Question Bone rigging with 2D Aseprite Importer

Hello all, my first post here I am an experienced developer and now I learning how to make games, went through a feel tutorials and I am feeling confident to try something from scratch by myself.

The art style I picked is Pixel art, and for that I am using Aseprite, but differently than in most cases, I do not intend to create frame by frame animations in aseprite as most do, instead I am creating my character there and my intention is to animate it in Unity.

Now, I am using the new 2D Aseprite Importer (

com.unity.2d.aseprite

) to directly import the .aseprite file into Unity instead of generating a PNG sprite sheet for my layers.

I keep my character's body parts each in different layers in Aseprite. This automates a lot of manual work as the importer generates a lot of stuff based on that.



When I open the Sprite Editor, I can see each individual layer already as a sliced sprite. Sweet!



But this is where the problem begins. When I go to skinning editor, they are also individual sprites, instead of how the character is positioned originally in Aseprite. I select one of the sprites and I can create the bones, I can drag bones on to other sprites but that unintuitively does not assign that sprite to the new bones, the bones are simply "floating" outside the selected sprite, and if I select then another sprite, there are no bones.

Here's an example of what I am trying to say, with the green "torso" sprite selected:



If I rotate the torno bones, all other bones rotate together, but not the sprites.



If I select another sprite, then there are no bones. Feels like each sprite is a different and unrelated entity.



So this is a problem I am struggling to wrap my head around. Using the 2D Aseprite Importer is awesome because it automates much of the steps, but I am not getting the same experience as many Photoshop bone rigging tutorials out there show, and I see absolutely no bone rigging tutorial for Aseprite.

If someone could let me know what is the correct steps to continue here? Thanks!

 

Thank you very much for the feedback!

Yeah I think mixing pixel art and 2D animation can give a nice look and feel depending how it's set up. I've seen some games using that and it's pretty cool.

I think it would be cool to be able to also offer a similar experience the Photoshop importer offers since Aseprite also can support a very similar workflow with layers. Maybe as a different importer mode option so as we have clearly separate workflow for Sprite Sheet, Animated Sprite, and then the one we are referring to here.



In any case, I will probably need to find a workaround for now, but I will eagerly wait for this feature. The importer as it is is already looking pretty good too!