Smooth Moves - 2D Skeletal Animation

Feedback is always welcome.

Thanks for the windows security tip!

[EDIT] I added this tip to my web page since I felt that was a great place for it to be. Thanks again! [/EDIT]

 

Just picked it up. I've been looking for something like this for a very long time. Thanks for this great looking tool!

 

You're most welcome. Happy animating!

 

Well,

I have an initial bit of feedback. I opened up the tutorial scene, but was unfortunately on a train, so wasn't able to access the tutorial videos yet. I generally like to dive in anyway, before reading manual/tutorials, and see how far I get.

And...

It was awesome. Quickly located the menus, worked out how to adjust the knight. I created my own animation, new keyframes, things moving/growing/shrinking, changed pivots, created bone hierarchies, sped up and slowed down animations. Gazed in wonder at the 10 or so lines it takes to move the animated knight around and trigger sounds etc. Quite easily found the curves screen for lines between keyframes. I'd say it was significantly easier to animate with this tool than, say, flash.

Overall I was able to work out the bulk of the functionality without once resorting to a manual. The animation setup screen is extremely intuitive and I am really happy with the purchase. I found myself getting annoyed that the knight didn't have more bones so I could do more outlandish animations (dance, polka) and am looking forward to getting my own art in there to play with.

Seriously usable and great fun, and from what I've seen of the API for using the resultant animations, slots in quite simply.

I think the only point on my wishlist would be to have an IK solver in the animation editor, because it would make it even easier to get those bones where you want them.

Fantastic work.

 

Thanks, runonthespot.

It's good to hear that you were able to figure out the editor without a manual. I put a lot of care into the design and layout, drawing from my experience with modeling and animation programs to blend together what I felt was the best of each. I wanted to streamline the process of getting my textures into a working animation without having to think about too many of the technical aspects.

The IK solver would certainly be a useful addition. I will add it to my list to ponder.

 

[SHAMELESS PLUG]

To all the Smooth Movers out there: If you like what you see in Smooth Moves, please drop a comment on the asset store feedback. More reviews generally equals more sales which means more justification for me to improve this tool. So far the overall reaction has been positive enough for me to focus on this tool almost exclusively. As interest wanes, I usually delve into my other brainchildren, but I really like working on this tool.

Thanks again for all the feedback and suggestions!

[/SHAMELESS PLUG]

 

Can you open atlas format? So the Smooth Movers will be adapted to the work with other sprite sheet tools.

 

If you mean make the code open source for the atlas, then I'm sorry, but I have to say no. One of the main reasons I chose to make this tool a compiled library is so that the scripts are guaranteed to work within the tool. I've found that opening up source can be a debugging nightmare since I'm not only supporting my own code, but any modifications that other people make. I've literally spent days hunting down a "bug" in one of my past projects, just to discover it was caused by a tweak that the user had performed, one that didn't play nice with my code.

The other reason I wouldn't want to try to conform to other sprite tools is that each has its own standard. I would have to constantly update my code to adapt to every change made by every sprite tool. I'd rather focus my time on improving Smooth Moves than making it work with other tools.

If there is a certain feature you would like to request, this is a great place to post your ideas and suggestions. If you just need help getting something to work, shoot me an email at support@echo17.com and I'll do my best to help you out.

 

Yet another 1.6 preview: Data Import Scale

You will now be able to scale your animation on import, just like you would an FBX file.

Adjusting the import scale allows you to conform your animation to the environment without having to use the gameObject's scale property. This can be especially helpful if your 2D animation is in a 3D world since the 2D scale is 1 texture pixel = 1 world unit, whereas your 3D world is probably much smaller. You can still use gameObject.localScale but this just simplifies the process if it is a global change.

​

 

Love the product and until today, everything has run smoothly. Yesterday, "Use Pivot" worked great, but when I opened my project this morning, clicked on the "Use Pivot" button, most of the toolbar was missing from the Pivot Editor and I get a string of console errors.

I'm not sure if this is SmoothMoves or Unity, but if you have any advice to fix, I could use it.

Here is the editor that I see:


Here are the errors I get when I open the editor:
http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/yy94/agf8623/EGM/smooth-moves-pivot-error.png

This happens for all scenes, including the tutorial scenes.

**UPDATE**
Looks like this is an initialization bug. Here's how to repo:
1. Open project.
2. In Hierarchy, click "Arena Background"
3. In Inspector, click "Use Pivot" button. Pivot window opens.
4. Note the errors and missing buttons.

To avoid bug, I did the following:
1. Open project
2. In Hierarchy, click "Arena Background" sprite
3. In the Inspector, click on the Arena image in Sprite (Script) section. Sprite window opens.
4. Selected the arena image and close.
5. In the Inspector, click "Use Pivot" button. Everything shows up normally in the Pivot Window.

 

Thanks Amaranth. Ironically I just saw the same error about an hour ago. I've got a fix in place and will ship it out with the next release (1.6). Thanks for the detailed explanation!

 

Welcome! I am absolutely LOVING your tool. I wish I'd known about it before I'd purchased some other more expensive products. Smooth Moves is way better!

 

Thanks for the kind words. Have fun animating!

 

hey echo,

absolutely loving smooth moves. everything is so intuitive! love the dynamic bone gizmo. love the atlas tool. well worth the asking price. i've left you some positive feedback on the asset store.

some suggestions (i'm using mac):
1. what's the correct way to select all keyframes in a column? i seem to only be able to do it by right-clicking the space above the column (which brings up a menu), then left clicking (which cancels the menu, but selects all keyframes). i would have thought double-clicking would make more sense.
2. selecting bones by clicking on the name seems the most useful method... but it always chooses the first frame, instead of the frame i'm currently working on. would be nice if there was at least an option to stay on the working frame.
3. i know you haven't set it up this way... but it would be nice to set pivots per texture. it seems if you do texture swapping you'll always need to set the pivot each time.
4. there's a weird bug when naming Animation Clips. i've tried to name one "HighKick_Start", and it keeps failing. it seems like... START and Start are protected? if so, i managed to trick it eventually .
5. is there a way to select multiple bones and move them all together?
6. a layout option with the timeline side-by-side with the main view would be nice. i have a high number of bones, but my poor macbook pro only has a screen height of 800, so it's hard for me to access all bones and see what i'm doing at the same time. not a big deal though.

here's my first rough animation... ever, i think.


(anyone know a good tool for capturing gif animations? i had to do this by hand in photoshop...)

 

Awesome, thanks!

This is a good idea, I'll put it on my list

So you're saying you click on the bone to jump to that bone on the current selected frame? That would make sense, but only if you have a single frame selected. If you have multiple selected, I guess it would just pick the first...I'll have to think on that one.

This might actually solve a thought I've been noodling on for a while: improving the texture swapping to be integrated with the editor. The pivots have been the sticking point since they might change in the animation. Unfortunately, changing that now would mess with everyone's animations, so I'd have to make it backward compatible. Another one to ponder...

I don't think that the word "Start" should matter. The only thing the editor won't let you do is have two animations with the same name (not case sensitive). The reason is that animations are referenced by name so they need to be unique.

Probably. I'll take a look at that...

I'll take a look at optional layouts, but I'm afraid that may be a little too much coding for an immediate solution.

That is totally awesome! I love it. Do you mind if I place this on the first post in my community projects section?

 

sure, go for it!

oh, one last thing - would be nice to be able to rename bones by double clicking or enter (on mac). again, a minor quibble.

 

Fantastic animation! Love it too.

 

Done!

I've been playing around with it for a few hours now. I'll post some animated samples when I get something decent done. Maybe it'll help sway someone still on the fence.

 

Done, thanks!

Actually, my first release did have the ability to rename bones and animations by double clicking on them. I was experiencing issues however when it would sometimes trap the double click when I only meant to click once. It was very annoying. I did put in a keyboard shortcut "R" to rename the currently selected bone in a previous release at the suggestion of one of the Smooth Movers. I can take a look at why the double click was misfiring so much, but hopefully the R shortcut will help out in the meantime.

 

That would be great! I love seeing what other people can do with Smooth Moves. I'm just a programmer, so my art skills don't do the tool justice.

 

kenwong's animation definitely swayed me, I'm buying this for sure shortly. I love the snap on the right hand in that animation btw!

 

Well don't loose your own interest too soon. I'm likely buyer but really want to see that some updates could be seen in future ... just watched all your Youtube-videos and I like really much what I see.... too bad I have already bought quite many products from Asset Store this month. Might be tempted to buy Smooth Moves next month. Keep developing it

 

Yeah, couple of more samples might sway me to brighter side of the fence... after seeing that knight in about 20 videos it'd be nice to see something else as well.... not to say there is anything wrong with the knight

 

Yeah, I meant to comment on that as well. That texture switch is a wonderful example of how traditional sprite animation can be played on top of bone animation.

 

No worries. I have plenty of features to work on, so Smooth Moves will continue to grow. Besides, it's a blast to develop.

 

I hear that I wish I had more time (and artistic skill) to work on showcase examples. I'm focusing on coding more features at the moment, but I'll try to get some art out there in the near future.

I appreciate the contributions of the community. If anyone else has something they'd like to show off, bring it on!

 

Working on one. I'll post it sometime next week.

 

Smooth Moves 1.6 is now available!

Overview of features:
- Keyframe color animation: Now you can set colors per keyframe and blend them with your bone and mesh colors.
- Mesh normals: You can now use lights with your animations.
- Import scale: You can set the scale of your mesh before it is created to conform to your environment size.
- Two new scenes to show off the colors and lights
- Lots of little features and a few bug fixes. The entire list can be found in the package's readme file.

Head on over to the asset store to pick up the update!

 

Great news- all features that I'm about to use.

 

Nice! I found this simple but fabulous tool for creating custum polygons for hit detection. Would love to see something like this in Smooth Moves. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qjevUHVnUCo

It's available in the Unity store.

 

Nifty!

Because I use quads for each bone and not arbitrary vertices, this would be a MAJOR rewrite. I'll have to shelve this idea for later pondering, but it most likely won't make it into Smooth Moves, sorry!

 

1st day I work with SmoothMoves and its great so far.

Few suggestions if I may:
1. Pivot Editor
Sometimes one may need to move pivot only in 1 axis. Similar to photoshop - when user holds SHIFT pivot is moving only in horizontal or vertical direction.

2. Detachable utilitie window
Ability to detach character preview tab - I want to put character preview panel to 2nd monitor and leave main window with timeline at 1st one.

Sorry if it was already answered - are you planning to add IK support somewhere in the future?

Oh, and it would be nice to be able to move a key. All transforms at once. At the moment I can only move position, rotation and scale keys separately.

 

Good idea, I'll try to incorporate that in the near future.

Not sure how feasible this would be. The layout of the editor sections are pretty static and would require quite a bit of recoding to make them dynamic. Also, I would have to keep multiple windows in sync which could get tricky. Is there any particular reason you need to split the panels up? I'm just asking in case there might be an easier solution to your end goal.

I have IK support on my list of something to look into. I honestly haven't looked at how complex this will be, but I definitely see it as a useful addition.

I agree about that. I am looking at some ways to slide keys around the timeline.

 

When character is complex and has a lot of bones I need to constantly scroll the bone-list. That is why I would like to have them separated - bone list and preview panel both as big as I want them to, up to a whole screen area each.

 

I see, that makes sense. I will add optional layouts to my list of things to look into. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

Smooth Moves 1.6.1 is now available

This was a quick fix for a bug that I caught too late to include in 1.6.0. Mainly this release fixes sprites crashing when instantiating from a prefab. You can find a detailed description of how prefab sprites work in the readme file.

I also rearranged all the menu items into a single "Smooth Moves" menu for quicker and simpler access.

 

woot thanks! if anyone can point me to an easy/free tool to capture screen -> gif, i'd be happy to share more.

echo: is there any way to play frame by frame, or a segment of an animation? i'm using smooth moves to create the tutorial window in my game, with each tutorial page being on one frame. i know i can implement it as one page per animation instead, which i'll do in the meantime, but you never know, those might be useful functions .

oh, one more thing. would be nice to cut/paste texture/pivot data as well as pos/rot/scale. otherwise i have to set up my texture switches again every time i adjust timing. speaking of which, inserting or deleting columns would be nice...

 

I love this extension! I agree with kenwong, a copy/paste feature for keyframes would be extremely useful! Also, I find myself wanting a separate panel for bones as well like dimwalker, especially if you're working lots of bones.

I'd like to add a request: the ability to control the visibility of bones and bone groups similar to photoshop/flash layer visibility. This would be super useful when you're previewing your animation but want to see isolated sections.

Thanks!

 

if you mean frame by frame in the editor, then you can just drag the timeline control where you want, or use the top buttons next to the play / stop button to advance one frame or go back a frame. If you mean play frame by frame in the scene, then not currently. I'm just creating a skinned mesh, so the final result has the play, crossfade, blend, etc. functions. Since there isn't really a concept of frames at the skinned mesh level, frame by frame probably wouldn't really work well in the scene editor.

I'm looking into a way for you to adjust which key properties are copied / pasted by the copy functionality. This should give you the flexibility that you would need.

 

I've got this one on my list. Visibility toggles would definitely be a useful addition.

 

I'm using a combination of Smooth Moves and PlayMaker. I've run into a problem. When I try to swap out one animation with a new one, I get an error that says the new animation doesn't exist.

Here is a screenshot of the problem:
http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/yy94/agf8623/smooth-moves-animation-error.jpg

In the screenshot, I'm attempting to swap the SlimeAlive with SlimeDead animation using the playMaker action called Smooth Moves_Play Animation. When I do this, I get this error:

The animation named [SlimeDead] does not exist
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
SmoothMoves.BoneAnimation:get_Item(String)
SmoothMoves_PlayAnimationoPlayAnimation() (at Assets/PlayMaker/Actions/3-SmoothMoves/SmoothMoves_PlayAnimation.cs:79)
SmoothMoves_PlayAnimation:OnEnter() (at Assets/PlayMaker/Actions/3-SmoothMoves/SmoothMoves_PlayAnimation.cs:51)
HutongGames.PlayMaker.FsmState:OnEnter()
HutongGames.PlayMaker.Fsm:EnterState(FsmState)
HutongGames.PlayMaker.Fsm:SwitchState(FsmState)

 

Awesome! I'll be on the lookout.

 

Can you send a screenshot of your animation list on the animation component of your smooth moves object? I believe the animation names are case sensitive, so that may be causing the problem. If you'd prefer your artwork to be anonymous, you can email me privately at:

support@echo17.com

 

I think I might know what is happening here. It looks like you are trying to play an animation by the bone animation name, not the animation clip name. When you call play, that is just like calling play on a skinned mesh animation where it references an animation clip within your animation. If you expand your animation component on the bone animation object you'll see the list of possible animation clips that you can play for that bone animation object.

if you are trying to play an animation on an entirely different bone animation, then you'll need to set up a separate gameobject with the other bone animation. Then you would disable one bone animation, enable the other, then call the appropriate animation clip in the new bone animation.

Hope this makes sense!

 

You're right! I haven't set up different sets of animations within an animation file. I'll test tomorrow and let you know how things go.

**UPDATE**
Yes, that was it! Thanks!

 

Excellent, good to hear it!

 

Hey, heads up echo17, your site is down!

 

Thanks for the heads up, yezzer!

Looks like iPage suspended my account due to too much activity! Guess if you are going to be suspended, that is the best reason

Sorry, folks, but I have to remove my mp4 tutorial files. I can still show the youtube videos, you just won't be able to download the HD versions of the tutorials anymore.

It may take iPage a while to get my site back online. I'll keep you up to date when it comes back up.

 

My website is back up...thanks for your patience

 

Sorry this is late. Was super busy last weekend and I completely forgot to post this here:

All animations done with Smooth Moves for our game Rival Threads: Last Class Heroes
https://www.facebook.com/atelier.kontrabida