Official 2D Animation 8.0 released for Unity 2022.1

I'm coming from Anima2D, and am a bit confused. With Anima2D I was able to create bones with code, and then animate them in the normal way with animation clips, etc... I had no need for anything else, especialy any sprite display or sprite manipulation.

With the new 2D Animation package, bones seem inseparable from sprites. Is this true? Or is there a way I can just use bones by themselves (and also generate them with code).

 

Bones without bound geometry are just a hierarchy of transforms, just like 3d bones. You can use empty game objects in pretty much all ways aside from the bone gizmos(though you can use the bone renderer from the animation rigging package to at least visualize them.)

It is definitely annoying how they bound so many things together- I would really like if they let you use the same tools except producing mesh renderers, personally, and it would definitely be nice to be able to just arbitrarily apply the bone gizmos to gameobjects.

 

Is there a thread for 2D Animation 9.x.x? I am having some trouble with SpriteSkin components not properly binding to BoneTransforms in 9.x.x.

I see mentions around this in the changelog for 10.x.x. I also see that 10.x.x finally has a public SetBoneTransforms. Will this ever get back-ported? Will I always need to upgrade to 2023.x.x to get 2D Animation 10.x.x?