't work very well, I'd assume. Would be curious to see what happens if you animate scaled-up pixel art with vertices and then run the image through a color-limiting filter which converts every pixel so it has one of the colors used in the original image. Would be an interesting experiment, but I'd not have very high hopes. In the end pixelart only works because their makers know how to trick our binds into seeing so much more than just a few pixels.

 

please runtime setters for rootBone and boneTransforms of SpriteSkin.
plz, plz, plz,...

 

Some people are going that route:

Crying Suns is animated in Spine. ANNO might be as well, hard to tell. The pose swaps look a bit too advanced for Unity Animation. Both are made in Unity, however.

 

User I quoted expressed that pixel art wouldn't work very well with bone/vertex animation in their view. So I posted a couple of examples that do exactly that in Unity to a reasonable success. If it's off-topic, feel free to delete my posts.

 

First of all,
in runtime we can create a sprite with all of its elements, such as vertices, uvs, bones, weights, and so on,..
it is accomplished by using runtime method like setvertexattribute, setbones, setbindposes..
but only bones' transforms can't be created in runtime..
this makes no sense.
there is way to create skinnable sprite on runtime, but we can't use that?


And too many gameobjects(transforms) issue.

I'd worked with costumable character system using SkinnedMeshRenderer,
but recently moving it to SpriteSkin.

Problem is on assigning bones' transforms.
without runtime setter for these, i have no choice but to move bones' transforms to their appropriate transforms.
(see attached image)



if we have setter, we have little transforms.
how fast Unity calculates transforms, not better than no-caculation..., i think..

please consider runtime setter for bone transform

 

I can't share those on runtime. Of course in editor, I can do this manually.

assumes that Legs sprite has 3bones, Pants sprite has 3bones,
and their bones are identical in hierarchy.
how can i set pants bones transform to corresponding legs ones on runtime?

Do i misunderstand your comment?

 

in your example, is only one renderer?
you said 'Sprite Swap', i quess...

but there should be two renderers for leg and pants,

what i want to do ..
to

( i.e) leg SpriteRenderer.sortingOrder = 0, pants SpriteRenderer.sortingOrder=1 )

not sprite change or swap, but assembling of renderers.. on runtime


Thank you for your kind and quick reply.

 

Maybe I misunderstand the bigger picture for your purposes but here but shouldn't the SAME bone should be used for both the pants AND the socks ?

 

I notice that in skinning editor rig copy&paste, flip x doesn't work, bone rotation is wrong

 

Thank you for your advice.

I was able to do what I want on runtime with some makeshift ways.



In comparison with SkinnedMeshRenderer, I think that SpriteSkin is fascinating tool.
Easy texture swap (sprite swap) and dynamic batching make me happy

Great thanks!

by the way, is there any grid snap option in Skinning Editor(edit bone and geometry) ?
it's hard work to edit pixel assets.

 

We are using Spine in our game, but suffering from performance troubles when there are more than 20 avatars on the screen.
Because the spine doesn't support Burst and JobSystem, so we really appreciate what 2D animation supports and eagerly wanna replace the Spine with 2D animation.

Only one reason stopped us: here is what I described in the previous post.

So, please support that.

Thanks

 

Snapping vertices or bone positions to pixel unit.

We already have 'Snap' option in Custom Outline or Custom Physical Shape mode in Sprite Editor.

It would be better if we have half-pixel(0.5 pixel) snapping rather than just one pixel.
With half-pixel snapping, we can put them to the center or corners of a pixel.

 

Despite the downgrades to the sprite swap workflow in the recent versions of the package(a big thing stopping me from 'upgrading'), the actual functionality seems like it should be perfectly capable of the sorts of stuff that they do in that ANNO trailer. I'm guessing that they are actually scaling up their pixel art before skinning it, to get that kind of look, (That is, using higher resolution textures of chunky pixels) though you certainly can rig and animate 1:1 scale pixel art if you don't mind some rendering artifacts.

 

Can you expand a bit about the downgrade in sprite swap functionality? I haven't followed or used the tool so far, but I'm interested in simplifying the pipeline by switching from Spine to 2D Animation.

 

As listed in the changelog(from 6.0):

• Removed editing of Sprite Swap feature in Skinning Module
• Updated Sprite Swap workflow focusing on Project Window and Inspector

Basically, you could take layer groups created in your art software and convert them to swappable sprites automatically in the sprite editor. They removed that, so in 6.0+ versions you need to manually build your sprite library one item at a time in the project window and inspector which is a lot of pointless tedious work if you have a lot of swappable sprites and your artist(or you if you are the artist) already did the work of organizing and naming your layers.

 

Sounds like Animation 2D specific PSD import could use a tags system akin to what Spine has with its PhotoshopToSpine script. Add a [tag] in square brackets in the layer group's name and it'll pre process it upon import to whatever you need, such as placing multiple separate layers under the same parent for easy sprite swapping.

Drag and drop workflows don't really address this when you have to do this at scale.

 

I currently use preset. Save preset in the rigged psb file, and load the preset in new psb file, the process is very fast and easy, no need for spite library, please don't change this feature

 

I like the current workflow, please focus on making the performance as fast as possible, because I need lots of avatars in the screen, I want a system that I can abuse, that is the most important thing

 

Tried it, didn't like it.

Actually, no, that isn't the right way to put it. I mean, there's nothing wrong with having that tool, but it is absolutely not a replacement for the removed functionality. It isn't the same as just being able to have everything set up in the art file and set up with a single click.

As for the sprite resolver, it would be nice if there was the option to have an integer index of sprites instead of hashes. This would be particularly useful for situations where sprites represent a value and you want to animate that value over time. Currently I need to use a separate script to handle that sort of case, since trying to interpolate hashes... makes a hash of things.

Bingo. It is a lot like if you told 3d devs that they'd now have to manually drag and drop skeleton bones into each imported mesh, or something equally absurd.

I'm curious to hear more about how you're setting that up and using presets.

 

i didn't set anything, the process is simple and straight forward, simply click the psb file that you have rigged, and in the top right corner of the inspector you can save preset, load the preset in your new psb file, the new psb file will be rigged.
It might not work in run time but I am happy the way it is, because it is so fast and easy.