Puppet2D - An advanced skeletal animation tool

Hey !

After sending my character ( sliced parts ) and created guides for auto rig i get odd effect .. anybody know what i am doing wrong ?

 

Trying to set it manually conflicts with IK code. You should be able to flip it by setting the Flip true or false.
Make sure you haven't also animated the global_CTRL scale or rotation

 

Hey Jamie,

I'm using unity 5.5.0f3. Why I can't use the paint weight feature? I try using the demo scene but that doesn't work either. It work well before, but now I can't use it. I have click the paint weight button but nothing happen. Is there something that I should do?

Updated:
I have try to make another project using unity 5.5.0f3. It's a blank project with only puppet2d plugin, but the paint weight still not working using the demo that you've provide. I've update to the newest puppet2d update.

 

Hi - I'm just trying it on 5.5.0f3, and its working fine for me - are you able to make me a video showing the error your getting? (Also are there any console errors?)

 

Hello

I have copied and pasted a spritesheet, trimmed and added the sames names for the parts.

Is there any way to change the whole spritesheet in run time, keeping the sames animations?

Thanks!

 

It also work fine before, but I think there is a problem after the windows 10 update. There is no error in the console too. I'll try to record the screen

Here is the video

 

You need to select a skinned mesh and click paint weights. (You selected a control in that video - it only works on skinned meshes, FFD meshes dont work with paint weights either)

 

Yes, how to do this depends on whether you are parenting sprites, skinning meshes or using FFDs:

1. Parented Sprites
These can easily be swapped using:

Code (CSharp):

1. GetComponent<SpriteRenderer>().sprite = newSprite;

2. Skinned Meshes
These can be swapped either by skinning both to the same bones and toggling enable on their skinnedMeshRenderer components, or if they share the exact same texture UV space you can make a separate material with the new texture and swap the material by:

Code (CSharp):

1. GetComponent<SkinnedMeshRenderer>().sharedMaterial = newMaterial;

3. FFDs
These can be treated like Skinned Meshes, or you can embed other meshes into the same FFD controls. (Saving having to remake the FFD everytime. This is done by converting the new sprite to a mesh, selecting it with the existing FFD controls, setting the skinning settings to 4(FFD) and click Bind Smooth Skin. This will embed the new sprite into the same FFD controls.

 

Oh yeah, it worked. Thank you.
Great asset you have

 

Is visual item swapping built in or do you have to code it manually (I already have Inventory Pro to handle the inventory and equip side of things but wondering if it's easy to turn layers on and off for each limb separately -including the base layer).

If it's built in does it keep all item graphics loaded at runtime or just the ones currently shown?
Or can we define a list of what's currently in the inventory and just keep those ones loaded for fast swapping? eg. slow swapping for armor (graphic loaded on request), but fast swapping for weapons equipped (such as large, small and thrown weapons that won't be displayed at the same time but can be swapped between with a button press - so we want to keep them all in memory to avoid lag and unresponsiveness)

Also (for a side-on 2D or 2.5D game with flat sprite graphics), if I use 3D animation data will the z component just be ignored, while still matching the x/y targets, or will I have to manually squash down all of the z values to 0?
(there is a ton of 3D animation data available and some assets rely on it also, compared to 2D animation data of which there is none)

[EDIT: I've purchased the asset and will give it a try. I'm guessing the dev is on holiday as he seems pretty active at other times]

 

Its not built in, but sprites are simple to swap.
Skinned meshes can also be swapped - one way to do it is make sure the differnet pieces share the same UVs and texture space and then you can swap the material.

You can't use 3d animation on it yet (Its a feature I would love to add). But using Autorig you can auomatically add this animation pack: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/77728

I plan on making more of these

Really sorry - I missed the email notification. Hope you enjoy using Puppet2d

 

Hi

I love the potential of this tool. I have run into a problem (probably easily solved).


I have my tpose character. I autorig and set the guides then hit auto rig and it runs for a bit then the editor throws an error

IndexOutOfRangeException: Array index is out of range

The image is imported as a sprite that is square and I have minmaps turned off.

I have tried it with a npot image and it passed however the sprite does not morph into the skeleton it just stays rigid. I am going through your documents and there does not appear to be anything special i need to do with the sprite?

Please help.

Regards

 

Solved it! I was using 16bits!

 

First off let me say that Puppet2D is fantastic.
Previously for sprites I had my own shader that would render backfaces and flip normals when characters walked the other way but your flipping method seems superior (backfaces not rendered at all even when flipped and normals are always correct - meaning I can use any shader).

There is only one problem.
The light from point lights still lights pixels that are behind other objects..
eg. when the arm is behind the body it is obscured and any directional or ambient lights what would normally light those pixels are of course not written to the screen. Strangely, though, any point lights still light those pixels creating an xray effect.

Now this is a cool effect that I might like to use someday, don't get me wrong. But for regular rendering I would like of obscured objects didn't light up from point lights.

In this image I'm using the standard shader with a green point light. You can see the green light from the arm shines through the body (and the green light from the leg shines through the hand), but directional and ambient lights are correctly obscured. Also there appears to be some squashed diagonal areas behind the chest/shoulder.
Switching to other shaders such as my custom cartoon/celshading one makes no difference - the problem seems to lie somewhere in the sorting layers or z-sorting in the Puppet code or Skeleton mesh..



So I tried with a different mesh that had built in z-layers.
All seemed well initially with a toon shader with normal flip disabled:


But upon hitting play some objects become disjointed and start folding, causing similar lighting artefacts to the skeleton's shoulders:

As you can see the parts on seperate z-layers have correct lighting but parts that are part of the same mesh and fold over/under cause lighting issues and also become disjointed or act strangely.

Here he is with the standard shader:

 

How to use it with unity. I know it is an extension editor for unity. But, how to get the animation back to unity.

And also I usually make png images (sequences) and import that into unity, I am comfortable with that method, so PNG sequence export available??

Looking great btw.

 

It looks like the issue you are getting is when the mesh folds over itself - the shader you are using doesn't sort well. I'm not sure of a fix for this - other than making sure you paint the weights better so it doesn't ever fold into itself (the puppetman demo characters weights weren't perfect in those areas, as you couldnt tell when it was an unlit texture)

 

Yup there is a PNG export - but I would definitely recommend using it either as is or baking it to bones - as this greatly reduces the memory the animations take up.

 

Hey, I just got this great package! I've been looking at ways of controlling the IK in code. Would something like Ooti Bone Controller work with Puppet2D?

 

Not sure about Ooti bone controller - most likely its for 3D.

Puppet2D IK controls are gameObjects that you can manipulate in code btw

 

Whenever we autorig a character Unity freezes and never comes back, we have not been able to autorig a character without unity freezing and have left the application for a good 30 minutes to confirm it is indeed a freeze and not just taking a long time.

Lightweight barebones project with no editor scripts in, working offline with no collaborate, would greatly appreciate any help you can give on the matter!

Tried in 5.5.2 and 5.6.0b10 and both have the same issues.

If we can get past this issue then we will purchase the animation pack you have going, we were about to when we were halted by the error.

 

What are the size of your textures when you click autorig? I recommend reducing them to 1024 or even lower, this is because autorig uses a heat map algorithm that loops through pixels.
Also if you have once created a mesh for that bodypart it will ask you if you want to overwrite it. Make sure you arent missing that dialogue box.

 

Thanks for the quick reply. We were indeed using 4k images (many body parts too). For now we have tried to use a single image instead of many parts and are attempting to rig using that.

However, we have a different issue now. We cannot get the autorig (or normal rig for that matter) to create a stable rig.

Here is a picture of the autorig process:



And here is a picture of the resulting rig and its issues:



And here is a picture of the artifacts created when trying to move the resulting rig:



This picture is us trying to move the other arm:



Overall the rig is completely unusable and we are struggling to work out what we need to do to get the software to work as intended. Any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated!

Here is one final pic of what the stock idle animation looks like with this character rigged:



We have tried rigging the character in every way imaginable, moving the guides, rigging ourself, but every time we get these sharp artifacts and weird warping issues to the character.

Thanks in advance for any help you or anyone else can provide.

 

Just thought I would add that we have tried to reduce the size of the image as well as eliminate any extra alpha space around the image, and this does not stop the problem from happening.

 

heres some general pointers:

- make sure your textures are square and power of 2 with mipmapping turned off

- i would definitely recommend splitting up the character for best results. Use a single sprite to make the rig, delete it and then skin the new bodyparts to the bones.

- if u use the heatmap method, you can reduce the size of the texture just to do the rigging and then increase it afterwards. Autorig uses heatmapping so definitely reduce the texture size to speed up the initial rig creatiom step. You can do this in unitys texture settings.

I quickly tried out a split version of your character and I did mange to make this :

 

Hi. Today i buy puppet2d and last 3 hours try to create bones for my character... and can't =( I can create hip and couple of spine bones, but can't select parent bone to create bones for arms. Just can't select( I recorded my screen, search ynyK2CPix_w on youtube. What i doing wrong?

 

From your screen recording it looks like you're trying to insert a bone - (though this isn't actually necessary to create arms) - you should be able to do this by holding "Alt" and left clicking. (That should insert a bone).

 

Thanks for quick reply!
On your video

at 2:30 you select parent bone and after than create bones for arm, and these two bones are not connected. When I try to make bones for arms, they are obtained by connecting to the parent bone as on you last video. So how should it be right?

 

Thats an older version of Puppet2D. There should always be a joint between the shoulder bones and the spine bone. Joints are visual representations of the parenting hierarchy of the bones.

 

Working with this really great package for some time now. Works excellent!
Now I have some problems with meshes that have been converted with "Convert Sprite to Mesh" and which are then applied to bones with "Bind Smooth Skin". The GameObjects with the Skinned Mesh Renderer are being scaled in Unity! Everything works perfect for example on an iPad Air with 10.2 and on an iPhone6s (10.2)

But on an iPhone 5 (10.2) some meshes are corrupted.
I tried to get rid of a xcode-error that is only showing while building for this device: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1261739/extension-gl-ext-frag-depth-is-not-supported-in-xc.html.
i managed to get rid of it but meshes still are corrupted!

Is this something that is already known? Any clues in which direction i should investigate this problem?

Thanks in Advance

unity 5.5.1p1
puppet2d 3.0

 

Make sure your textures are:

• square
• power of 2
• mip mapping turned off

Also make sure there wasn't any scale on the sprite or its hierarchy when converted, and there was no pivot changes on the sprite.

Finally - there is a bug in Unity 5.5 that I have a fix being released where when you convert a sprite to mesh it changes the settings on the sprite.

 

Thanks jamieniman for your REALLY fast response and all your good work!
All characters looking good now on iPhone5 after i used the Sprite Packer in Unity to combine the Sprites to an Atlas.
Now there is another problem:
The individual sprites AND the atlas are showing up in the log while building the project! And this has an huge impact on memeory. Does this happen because i am using SpritePacker in Unity? Or because "Converted Sprite to Mesh" has been used before the Sprite was packed in an atlas? What could I do to have only the texture from the atlas in Memory and not the individual one?

And one more question: Why is the problem only occuring on iPhone5?

When will this be available?

 

Just found an old answer to a similar question: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/p...al-animation-tool.220203/page-15#post-1953909
- So it seems that one must reskin any meshes to the bones after the underlying texture-atlas changed?
- Is there another way to swap the texture with a new texture (now coming from an atlas) without reskinning?
- Do you have to reskin every time the atlas itself changes (optimized by texturePacker including new positions)?

 

Hey, I've just started using Puppet2D and I've been very impressed so far, but I've run into some issues with evenly painting weights across a generated mesh.

I can't seem to ever get a mesh to generate in a way that has nice, even topology for painting weights. The resulting meshes are always riddled with tris stretching vertically from one end of the sprite to the other, which results in messy and uneven deformation. Is there anyway to control the layout of the loops within the polygon 2d collider or generated mesh? I can't seem to reliably manipulate them by just adding new vertices.

 

I think i found a solution.
Problem: you have a mesh from a single sprite but want to use a Sprite (texture) for this mesh without reskinning to bones. So even if the atlas changes (repacking) the material is correctly.

Solution:

1. add the single sprite to an atlas (I am using Sprite packer https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/12976)
2. change the material of the skinned-mesh-renderer so it points to the sprite (texture) from the atlas
3. get the UVs from the wanted Sprite(texture) inside the atlas on awake and change offset and tile of the material to the corresponding values.

right now i am testing with this script and even if the atlas changes, it looks fine after everything has woken up.

Is this OK and a good idea or could it be done in a better way?

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. // the Sprite inside the Atlas
3. public Sprite sprite;
4.  
5.    void Awake () {
6.        #if UNITY_EDITOR
7.            Rect UVs = this.sprite.rect;
8.            UVs.x /= sprite.texture.width;
9.            UVs.width /= sprite.texture.width;
10.            UVs.y /= sprite.texture.height;
11.            UVs.height /= sprite.texture.height;
12.  
13.            Debug.Log (UVs);
14.            Material mat = this.GetComponent<Renderer> ().sharedMaterial;
15.            mat.SetTextureOffset("_MainTex", new Vector2(UVs.x,UVs.y));
16.            mat.SetTextureScale("_MainTex", new Vector2(UVs.width,UVs.height));
17.        #endif
18.    }
19.  

 

It would be better to write an editor script to change the UVs of each of the meshes - that way you will only have one material.

this is part of what you need (untested):

Code (CSharp):

1. SkinnedMeshRenderer smr = GetComponent<SkinnedMeshRenderer>();
2. Mesh mesh = smr.mesh;
3. Vector2[] uvs = mesh.uv;
4. for(int i=0;i<uvs.length;i++)
5. {
6. uvs[i] = uvs[i] +  offset;
7. }
8. mesh.uv = uvs;
9.  

 

Usually i find it helps to use the highest subdiv setting.
If you find thats not precise enough for you, then you use the FFD tool to create the vertices exactly how you want. Heres how a good way to do that -
1. First add the polygonCollider2D to your sprite to get the border how you want
2. Then select it and click Create FFD Tool.
3. Start drawing the inner points eactly where you want them (dont worrite about the white line - this only matters for the outer edge.
4. Press Enter to finish FFD
5. Select the Mesh and click Bind Smooth Skin to detach the skin from the FFD controls
6. Delete the FFD controls
7. Only skin the new mesh using Closest point skinning

Hope that helps

 

Its out now - Puppet2D v3.2

 

Hello! I'm really digging Puppet2d! Makes creating rigs easy and they also play consistent animations unlike when I tried to create animations using Unity's bone animation tutorial. I'm wondering if there are any best practices I should keep in mind when creating an animation controller for Puppet2d? One that I can already think of is when flipping the character you need to use the Flip option from the global control script, I'm just not sure how to call that in my characters movement script. Any tips would be greatly appreciated =)

 

A few things I found useful.

Naming Convention

• The "bones" you create with Puppet2D are actually joints. e.g. shoulder, elbow, wrist. Or hip, knee, ankle. The connecting bone" part is done by script, and your characer's sprites. Try to keep things consistent
  
• Naming the sides Left and Right can work, but since characters usually can flip, you may want to go with F (fore/ground) and B (back/ground). This keep things clear at all times. My naming convention is JNT_F_shoulder for the foreground shoulder joint. The sprite underneath it is then "SPR_F_arm". Once I saw it that way, things got a bit more intuitive.

The Controls

• Even though my project is adjused to be 1 unit = 1 meter, and as far as I can tell properly set up, the Puppet2D controls are always oversized and difficult to control with the size slider. I found that the imported "pixel per unit" settings of the Gizmo sprites is set oddly by default. Just increasing the number to something like 400 made the whole thing much more manageable.

 

Hello @Jamieniman

I have two bugs (current, v3.2) with FFDs.

Phantom Object
I created a flag and wanted to deform it using FFDs. Through use of undo, or something of that nature, the tool didn't keep track and unsuccesfully finished it. This would be no problem, as I could just start over. However, each subsequent attempts even if executed cleanly were somehow corrupted. The effect was this that I had my item and it worked, but no game object existed in the hierarchy, oddly enough. It seems the final step is always to force it under a Global_CTRL and this "corruption" along the way somehow disturbed the process.

Workaround/Fix: Today, I tried it again. While searching for the sprite to animate, I saw other mesh objects etc of the same name that were created that likely caused the problem. Since they are supposed to be created anew, I simply deleted them, and started fresh. This solved the issue.

Artefact
After drawing FFDs and hitting Finish FFD, a strange artefact is created near where the path is automatically closed. It's not a big issue for me, and will be obscured by the character, see attachment.

@wolfkillshepard
See some tips above:

I am using Playmaker to do this, and wrote an action (see there) for it. The Puppet2D people can offer it if they want, but you probably like to refine it. It does nothing but merely finds and access the global_CTL script, and flicks the Flip bool around, according to a variable from within Playmaker. You can steal the code from there. Since my logic is done in Playmaker, there is nothing else. You would need to write the logic for when the flipping is supposed to happen, e.g. if velocity < 0 then flip = true, else flip = false; or something like that.

 

something like this:

Code (CSharp):

1. GetComponent<Puppet2D_GlobalControl>().flip = true;

In terms of tips - there's a page on the puppet2d website that gives tips on performance:
http://www.puppet2d.com/performance-tips

 

If you come accross the issue again and managed to find steps to reproduce it, that would really help.

This is caused by the texture being to close to the edges of the UV bounds. Try to leave transparent space around the edge of your sprites texture.

 

Thanks so much for the help! Works perfectly

 

Thor_e Thanks so much for the info! I've already applied your best practice tips and they are certainly makings things organized and manageable.

 

One thing I've been thinking of tackling is 360 degree aiming, anyone try this yet? I'm thinking that in order to combine movement animations with aiming I'm going need to use animation blending however in terms of the actual aiming animation itself, I'm not sure if the best thing to do is to tie the IK handles to the mouse position or figure out some other method. I'm going to start experimenting to get this to work but if anyone has any tips in the meantime I'd certainly appreciate it =)

(one thing I tried was creating a separate rig of the character shouldering a weapon with his shoulder as the pivot point. Works great for a big portion of the aiming degrees but kind funky when aiming up or down. Will have to experiment till I figure out a way to fine tune the animations for some degrees).

 

Just loaded up Puppet2D and got the following error 5 times:

Assets/Puppet2D/Scripts/Puppet2D_BakeAnimation.cs(114,23): error CS1061: Type `AnimationEvent' does not contain a definition for `time' and no extension method `time' of type `AnimationEvent' could be found. Are you missing an assembly reference?

 

@jamieniman

Could you please add the ability to paint weights via colored pies like spine and dragonbones does? Currently the only feature that is stopping us from fully adopting puppet2D for long term use and purchasing multiple seats is the lack of this feature. The current weight painting is not very intuitive and does not carry over as a transferable skill to the other programs or from the other programs.

This mainly UI improvement would be fast for you to implement, and would make creating well-weighted rigs much easier. Right now we have migrated to dragonbones and anima2D instead, but would love to keep using Puppet2D due to your amazing support and the other good features.

I really hope you take on board this suggestion as i believe it will help a great many people.

 

What Unity version and Puppet2D version are you using?

 

Ill add it to my trello features request list.