Unity 2D Animation v2 - Preview Packages

Hi!

First of all! Congrats for all your work!

The PSB importer is very easy and save a lot of time compared to Anima2D
The new "Skinning Editor" Window is crystal clear for me! (i love the Preview Pose tab ^.^)


I have some request/questions:

- Is it planned to rename bones in the "Reparent Bones" tab or in another bone list system?
- Can we have an option to import PSB layers by order instead of name?
- In a previews post (V1 forum), it was mentioned than 2D skeletal Animation package will be compatible with Anima2D Spritemeshes... Any idea how to do it? Or any new about this subject?
- (And the more essential for me!) Is it possible to batch multiple spritemeshes? Actually it seams like no. When the Sprite Skin Script is enable Unity won't batch Sprite meshes between them. Any suggestion? Or is it planned in a next update?


Thank you!

 

The PSB file format requirement effectively prevents me from using v2. The doc says that's a "current" requirement, so I'm hoping it doesn't stay current for long. Very disappointing.

 

What is a good way of sprite switching in version 2 ?
Also, can clips be shared across characters?

 

Hello!

After 3 days of testing, some new problems/errors occured for me.

- The copy/paste tool for geometry wont work.
it return the wollowing error:
"Unable to convert copied data to Skinning Module paste data.
UnityEditor.EditorApplication:Internal_CallGlobalEventHandler()"

- Sometime, PSB files return 8BIM/8B64 error with no reason.
All my layers are in a "Standard" Blend mode & No Effects/Mask on it.
Only way found to fix it is to create a new file and copy/paste all the layers in it.
i've search in file data a whole day but don't find what was causing the error.

- No possibility to use a sprite create directly in unity with the Sprite Editor.
the PSB Importer don't regognize it.
This sprite while be delete with a reslice or can't be use to create a sprite mesh.
Resulting new layers in the PSB file to create new parts, and more sprites in the atlas.

- Options for atlas in the PSB Importer.
Talking about the automatic atlas generatie by the PSB importer, is it possible to include the sprite mesh in the sprite position calculation? or use the custom Outline? I don't know, but right now, a lot of space is loose in the atlas for no reason.
Possibility to have an option for the automatic PSB atlas? Like padding scale etc?

- The Orange outline From Hell!!!
And plz, for the love of mankind, make an option for setup/discard the ugly orange outline into the Geometry Tab!
It cause a lot of pain to work with precision.
(Edit: Settings/2D/Animation/Sprite Outline Size)


Must go now, thanks to reading my lamentations.
Hope they will help you.

See You!

 

Hi!

Is there any plans to support another file formats like PSD or a similar format but open source? Having only the PSB option is a little bit disappointing.

 

Hi Hutch_Laura!
I've tried to simply rename a PSD file extension to ".psb" and it seams to work.

In my test i have 3 layers and i can create geometry & skin them with bones.
have fun! (don't blame me if your computer explodes ^.^)

 

example from developers - meshes from single PNG-file
/*or maybe I misunderstood You*/

just settings

Hope I helped You

 

Hi EvOne!

Thanks for helping me with the outline! I hadn't thought about looking in the settings! My bad -_-
For those who search this specific option, it is here "Preferences/2D/Animation/Sprite Outline Size"

And for the impossibility to use sprite with the sprite Editor, I misspoke, sorry.
I can't use a sprite create directly in unity with the sprite editor when i used a PSB multisprite file.
The PSD importer don't understand and ignore it or delete it.
No problem with a single sprite.

Have a nice day!

 

Hi KhyC!

Thanks for the tip of renaming the psd, but it didn't worked for me :'( I guess it can be because I export my psds from Gimp or Krita, not Ps, and when I try to rename them Unity just doesn't recognise the files.

I hope they add support for other formats in the future, I don't think is good to force people to use Ps for this

 

Do you plan to add 2D avatar body mask? ...and maybe mecanim muscles system(for good IK)? Override and Weight in Animator Layers is not enough to control a realistic animations.

 

I wish I had this when I was working on the 2D Animation challenge! These are great changes.

 

Any plans to add simple FFD feature to this animation package or in another one?

 

I have a very strange problem. I created everything and my sprite is ready.

But when I try to edit it again, it does not show any bones (Create Bone is Selected), so I cannot edit it... But if I click a lot, eventually my bones will reappear and then everything will work as expected.

Am I missing something? Is there a shortcut to make the bones reappear when editing? It was working fine before version 2.0.

Edit: I found the reason, you have to select the right thing on project view to edit the bones :

No Bones Appears:




Bones Appears:




I think that this should be documented somewhere! It took me some time to figure it out!

 

hi! Great work on this asset so far! i really love it. i have some confusion as to the most efficient way to set up my sprites and bones for individual animations. i think these are mostly variations of the same question but ill be detailed for the sake of in the event they are all solved differently. yes im a noob so please handle me with pink gloves. my current questions are:

1-what is the proper work flow for having the skeleton swap sprites in mid animation?
eg. i want the arms sprite to change when it reaches a certain angle, then change back at another but the rest of the body to stay the same during a run sequence. Should i: be importing the other arm angles on the same sprite sheet and just turning on or off visibility during the animation?

2-What is the proper work flow for swapping the entire sprite set on the skeleton when switching between animations?
eg. I want that the sprites for the character are completely different during the jump animation than the run animation. should i: again have all the separate jump sprites on the same sprite sheet as the run sprite sheet and use the same skeleton just having all visibility for running turned off and turning on jump visibility when jump is activated? or should i use an entirely different skeleton and sprite sheet for the jump animation?

my character is rather complex and there are a lot of different animation angles so i would need to frequently swap a lot of sprites for different animations. when i tried importing all the spite combinations in one shot, its a lot of sorting through. is that the way im supposed to do it?

3-if a character picks up equipment that changes only a small part visually of the overall sprite while equiped .... again should i have this on the same sprite sheet? or use separate png and add to the existing animation and character sprite (also i dont know how i would do that lol)

thank you so much for your time!

 

I’m gearing up to work on a new game and exploring workflow options, and I really want to use these skeletal/psb import packages in production. They already do some fantastic stuff, but it (and animation/sprites in general) have some quirks that might keep me from being able to use them. If any refinements to the workflow/features are on the roadmap for the next couple months, I’d love to be a part of testing them and providing feedback.

Edit: My first comment/feature request I realized is already present in the form of sorting groups. I feel like quite the bonehead for not knowing these have been an option since 5.6! I'm so used to rolling my own solution for stuff, I sometimes forget to check what Unity has already added.

Second, a clean way to swap a character to an entirely different set of sprites (for different poses) is something I’ll need. I see one simple way to do it now, but I’m not sure this is efficient. I’m planning that each pose for a character will be parented to a root gameobject, my Animator component will be on that root gameobject, and I’ll just animate the active state of the children to toggle on/off the needed poses. Related to this: the .PSD importer doesn’t let you place the resulting sprites in an atlas of your choice - it makes a new, separate one for each .PSD. If I want to have different poses for one character, that either necessitates that each pose is its own atlas (not the end of the world, but a bit wasteful), or I put all of the poses in a single .PSD, which really isn’t practical. I hope it's planned to have the packing tag be respected with this new system.

Lastly, something jumped out at me related to the animation process in Unity. This isn’t a 2D specific issue, but just a general animation workflow issue from the perspective of an animator of 15 years or so. As a maya user, I’m used to being able to select an object in my scene view to bring up its animation curves in the graph editor. Want to adjust the wrist rotation? Click the hand, and only it’s curves show up in the graph editor. Unless I’m mistaken, Unity’s animation window can only focus on the curves for an object that you click on in the object list within the animation editor, rather than in the scene view. This is fine for simple hierarchies, but I’m a little concerned about this when I’m getting into characters with large amounts of bones.

Really looking forward to what improvements are on the horizon for these packages, and sprite animation in general.

 

Thanks for contributing, ColossalPaul! I didn't expect a Unity response over the holidays.

As I've been working with more "real" files instead of just simple tests, I have a comment regarding the PSD importer - it should probably show a progress bar or something so that you can see how it's progressing through larger files. I fed it a 30-40 layer 2k texture and it takes quite a while to import, in fact it seemed to crash until I told the import settings to downsample to 1k, but it's possible it was just taking several minutes.

 

Thanks for the replies! Unity sucessfully imported a psd file with layers generated in GIMP after I renamed it to psb as directed. It does grumble though. This message (one for each layer, for each event) appears a lot:

 

Thank you so much for the responses! I understand from what you're saying that in the current state of the package sprite swapping is not intended to be done either in an efficient way or at all. Is it possible in the meantime can you tell us the best way to set up our complex sprite characters so that by the time you release the next version that will support it, we will have everything ready to plugin? or is that too difficult since it may not be known how it will be implemented?

my characters are made up of a minimum of about 15 base sprites laid out on a skeleton (minimum) and times that by the number of poses (jump, crouch, swim etc...). that winds up being over 200 base sprites for a character. then factor in tons of skin changes for items attached to the character... it winds up being a few thousand individual sprite components. very complex. What i think could be very helpful for us artists anticipating a solution to organizing this workflow is if you could tell us what is the most efficient way to be working now so we dont have to go back and redo everything when the solution becomes available.

one suggestion i have is that you make the "group" option available to work with the psd importer. When im working in Photoshop i could group in folders all layers of sprites that apply to a specific pose. if the importer could read those folders and organize them somehow visually as well as have the ability to switch on and off their visibility on the skeleton at run-time, i imagine that could help tremendously. although you may already have a better solution.

im mostly worried im going to make a ton of animations with different sprites and different skeletons for a single character and find that later it was the wrong way of working and its either a performance hit or worse yet i have to redo the whole thing.
any suggestions or direction could help a ton

 

I don't think our target workflow should be having all potential poses inside one .PSD. That would mean that if you make a change to one, or add a new one, it would have to reimport the entire asset, which could become an extremely slow process if you start getting a high layer count.

 

Please implement an official skins system like this one for Anima2D:

 

Some more workflow thoughts from skinning a character: I animate scale sometimes, and you can't preview scale changes in the skinning editor. It would be nice to be able to scale a bone (perhaps alt-LMB and drag?) and see how that behaves with your current skin weights. Similarly, I often animate translation from time to time too, and translating a bone that is a child of another (like grabbing the middle bone of a character's spine) in the skinning editor behaves very differently than translating a bone in the actual scene. It seems to be making the parent rotate to face the child in addition to having the child distort the mesh as it normally would, leading to some inaccurate behavior. Again, this is only in the skinning editor, it behaves as I'd expect when actually animating.

Lastly, I think the sprite skin bones, as shown in the scene view, are pretty hideous and make animation difficult. They're very large and completely opaque, so I have to hide them to see what the heck my work looks like. This is possible by going to gizmos>sprite skin, but then I have to turn them back on to keep working, or have a game camera panel open as well as a scene panel (probably what I'll do for now, screen real estate be damned). In maya, I have a hotkey for showing/hiding my rig, so I can quickly preview my animation without a pile of wireframe garbage on top. I'd either make them way more subtle, have it possible to show/hide with a key, or autohide when you hit play in the animation editor.

There's a character in here somewhere....

 

Now that i think of it that way, i think your right. i also agree that the opaque bones in scene view do get in the way. also will there be options for bones that are influenced by physics? or should we expect to depend on other assets like "dynamic bones"

 

That sound very great !

 

Just want to say, I love these tools. I haven't been this excited about a unity feature since... ever.

I have a workflow improvement suggestion for skinning. Right now my process goes like so:
1. draw bones
2. generate meshes
3. do auto weights as a starting point
4. go through each bone and remove influences that I don't want, then perform auto weights again with these exclusions
5. fine tune weights with a brush

This is great, except for step 4. When I'm editing bone influences, right now I have to select each sprite, then click the influence I want to remove one at a time, and then the little tiny minus button in the bottom right. Since I have to prune out unwanted influences from a lot of stuff (my characters are very layered), it would be perfect if I could just use the +/- keys while floating over a bone to add/remove them from the influence list of the selected sprite.

I've also run into a bug/oversight with the way the PSD importer generates an atlas - currently setting them to be compressed on iOS, which requires square textures, may still produce a non-square atlas, and the texture won't compress, throwing a warning in the log. Also (and you probably already know this), I'd expect if I make a SpriteAtlas asset and tell it to atlas everything in a given folder, it should incorporate the output of the PSD importer, but currently it does not. To quote ColossalPaul: "The atlas in generated by the PSDImporter is not meant to be the final atlas to use. Please consider packing the sprites into their actual SpriteAtlas to make sure that the texture usage is optimal." I assume you don't expect us to open the PSD and drag those sprite into an atlas one by one?

Honestly, I've been playing with these tools for a few days now and I think they're just about production ready for me except for this atlas issue preventing me from combining all poses of a character together and compressing them properly.

 

@unityteam

It seems that flip sprite is not supported ?



In this image, bones are not shown and I don't know why but I can move it and gizmos bounds doesn't take in count flip from sprite renderer.

EDIT :
I found where passed bones, they are too bigger for my scene view even if I deactivate 3D gizmos

 

i was thinking the ability to just hold shift and select multiple bones and then just hit +/- i find it tedious that i have to mouse back and forth to prune out some 20 bones from every mesh going back and forth to the bone and minus...but your solution sounds good too

yeah that hasnt worked for me either

 

When i use normalize checkbox active with weight paint brush i get strange results, without normalize as expected. So probably something with this function wrong, but not sure.

 

Hi,

I tried the package and it works great, I have some remarks:
1) Some times the weight brush doesnt work, I keep brushing but nothing happens.
2) You have to do something to handle the graphics that does not need bones. Eg the mouth that open and closes, the eyes that open and closes, the eyebrows that move. This is critical for a character and now I have to disable them in the program and put them manually. What is the procedure I have to take?
Thanks

 

Also in the platform settings for compression in PSB please add the consoles.

 

How can the bind pose be reset from code? So that if a cutscene or timeline is quit midway, the sprite can be returned to it's default pose?

 

Just to confirm, in the inspector for SpriteSkin component , there is a button called Reset Bind Pose which does what I need, is there any way to do this from code?
Thanks for the solution!

 

All 2d characters that are used in games like point and click adventure games need more details other than bones: Eg:
1) Eyes. I usually put masks in eyes so that I can move the eye ball around. I use code to automatically move eyes to objects and stick to them. Can open and close with prite swapping or better FFD.
2) Mouth. This is very complicated. The easy thing to do is to put many images and swap them while the character is speaking. But the best method is to animate the mouth with 60FPS which can only happen with FFD. This way I animate the correct phonemes "A" "O" etc and then with some software we translate the speak mp3 file to phonemes so that the character will open and close his mouth perfectly when he speaks some text. This can happen with image swapping too.
3) Nose. We move the nose around to make face expressions more real. Also FFD works great here.
4) eyebrows. These are very important for face expressions, we move them and rotate them. These will help with face feelings. Eg sad, happy..
5) hair. Hair works ok with bones and IK but it would be supper great to have a new feature designed for 2d hair. It can work with bones and maybe add it as an IK solver? I dont know. Also another very usefull feature will be the hair to have the ability to add gravity on them, this way if the character head rotates down the hair will go automatically down without the need to animate them in each frame. This will save me a lot of time.
6) fabric. Another very useful feature will be the ability to add some 2d fabric. Now I did it with bones and IK and it looks nice but if it was a dedicated feature it would look awesome. Maybe as a IK solver? I dont know.
7) things the character has: Eg sometimes the character holds a gun, sometimes a sword or anything else. There must be a simple procedure to glue objects to some characters point eg hand, feet, head and then be able to move them during animation.
8) cloth changes: I know it can be done as it is now but maybe there must be an easier solution for the character to be able to change clothes easily and keep the same animations in animator. Eg the character wears normal clothes and these move around a lot since its soft. then the same character some time wears an armour and now the clothes does not move around since its hard. But the character will be able to keep the same animations like walking and jumping but it will look differently since we use other clothes and weights.
9) swap sides. easy way to swap sides. A character designed to go right must easily go left with the same animation and graphics.
10) tail. Put a new IK solver designed for tails. Can be used in any animal tail, snake etc. Very usefull.
11) Wish list: shadow. It would be super if a 2d shadow can happen somehow. Just a thought.

 

Got it thanks for the alternative, will try that out.

 

Sure, but I can't reproduce it after I restart Unity :/

 

Hello.
I made a character with inverse kinematics in this lesson:

And I wanted to ask why he influences FPS in such a way, is this normal? Each new character added lowers FPS very much! I will attach a video. There are some opinions why this happens and how to do better? i want to hear any advice or solution.

MyVideo:

My PC:
i5-6500, GeForce1050ti, 16gb ram

Profiler:
https://i.gyazo.com/0181dda25ca452d8aa2371048b11b7f1.png

Thanks.

 

Hi!
a suggestion - the ability to scale groups of bones (if its not there already and i cant find how to implement it)

Ive found myself run into a number of situations where i would need to scale entire groups of bones up or down (usually after a cut and paste onto another similar sprite but larger proportions) but didnt seem to find and solution other than editing individual bones one at a time draging them out to fit the new sprite. also if i tweaked art in photoshop and increased or decreased the pixel dimensions the bones then would be out of proportion or by increasing or decreasing the pixels per unit in inspector when pasting a set of bones wold make them paste out of scale. at first i thought ... meh i can deal with just adjusting the bones after each tweak.... but now ive found myself saying man i wish i could just drag and scale all these bones at once for more complex rigs.

 

Will it be available for 2018.х Unity version?

 

Will the next version have other features added except the optimization?