Official 2D Animation Preview Packages

Thanks for the update!

Yes, good point. I'm using a custom shader, the Uber Shader for Sprites (using PixelLit) lighting mode.

 

I am currently having a problem with the Sprite Skin component. I'm working in a team and when I send them the skinned sprites, either by a Unity Package or through Git, they often lose all bone data in the prefab or scene, I even send them the meta files for everything. I am unable to click Create Bones or set the root bone to automatically set them all, it acts like the sprite has no skin. I am able to fix this by deleting the sprite in the world and adding it again. It seems that while the sprite in the world loses all skin data, the image itself in the asset folder still has it but it is incredibly inconvenient to do this for every single sprite.

 

I've run into this issue a few times as well, but I don't know the cause. When it happens to me I just go into the sprite bone editor, move a bone, undo (ctrl-z) and apply. Back in the scene inspector things are magically re-recognized as being rigged up as they were before. It makes me think that it has less to do with the sprite meta file and more to do with the scene associations. Just a guess though.

 

As a follow up, I actually just experienced this issue again. It was right after I cleared my project's Library director because I had been playing around with sprite atlas caches. So, it seems that the 2d animation package is storing some data in the project's Library directory when it shouldn't be. I would assume all relevant information/references would go in the sprite meta file and the scene file, and not in the Library directory (which as a best practice is not committed to Git).

That would explain why Admiral-Sky is having issues sharing his rigged sprites with other members on his team. Hope this info helps the Unity folks with tracking it down!

 

Thanks for sharing this! Super helpful.

 

That's great, thank you!

 

Is the "Sprites/Diffuse" shader not supported? Currently sprites using the diffuse shader are rendered pitch black if the sprite has the "Sprite Skin" component. Or am i missing something?

 

Can you guys add a way to change bone depth through animation? Like maybe a component you attach to the bone game object that overrides the default bone depth for that bone.

 

Hey All,

Just wanted to say I'm enjoying using the 2d animation package. Here's a clip of the turn-based rhythm rpg I'm making with the new 2d animation tools in Unity:

I hope things are progressing with the package. Keep up the good work!

 

This looks great! Could you explain how you did that?
As far as I know it's currently only possible to animate single sprites using the bones and weights,
but your characters look like you composed them of multipble bodyparts...

 

That's true for a single Texture/Sprite Skin, but it's just a matter of separating textures for each skinned body part and adding them as their own Sprite Skin to the game character. This is perhaps a bit more work when creating the hierarchy of game objects in the editor, but has the benefit of keeping each piece as simple as possible.

 

We have tested the preview for 2D Animations and worked great for us, the only problem is that it's still in preview and our project should be released in 2 months... Do you think we may have a non Preview version in 2 months or should I consider using another tool?

 

Just to let everyone know, this was fixed in version 2018.2.4!

 

Hey, I have a couple of issues; 1) My child-bones is able to detach themselves from the parent, as you can see in the image. I've used the "create bone" tool in the Sprite Editor, so I'm pretty sure they shouldn't behave like this when moving the middle bone. 2) I have trouble with actually seeing the bones in Scene view - if i zoom in too much, they will turn invisible, and sometimes just moving the camera sideways will make them appear again. Not sure what's causing this, it helped making my character bigger, but it's still occuring.

Any help on these issues would be appreciated.

 

This was regarding sprites losing their bone associations in scenes. Any news or workaround? This happens to me frequently in the editor (Windows 10, Unity 2018.2.7) and literally every single time I've run build automation (ubuntu container, Unity 2018.2.7.)

---edit---
CI/CD pipeline is killed by this error since it requires a manual fix. Has this been reported thru the tracker, or just here?

Thanks!

 

Fantastic! This is a really promising looking bunch of tools. Thank you!

 

It's been a couple of months since an update to the package. Any new info to share? I had to reconfigure my rigs again due to the issue discussed above about info being stored in the Library directory (which isn't version controlled as a standard practice). It would be nice to have that fix, or at least some information on when it will be fixed. Thanks for any info!

 

Hey. Many thanks to the developers for doing this direction. Really. Thank you.
We hope to see updates. So do you.

After a good digging, I can say how the system can already be used.
The first thing I want to mention - here people wrote before that there is a desire to sort the parts of the object, such as when one hand behind the character or a motorcycle between the legs of a motorcyclist.

superchop implemented this by isolating such parts into a separate texture and a separate object with its own Sprite Skin, right? Quite expensive way.
I noticed here that if you have all the parts of the character on the same texture, then the parts to the left of the atlas -below the Z-hierarchy of those that are placed more to the right. Thus it is possible to carry out some composition.
Also, maybe the Y position on the Atlas matters too(idk).
update: If you select bone in weight editing you just could now simply set bone depth for the same effect. Nice!

Look at that fancy LizardMan go. So fancy. So lizard. So walk.
The second is that everything works well with "flip X" in sprite component, including animation. Good to know.
By the way, during the creation of the animation there were moments when using ctrl+z to undo the last action - position of the last changed bone was reset incorrectly. In addition, sometimes there were problems to reset the selection and you had to do it either in the inspector or using the animation window. It is just me?
So from my experience now if something to animate, it is better to interrupt the wrong movement in the process by pressing escape.

Third, replace the sprite in sprite component and keep it animated with same animation is already quite possible. Nice.
You can make a duplicate of your sprite asset. It will be copied with the existing skeleton, weights, and geometry, and you can edit the texture afterwards - the sprite obtained from the new asset perfectly takes the place of the original one.
There is another option - because in the inspector is recently available such a thing as a preset which works great for importing too and allows you to transfer bones and all marked geometry to a completely different asset.
By the way, I edited the geometry in the sprites obtained that way and everything was fine. I think as long as bones have the same structure as original - it must be fine.


Also, I want to say that it will be great if we will be able to conveniently replace individual parts of the sprite, but not the entire sprite atlas if necessary. Waiting for that feature. Even if all these parts will need to be placed on the same atlas - this is already something. Especially if it's better for performance.
If you really really want something like that, you probably only can add such "frame parts" to the skeleton at once and in animation make them invisible by assignment them to the zero scale or something like that. Not nice.

Finally, the most important reason why I wrote in addition to the desire to help - perfomance. Thirty sprites with Sprite Skin eat pretty big amount of resources even with same sprite, bones and animation, and I'm not talking about a hundred or two hundred. Please think of something if it possible to fit it in more complex project.
Job system? Simplified mode(Lower visual precision)? Best practice guides? Vertex displaced instancing? Optimized game objects(As in 3D animated objects)? Or built-in tool for baking bone animation into frames?
Something.

 

That's correct. Though in my case I'll never have more than around 8 characters in a scene, which makes performance less of an issue. I can see how it might be an issue if you plan on having 10's or 100's of skinned characters.

Go LizardMan!

 

we are hoping to use these animation packages for our projects, key missing features for us:

- parenting multiple sprites to a bones rig hierarchy
- reusing rigs and animations across multiple characters
- better visualization for bone weights, especially looking at all the weights for an individual bone, the multicolored setup doesn't cut it

is there any indication of when phase 2 will be available in preview?

thanks

 

Hello!
I'm new to using Unity. I am an Animator. We are making games with a lot of 2D characters talking to each other but my main Question is:

Is it possible to create rigging null shapes (basic wireframe objects like rectangles, triangles, circles) which can be easily selected for creating animation keyframes in the Scene viewport? I come from Maya and 3dsmax point of view, and this is essential to have for any 3D character rigs. I would like to have the same functionality in my 2D character rigs in Unity. Its speeds up the animation a lot.
At the moment I have created my own .png files that are basic shapes that look like wireframes (which are connected to my Effector objects in the IK for Arms for example), but I cannot select them when I click on them in the scene viewport! I have to select them from the hierarchy window by name, which is not animator friendly. I am attaching a Screenshot of my character rig.

Any help is appreciated! Thanks

 

I forgot one thing! As you can see from the image above the left arm is bending the wrong way, this be bent the right way if I drag out my Effector object in an arc shape to the right, which is not very stable to work with when animating. In most IK systems I have used, the IK solver is placed behind the elbow area so that the arm does not bend backwards, in DUIK in After Effects there is an option box you can tick to make the arm bend the opposite direction if you want. Am I missing this option in Unity menus? I can't see it anywhere in the IK window, I'm using the CCD Solver 2D by the way.

Thanks again

 

Hi again,
So I have been building my rig, this time I was working on a parenting structure for the Left leg IK and Unity crashed twice within an hour. Now when I open up my project file the SpriteSkin component fails to load, therefore making my rig not useable in the scene viewport! But when I select one of the sprites for a limb like the left arm, and check it out in the Sprite Editor, the bones are in the correct positions, the Geometry looks the way I left it, when I check the Weights tab and test it by moving a bone, it deforms correctly just like the way I left it. The scene viewport however shows the character without any bones applied, but some dotted lines in place of the bone connections. I'll attach a screenshot.

Its very strange. Again, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

This is probably related to the issue brought up by myself and others going back several months. See the 3rd-5th posts on this page for some back-story and possibly helpful info.

It's worrisome that Unity has been so quiet on this thread. More than 2 months without a post or response to user issues/requests for information. Ironically, when I alluded to such concerns way back in May of this year, they were met with ambivalence. This package has only grown more worrisome for me in the past 5 months since then, as there have been very few updates/fixes in that time. I'll say again that I hope this package isn't getting side-lined like so many before it. The most frustrating part is the lack of feedback from Unity on this thread. Are we looking in the wrong place?

 

is there any chance they drop the project ?

 

That would be bad for Unity, that's for sure.
I personally don't think they'll throw out an existing package like this. It can be a very good animation system and a great concept.

Although, I do share the embarrassment about some sort of dev-silence in this thread. If one of the developers came here and at least said how they are doing - it would be great.

 

Oh my god, I want the money I spent on spine!!!

 

Hi Sergi,
Thanks for the reply. Some helpful info there for sure. I found a way around the rigging problems I had earlier by experimenting with different GameObjects as Nulls and parenting methods I learned from Maya years ago. I tried the assigning icons method you mentioned, but its not really suitable for an animator to work with, we really need easily selectable, non renderable 2D wireframe, rectangles, triangles or circles, also an option for choosing colours would be good. So, for example all of the Null/Controllers on the left side of the body are blue, right side are red. The nulls are part of the IK (through parenting) in the arms and legs at the wrists or ankles. Now all you have to do to animate a character walking is select the nulls and keyframe them. Its fast and effective for Animators.

Anyway, glad to hear there are more updates on the way, the Function curves and Dopesheet animation tools are very cool by the way. Similar to Maya for me.

 

Anyone, Please Reply to this Comment when Phase 2 is out

 

Hi Rus Hi Unity, Team after Catching your talk at unite we have decided to give this a go with great results,

1. I love the intuitive tools, i had a character rigged and weighted in no time as soon as i realized the multi layer psd feature you mentioned, was not in this release i found a work around (just slightly separating body parts so they dont overlap) , a start to finish tutorial would go a long way for newbies,
2. making a run cycle was easy with help of the IK tools.
3. Bone depth !!!!! cant thank you enough.
4. Please continue your great work on this we really want to use this in our game.

Below is an issue we had on exporting and importing the rigged prefab on the fifth import it has imported correctly, i'm stoked it eventually worked, being a preview i was happy to wait for the finished version.

made a rigged animated prefab > exported it as a package , imported that package then all the bones whilst still mapped and weighted correctly had no influence on the sprite anymore as per pic attached.

Thankyou for your hard work on this keep it up ,

Barra

 

Is there any way of using this system as UI element? A Sprite Renderer behaving like the Image component on UI

I could place the gameobject with the sprite renderer in front of the camera but that's a bad solution for a game with multiple cameras. The idea is placing an animated character using bones in the UI

 

[ UPDATE ] : Ok... so this is an issue every time we pull the project from git , we gotta re import this character package, again usable there is a work around, but slows us down so much.

God speed Devs our thoughts are with you

 

I'm getting several errors like this when installing this package (on any of the latest Unity versions):

Code (csharp):

1. JSON parse error: The document is empty. (Packages/com.unity.2d.animation/Editor/Unity.2D.Animation.Editor.asmdef)

Anyone knows what might be the cause or how to fix this? Works OK on another machine.

EDIT: solved by deleting the whole Unity cache (in the AppData folder on WIndows) and installing the packages again. I'm leaving this here in case anyone encounters a similar problem.

 

@Sergi_Valls After the 2018.3 release will this bone animation system be as feature filled as Anima2D is? I have a rigged character using anima2D with multiple sprites from a single spritesheet, would the inbuilt unity system be ready for such a character?

 

Profiler says that SpriteSkin animation causes GC allocation on LateUpdate and on rendering.
Is it a beta issue of 2D Animation package and planned to be fixed?
Or is it harmless for performance, because Profiler is wrong?
I wonder why even NativeArray allocation by Allocator.TempJob is reported by Profiler as GC Alloc.

 

I don't see the Download for Phase 2. But it must exist, because someone Replied to my Comment, that spells ,,Anyone, Please Reply to this Comment when Phase 2 is out".
Where's the Download for Phase 2? I only see the one for Phase 1.

 

Hi @Sergi_Valls, I would suggest that the 'Timeline' tab where you can sequence your animation tracks with audio tracks should be called something else, like Track Sequencer, or AnimTrackSequencer. For animators the Timeline always refers to where you create keyframes with values over units of time, like in all animation programs. So your use of the term 'Timeline' for a track sequencer in the actual 'Timeline' window is double-confusing, For example "I'm working on Timeline in timeline window". Please rename it, for Animators its a pain. Thanks

 

I'm having this problem too! What's really weird for me was I toggled the editor skin (Preferences --> General --> Editor Skin) from Professional to Personal and the bones showed up. BUT, after I added my scripts and 2d box collider, the bones disappeared and got replaced with dottted lines. And swapping editor skins didn't work anymore. So I'm lost on what to do. Created my idle and running animations and was ready to work on jump and shoot, but now it's really hard with access to the bones.

 

So I think this is scene related. I created a new scene and didn't have these problems.

 

How would I use a different sprite for a single part of my sprite mesh? For example, in this mega man sprite sheet:
Notice the front arm for running is different than the front arm for jumping (the fist mainly). How would I use the 2d animation preview package to swap out that arm? Not sure if I'm asking the right question - I'm a newb with unity animator controller and animation in general. Thanks for any help.

 

I have a huge problem animating rotations. If I use the Editor or the Inspector to rotate the bones, it makes huge rotations, something like +360 for a small mouse movement.

I only am able to really animate rotation by editing the values on the Animation Editor itself.

I think this should be related to I using 1 Pixel per Points? Anybody else has this problem?

 

Thank you very much, it helped me a lot

 

Hello Unity 2D Animation Tool Team!

First I'd like to congratulate and thank you for all your hard work and doing an amazing job on Phase 2 of this package! I'm looking forward to hearing more about it in a couple of weeks as mentioned towards @ 15:10 in the YouTube video described below as well as its official release in Unity 2018.3.

I recently watched a new video that Unity put up today on YouTube detailing the new updates coming to the 2D workflow (here is a link to the time stamped video @ 14:53 detailing the multi-sprite workflow):

There's a couple of things that came to mind:

1. How are you able to switch sprites on certain bones to different sprite parts while animating a character?
2. I'm not sure how the mosaic works in putting the character together in the sprite editor?
3. How are bones automatically generated through the character rig? I understand its created with nested prefabs but how does it get the sprites to attach to the bones? Is the photoshop file format (PSD) the only way to get the separate layers or hierarchy information from the file to generate the character rig?
4. Is their going to be an official way to swap entire character skins so that we can reuse animations for other characters? I've seen the unofficial tool created by a Unity user (Kamyker) from this forum:

SpriteSkin Extensions Github

So these are just a few things I noticed that need clarification. Thank you for your time and again I'm looking forward to hearing more about the package!

 

I have a very strange bug, and I'm sure is caused by using Sprites with Bones!

I have a scene with several "Regular Sprites" and "Sprite Skins" on the same scene... Some share the same Sprite Atlas.

When Moving/Zooming the Camara, some Sprites (Regular Sprites, not the Skinned) are drawn randomly Flipped (only in Game View, in Scene View it is always drawn correctly). And no, there is nothing on my game code flipping these sprites and attend to the details, it is only drawn wrong on Game View, not on Scene View.

If I remove all sprites skins from Scene, then the bug does not happen anymore. It seems something related to drawing a Sprite Skin and then a Regular Sprite later. Maybe something related to drawing Full Rect and Tighy Sprites that are on the same Atlas.