Looking for the "best" 2D skeletal animation asset

Sup guys and gals!

I have been using Smooth Moves now for a long time, but we decided that we dont like it anymore. Its hard to work with for a programmer because it doesnt allow certain prefabs or other small nifty things, and it breaks all the time. When it breaks it means force rebuild and...it...takes...foreeeeever....especially when u have 50 animations plus and it starts going trhough them all everytime u wanna hit the play button to test it so...enough is enough.

Ive been looking at a few animation assets, the ones i think LOOKS good are:

1: Spine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se0nh1JPh8s
2: Uni2d http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_bw-UF1PjU
3: Spriter http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xLZIx9RwGs

I need a skeletal system, and Smooth moves only uses bones, not the same thing at all. These skeletal systems seems to offer texture distortion with the skeletal system and this is great for things like tentacles, snakes and so on, but also offers a much better looking flow in walk and run animations unless u wanna kick ur own ass inside Smoothmoves getting this right.

Me and Adrien is making a couple small games for practice and i need new tools, please let me know if u have any experience with any of these!

Thanks alot guys, appreciate it!

 

Spine doesn't have mesh deformation or skinning yet - it's in the works, but I expect it's going to take a month or two to roll out. The video demos you'll have seen are mockups created with Softimage.

That said, it's a very nice tool. It's Unity implementation may be pretty hard to get your teeth around at first as it's not a 'true' Unity extension like Smooth Moves, and there are no Unity-specific docs (there's a general "runtime" docs, as they support lots of platforms with single export data in binary/JSON format).

 

I supported Spriter in the kickstarter and have been gettiing updates. It's still in Beta as far as I am aware - I think the last update was a few days ago. If you look at the developer's site you will see that there is a lot still promised and not there yet. Plus I don't think the Unity plugin for it is done yet, but you would need to check that as well.

 

I have been following (and testing with) Spriter and Spine from their beginnings.

FWIW, my money is still on Spriter. The workflow is just better to me, and you can play with all the advanced features right now. Skinning, mesh deformation, hitboxes, action points, project resizing... yep it's all in there, and you can export to sequential images if you need something now. The Pro version is still only $25USD until it hits v1.0.

They are really close to finally being done with its feature set, so the runtimes will start getting major attention soon. http://www.brashmonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14534 I know Thinksquirrel has recently talked about updating his API for Unity 4.3 once the final specs are cemented.

Spine has just started a new Kickstarter to fund developing a few more of Spriters features, but it comes with some price hikes on top of the other recent hikes. Spriters final street price is still unknown for the Pro version after the v1 release, but they have a Free version which is actually pretty nice feature-wise.


I have looked at Uni2D, but it seems to be trying to do too many different things in one Unity plugin for my tastes. Especially, with Unity 4.3 out now.

 

Actually the second Spine Kickstarter ended successfully yesterday. Mesh sprite support is due in a few days according to Nate, so he's clearly powering through the promised features. I don't see the price hikes you mention, perhaps this was some time ago...the current listings shows the prices have been reduced, and the Kickstarter reduced them further (Pro for a $160 pledge).

Still, competition is healthy - Spriter looks good too, just a different workflow approach. Can't fault choice.

 

We're currently using SmoothMoves for our game (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=190788204) and we're really happy with it.
We tried Spine but coding with it it's a real pain due to the lack of docs and because Spine animation are not standard unity animation.

We also tried Uni2D and it's using standard unity animation which is great but it's easier to code your own plugin that setting up and animating character.

 

The problem all these plugins/softwares have ( not sure about uni2D ) is that they don't have real animation curve support and it's a pain in the ass when it comes to advanced animation.
Still don't understand why they give more priorities to not-so-important features instead of animation basis ones.

I, also, am looking for the advanced animation solution to make things like rayman / vanillaware products, but I think this is not there yet :/

 

Thanks guys for the responses!

I was tempted to get Spine but it looks very messy imo, theres just SO much to learn in it. using smooth moves has been ok, but like i said it doesnt use skeletal structures, only a bone parenting system and its just not enough for my larger animations. Also it seems Smoothmoves doesnt want to work all the time like it should, and my programmer absolutely hates it, so time to move on.

I did follow Spriter since the start, but was afraid of the Unity support for it so kinda left it in the dark and started looking at Spine.

The tutorials for Spine are great, very indepth, but like i said, it seems extremly hard to learn it so u can use it flawlessly everyday.

Uni2D seems pretty ok, but i agree with the above, its just too much in there now, what is Uni2D really at its core?

For now im actually using spritesheets, the way i hate the work, because SM is seriously hard to deal with when it comes to prefabs and such, it keeps breaking and we have to forcerebuild stuff all over.

 

There was the initial price (seems like it was $55,) then there was another retail price (but it was on sale forever... $60-75 maybe.) Now there are three different versions, with the lowest priced Full featured option at $299 ($249 on sale it seems.)

The $190 price was for the kickstarter which ended yesterday I guess.

I brought it up originally to illustrate that you can't sit on the fence too long, as the prices will just keep going up. Not to knock one or the other. Spriter could be $399 tomorrow...

Exactly, and they both have free versions you can test out. One of them is bound feel better to you.

I wish Uni2D had something similar, as it does look like a it would be a nice option for a lot of people.

 

The prices are getting serious on Spine,thats for sure....and im not even sure i like it! im gonna do some testing on both of these, Uni2D is still making me curious, especially that V2 video they posted.

 

You need to look at the runtimes for these things as well. You'll be wanting these features from the runtimes:

- zero garbage collection
- ability to attach or obtain bone positions
- ability to slot something in between bone positions - always useful to have some depth and some don't
- general performance
- proper unity integration?

So it's not always an editor consideration.

 

yeah been scouting on peoples comments for those, seems they both arent perfect for any of these yet. If only Ubiart Frameworkd would go public...

Smoothmoves has helped tons but its time to move on, and i like Spriters look and feel the most, even tho Spine is not far behind. The guys doing Spine tho has VERY good documentation and videos.

 

I've not spent any time with Spriter yet - I will when they add Unity support. Spine is very easy to use - it can feel like a mission the first time you set up a character, but once you've settled into a routine actually animating is extremely fast. The UI is very responsive, feels like it was tailored specifically for speed animating.

But you're right, all the solutions are far from perfect, and there's something about them that feels like they've been made in isolation. They could learn a lot from applications such as Motionbuilder. But they're also mostly being written by a single person, and the price is too low/market too small, so that kind of conceptual reach is probably going to take a while.

A couple more things to keep an eye out for and look into when choosing: what kind of collision support do you need, animation blending, and will you need multi-atlas support.

 

Hmmm ok, but how is spine when it comes to getting them into unity, and are they easy to deal with from a programmers side of things? Snoothmoves has too many weird issues, and havent seen spriter for ages.

 

Code-side it's not too bad. It's not ground-breaking either. There are a few things in the docs which appear to be not quite up to date.. It seems you can usually get quite quick answers to questions in their forum, I've not had reason to go there yet...so be prepared for some initial head scratching.

Worth mentioning that they support 2D Toolkit for atlas building (Sprite Collection), which I prefer over re-exporting atlases from within Spine (and you get all the nice tk2d options to boot).

Best thing to do is go to their Runtimes git repo and take a look for yourself - the runtime's free to all and there're some sample files in there -- I think the tk2d one has an Event-driven C# animation control example.

I don't get along with Smooth Moves either. It's a great extension, just not to my tastes.

 

Seems i need to make u my buddy, beeing stuck with DM so long and its simple ways of things, im gonna scratch my head alot when it comes to spine it does look very solid tho and Søren sure puts out alot of good tutorials on it. Can we be skype animation bffs? im fast on the artside but learning these babies requires alot of coffee and broken furniture when i just dont get it!

 

Yeah I know how you feel - I'm still fudging my way through it myself, putting a list of questions together so I can get an all-in-one reply (Nate's hidden himself away for a few days). PM me your skype and I'll give you a shout when I get back home later today.

 

Hi,

I was also looking for a 2D skeletal animation tool, but I wanted it to fit easily in Unitys 2D workflow (since 4.3).

So I've developed my own solution- its called Puppet2D. It's loosely based on how Rigs are made in Maya.

Some of its features are:
- A fast bone creation tool
- Create controls to animate the bones, making a really easy to use puppet for animation.
-You can create IK controls (to keep feet on the ground and easy to animate with)
- You can convert your sprites to mesh and skin them to the bones

Its currently going through Unitys Approval process, heres the website if you want to know more

http://www.puppet2d.com/

Let me know what you think -

 

Wow!!
This is unexpected!!
I want to tell you "take my money right now!" ahah but I have to know more before.

Why you're not making a dedicated thread for it? How much is it ( since it's not one the market yet )?

The tools seem to be great and simple. The fact you're coming from Maya is great too.
Maybe some things need to be simplified though.

I've seen you can use the switch sprite thing and the hierarchical animation too, right?
How far can we use this? What if we have a skinned texture ( sprite ) that we want to switch?

Do you plan to add a FFD system to animate?

How are the perf ? have you run some tests?

Do you think it's possible to "easily" export the animation infos ( I mean if we want to create an exporter, do we have access to all the informations? ) ?


Anyways, Great job !

 

At the end of the week I'm getting hold of the Reallusion Animator 2 pipeline which I hope to combine with Autodesk Scaleform to allow me a few more options when it comes to my 2D work. This suits my purposes but probably not many others still I thought I would throw it in the mix as an option to consider.

 

That's the plan - I wasn't sure whether to make it before or after its release

$30, I'll see how that goes

Please let me know where I can improve it. I'm a technical artist, so I'm really into making easy to use tools, that are intuitive for artists (as well as devs of course)

Currently as you've noticed - only sprites can be switched not meshes. This is definitely something I want to work on in future releases

That would be amazing! I'd love to get that into the tool if I get a chance.

I've had over a hundred animated characters running without a drop in framerate - but I should do some more detailed mobile tests to answer that better. Skinned meshes will add overhead as they don't batch in unity as far as I am aware (so each character will be a draw call)

There's nothing hidden away in dlls - so it should be easy to work with.

 

Just to let you know Puppet2D is out!

Check it out here:

http://u3d.as/content/puppetman/puppet2d/6cf

 

Hello there!
Just wanted to let you know there is a new advanced 2D Skeletal Mesh Animation Tool in town that will be released soon!

It is called Creature and does skeletal animation as well as highly advanced mesh deformation together with a very capable dynamics engine built in (for automated animation of cloth, hair, walk cycles, soft body and more!)



Website:
http://creature.kestrelmoon.com

Check out the discussion thread here:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/cr...etal-mesh-and-dynamics-animation-tool.299801/

 

@kestrelm looks very impressive! Went to try it out and found that it is Mac only. Do you have a Win version planned?

 

@zendorf Thanks for your interest in the app! The windows version is right now currently in development (coding as I speak!) Rest assured, the windows port will be out soon Let me know if you have any more questions!
Also, which Windows version do you use? Win 8 or Win 7?

 

Sprites and bones is a pretty good plugin for this sort of stuff. It's available free here on the forum. Might check that out, but be sure to get the latest version which has links to the github near the last page of the thread.