Official 2D Animation Preview Packages

Sounds great !
Today we use Spine from esoteric software which is great. Having the same kind of tool directly integrated in Unity would be nice. Some feature like be able to swap an image during an animation, or change sprite draw order or the possibility to create skins are must-have for us. I hope that kind of features are in your road-map

 

Will it be possible to animate using IK-handles?

 

Looks pretty cool! We're long time users of Spine and love this sort of functionality. Has there been any improvements to the gimbal locking problems that the Unity Animation timeline suffers from when keying rotations?

 

Isn't that exactly what the video above is demonstrating?

 

Can you gimble lock in 2D?

 

When adding a bone to an existing skeleton, the current behavior is this:
new bone appears at the end of the selected bone

instead the bone should appear at the origin of the selected bone

 

When changing a skeleton, apply should also redistribute skin weights or at least not erase all skinning
It just lost all the skinning even though the weights are shown in the editor

probably a bug with this:

 

Good point! I guess not. I'm still weary of Unity's animation timeline vs something like Spine or Maya, though.

 

Why? The current behavior makes more sense to me, as it lets you extend a skeleton, easily creating a chain of bones. If you want to create a branch, you need only select the parent bone.

If it always created the new bone at the origin of the selected bone — i.e., created a branch — then how would you create a chain?

 

Click click click just like in Maya and in this thing A chain is an append to the previous bone. A bone is only a position transform and only acquires a rotation and a size when you click a second time. But maybe I'm wrong and maybe Maya is wrong too so have you actually tried appending a bone to a chain in this thing and found that it makes sense?

 

By "previous bone" you mean the currently selected bone, right? (Because a newly created bone is automatically selected.)

So I guess I misunderstood you — I thought you were saying you didn't like this behavior.

 

Yes, that's correct, thanks for clarifying, I'm sure your input makes the dev work easier because obviously my description was not clear enough.

 

Looking good!

We need:

1) FFD please.

Once your bone-based deformations are ironed-out, people will surely start asking about this.

2) And If you plan to have anything resembling vertex-level deformation support, having something like Creature's "motors" (algorithms that run on top of vertex matrices, bones, or "mesh regions") would be helpful to speed up the workflow N-fold.

Example Features I'd like to see
Here are some examples of "motors", that Creature implements on top vertices/mesh regions (vertex groups)/bones, that i like:

> Bend Physics / Secondary Motion (Applies rope and bend physics to bones - wiki, creature tutorial)
> Cage Motor / Grid Motor (Deforms mesh using points on cage boundary/via set of Grid Points - similar to Photoshop's Warp/Puppet Warp - image example)
> Physics Motor (Deforms the mesh using soft body physics)
> Path Bone Motor (Makes bones follow a user defined path)

Performance-wise there are different levels of optimization features, fastest of them being - you can bake only vertex positions of your mesh, if you don't need physics interactions, sprite swapping or bone manipulation, resulting in extremely high animation performance.

 

I've been using Anima2D for over a year now and seeing this makes me very excited.
If you guys can pull off features proposed in Phase 2 I'd switch to this on my next project, for sure.
I played around Phase 1 and I think it's an amazing start.
I think you should prioritize ease of sprite switching.
An example would be a character that could have equipable armor. An easy way to keep the skeleton but swap out the helmet or chest piece. The correct bone should bind but the sprite should have its own mesh tesselation.
(Does that make sense?)

Edit:
Are there plans for a spring bone (for cloth/rope sprites)?

 

Another feature that is really cool is be able to have separate group order in the same character. That way you can correctly "plug" objects into your character. For example you can place a motorcycle behind one leg and un front of the other leg of a character.

 

I see, fail early is a valid approach. you didn't want to auto update weights and hierarchy?
I think that Bn6 and 7 were deleted by mistake and I pressed undo after that so have a look at undo, it seems that it doesn't revert reference lost.

 

One thing that we relied heavily on was to be able to animatie multiple sprite that were in one single atlas, or even better, have the support to pack them to atlas textures afterwards. We had a lot of weird shaped tentacles in really high resolutions (for 4K support). Without the atlases the game would've been 4 times more than it is.

 

Support ETC + Alpha compression in the new Sprite Atlas please.

 

OK finally got to take a look at this, I'm the maintainer of Unity Sprites and Bones so have a bit of knowledge in the way of animating 2D skeletons in Unity. So here is my feedback so far:

1) Please do not tie bones and the bone editor to the Sprite Editor, it is extremely limiting unless you can throw in a whole bunch of other sprites into it and edit it from there. I want this to be like all other animation tools, let me define how I want the skeleton to be and the sprites to go along with it, so basically let me set up my character, then the bones come after. Also want to add sprites to different bones and be able to continue to add/subtract as I work. Otherwise the bone tools themselves are adequate enough.

2) Sprite geometry editor should have a couple more extras, but it is a good start. Having holes is really really nice for certain things. Weighting seems fine, maybe some alpha slider to see the underlying sprites?

3) Needs something to use the mesh for FFD, it all looks like a decent start to something bigger.

4) Needs angle constraints or something for the bones themselves, looks like there is just a bool but nothing to customize it between ranges.

5) Needs some sort of pose editor, again I think there should be some sort of character creation first, then comes the bone creation and pose creation.

That's all I have time for now, it has some promise since all this is early, but if you marry that bone tool to the sprite editor, it's going to be dead in the water for more than the simplest of characters unless you want a really hairy workflow.

 

This seems great, although on second thought it obviously wouldn't work with pixel art so well. This is coming out in 2018.1, correct? Can't wait!

 

This package release is so good. You guys must feel freeeee

 

I use Maya to animate complex animation for my characters because Unity dont support pre-post Infinity Curve animation. If unity can support this feature in the timeline it would be awesome.

 

Any word on the vector graphics importer and if this will work with the 2D animator? Currently using SVG Importer. Also, curious if the vector graphics will work work with Tilemap and Sprite editor/9 slicing/UI.

 

Speaking of SortingGroups and sorting order, I want to finally be able to animate them without hacky workarounds, the sorting order and sorting layers should be exposed for all Renderers and SortingGroups so we can finally animate them. Then we can mix 2D and 3D if we want as well in an animation.

 

Will the package introduce breaking change for the future update? I would like to use it in real project.

 

Sounds promising!

I tried my hand at making a new skinned sprite, process was a bit confusing at first as the bone/weight creation was in the texture level, but it works. IK Manager was simple to use ( though I'm not sure what the difference between the two chain types is ).

Here's a bit of an animation I did, not much movement but I'd really love to see something like DUIK limbs for those curvy parts.

 

Weird IK solution, it seems that the extremities are not rotating

 

Yeah, I think the limbs I assigned in the IK Manager only covered the mid sections of each limb. Also the number of bones in each limb is to many for the movement I want to achieve. I'll try again with two bones per limb.



I'd love to see how it can be processed in a cleaner way, if you want I can post the PNG of my crawler art here.

 

Took another stab at rigging this character, this time with two bones per limb and a cleaner weights setup. I'm starting to really like the native animation tools.

 

It looks more natural and with smoother weights in the middle you could remove the kins. Still 4 bones shouldn't be that janky so there is a bug to the IK, it might be the algo implemented or the lack of solving weight, you should report it while their is momentum.

 

I think it's because I didn't do a clean work on the weights and geometry.


This was auto generated with mostly some cleaning up near the joints.

 

Use the smooth weight brush, if there is one.

 

Agreed.

Agree - From a quick search this is what is known as Out of Range Limit Curves in 3D Max.

Please support animate-able squash and stretch on individual bones and bone chains.

The three best features in 3D Max bone setup are these three.


Create bone is self explanatory


Refine allows a bone to be split anywhere the artist chooses - without messing up bone scale, orientation or rotation.
Refine can be performed X times on any chain or single bone without error.


Mirror is self explanatory but performs all the negative scale correction 'fixes' behind the scenes - really great for artists.


And bone edit mode allows for bone length, chain reconfiguring without messing up any bone transform/scale settings.


continued vv

 

How it's going to work with pixel art characters? is it going to keep the shape of the character or is going to act like unity handle rotation?

 

Will the package introduce breaking change for the future update? I would like to use it in real project.

 

@rustum would you consider adding bezier patches (used in rayman legends and seasons after fall) as an alternative to regular mesh skinning? It would be an awesome feature, and we would avoid the need to paint skin weights.

 

Please allow for bone positions and rotations to be easily updated programmatically in realtime.

I want to be able to have a 2D character built entirely from RigidBodies and Joints and and every frame, apply the RigidBody positions and rotations to the Bones of the skeletal system.

This gives me a physics-controlled character with the skinned sprite deformation.

I do this today with Anima2D and just want to make sure I'll be able to continue doing this with the new built in 2D Skeletal system.

I use this technique in my game, Just Ski:

Thanks and can't wait to try this.

 

I think it's possible from what I tried. The bones can be modified through animation and through code, and the skin follows. I made one of the bones aim at the mouse position to make a skinned character shoot at a point.

 

..oh, nvm.. is see it does have IK.. my bad.

 

Will it be possible to transfer or import Anima2D SpriteMeshes and Bones integration with weights and skin information into Unity 2018.1 new 2D Animation system ?

Right not I have a lot of SpriteMeshes with very complex weights done for every bone, will I be able to move it to new system?

What will be with Anima 2D eventually ?

 

Wow!!! ))) -The best news for many long years... THANK YOU!