Smooth Moves - 2D Skeletal Animation

Not in the near future. I have a significant client base still using this version (mostly because of the cost to upgrade to 4.x pro, along with the cost of each pro addon). I believe Unity has something in the works to allow multiple choice when downloading an asset. If they do implement that, then I could branch my code and let users select the version they want based on their Unity version.

I haven't seen this before. I use SmoothMoves in Unity 4.3 in my own projects. If you want, you can send me your invoice number you received when you purchased the plugin and an example project demonstrating the issue. For more info, have a look here:

http://www.echo17.com/forum/index.php?topic=247.msg800#msg800

 

I appreciate the offer, but we're now switching to Sprites and Bones since it integrates with Mecanim and works with our existing 2D toolkit workflow.

 

Hi eco17.
Any plan to implement a tool to export animations created in Smooth Moves to Unity Animation?
Or any idea how to export Smooth Moves animations to Unity?

Thanks.

 

SmoothMoves already exports animation files within Unity using the legacy system. If you are asking about Mecanim enabled animations, see a couple posts above.

I'm not really familiar with Unity's new animation structure, so I can't give any good advice on how to create it. However, SmoothMoves comes with the full runtime and build source, so you can dig through the BuildHelper.cs class in the SmoothMoves_Build project. This is what creates all the mesh structures. You might also need to modify BoneAnimation.cs in the SmoothMoves_Runtime project to use what you built.

 

Nice, after reading all the thread we figured out from where all our problems and bugs come from. So you just abandoned the 4.x unity user without any notice.

Yes, we leave this ship too, what a waste of time use your product.

 

Check out this awesome new game from the gurus at SGN. All animations were done with SmoothMoves!

Panda Pop
Website | Play on Facebook | iTunes | Google Play

 

Indeed, looks great, motion looks very smooth

BTW, is there an easy way to flip the whole model left/right ? Say i have created it looking right in the editor and want to have the same looking left

 

Take a look at this FAQ: http://www.echo17.com/forum/index.php?topic=247.msg381#msg381

 

Check out PNG recorder. It lets you take your 2D animations and export them as PNG sheets for traditional sprite animation:



Asset Store Link​

 

SmoothMoves will be on sale Tuesday, February 25th in Unity's 24 Hour Deal sale. Grab it while it's hot!



https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/2844​

 

I've decided to extend the sale on SmoothMoves for a bit longer. If there isn't much interest, I'll put it back to the regular price. Happy animating!



https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/2844​

 

Thanks for the shout out! I was amazed with what our artists were able to do with Smooth Moves. =)

 

Me too. I especially love the way the momma panda moves around. I couldn't tell that she was actually made up of individual textures, she moved so fluidly.

FYI, I am now addicted to your game, so thanks for that

 

SmoothMoves will be going back to its original price soon. I have submitted the change to Unity, so when it is approved, it will go off sale. Snatch it up while you can!

 

Check out Conquest of Champions, a new game by KihonGames. All animations were done with SmoothMoves!

Conquest of Champions
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Play Now!

 

Check out Ladybird - I'm ready to Spell, a new game by Penguin Books. All animations were done with SmoothMoves!

Ladybird - I'm ready to Spell
iTunes | Google Play

 

Hi guys,

Sorry echo17 if some questions of mine are repeated here, because are 81 pages to pass though. I'm considering to buy this asset so hard, maybe it completely fits my needs:

- Can I animate 2D and also 3D chars or only 2D?
- It uses skelenton tecniques for animations, so I can just change sprites and all animations continues to animate as well if the parts are similar?
- Is there some support to change easily sprites of animation on the fly?
- Can I export animation for spritesheet or do I need some external tool to accomplish that?
- Some promotion will be launching soon?

Thanks a lot for patience and keep it up!

 

SmoothMoves is just for 2D animations, but they can exist in a 3D world. Technically the animations are 3D, using a skinned mesh, but all the triangles are in the same plane so it makes them appear 2D.

Yep, you sure can. Take a look at this video:
(The process has improved since this was recorded. You can now set your pivot points in the atlas so you don't need to override them each time you swap out a texture.)

You can swap textures at runtime programmatically. Have a look at this video:

SmoothMoves doesn't have this functionality out of the box, but there is a plugin on the asset store that claims to do this. I haven't tried it myself, so I can't give a good review, but it is priced fairly, so you might want to take a look:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/13272

I just had a sale at the end of last month, so it will probably be a while until the next one. You can watch this thread, or the social media links in my signature for announcements like that.

 

Thank you for reply, your framework is really impressive and I want it. Soon I'll take it. Thanks!

 

Hey,
I'm working remotely on a project and we are considering SmoothMoves. However, since I'm working remotely, I really need to be able to export my animations as video to show to my managers. I looked through the user's manual but it doesn't seem like you can export the animations as video clips?
Please let me know if I have this wrong.
Thank you.

 

You might be able to use LiceCap to make an animated gif.

http://www.cockos.com/licecap/

 

Thank you, that looks pretty good.
Is there any guarantee of capturing the exact frame rate with something like LiceCap? If it lags, the animation wont be right.

 

Animated gifs are very much lo-fi.

You can up the frame rate, but at the cost of file size (probably doesn't matter these days). But you can't change the color depth.

There's probably something free and good-enough you could use, but there's always commercial apps like ScreenFlow (what I use) for tasks like this. Kids used to use Fraps to record games, but I don't know what they use nowadays. I'm old. Get off my lawn.

Good luck adventurer.

 

Thank you for all the info!

 

Have a problem that some texture on bones is invisible, seem it remain but cant see them.
I sometime close and open unity again or rebuild texture, which sometime can fix it, seem like depend on luck.


(All Armor parts and weapon are invisible)

can someone help on this situation?
thanks

 

finally, it back them self :'D

 

I also use ScreenFlow for my captures. That's what I used to record my video tutorials located here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/echo17software/playlists

 

SmoothMoves 2.4.1 Approved and in the Asset Store

Download here: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/2844

Be sure to back up your work and download the update into a new project. You can copy the code over into your current projects using your OS's file system to ensure no import errors occur. See this FAQ for more information on upgrading:

http://www.echo17.com/forum/index.php?topic=247.msg361#msg361

Check out this link for a complete list of changes:

http://www.echo17.com/forum/index.php?topic=2.0

FYI, you can follow these updates on my Facebook, Google+, and Twitter feeds as well (links in my signature)

 

First of all:
AMAZING ASSET!!

I'm creating a Castlevania 2D like Game with this - and the whole Character Animation.. from idle to Com o 14..etc.. visual equipment that moves perfectly. EASY AS HELL!!!
thanks for that!


Now a small question:

My characters are using two weapons at the same time. these weapons can be freely mixed.. so the left hand has another than the right.
Now i thought, using an atlas for each weapon. each atlas contains 2 sprites:
Weaponname_foregroundHand.png
Weaponname_backgroundHand.png

The background Hand sprite has an empty space in the grip part of the hand, so it looks like the character is holding it.

the question now is, how to change the weapon sprite when rotating from left-direction to the right. It would be strange to make the weapons flip hands when changing direction. So, the background weapon needs to be the foreground, and chane its sprite and atlas to the foreground one. Same reversed for the foreground handweapon.

Is there something like an array index in an atlas, that i can use to change from sprite 0=> 1 and vise versa?

 

Thanks for the kind words. Check out the TextureAtlas.cs script in the SmoothMoves_Runtime project of the included code. There are a number of arrays that contain texture names, guids, sizes, and pivot offsets. The arrays are all the same size with each element corresponding to the elements in the other arrays. So for instance, the third element of the textureNames array corresponds with the third element of the textureGUIDs array.

Alternatively, you could just keep your own array of weapons externally to the atlas somewhere in a data structure. For instance, always making the right hand weapon the first element of your array and the left hand weapon the second element, etc.

Hope this helps!

[EDIT]

For swapping, see this FAQ: http://www.echo17.com/forum/index.php?topic=247.msg373#msg373

[/EDIT]

 

Hey there. Been shopping around for a 2d skeletal animation asset and i think im pretty much decided on smooth moves. Was wondering if it would be possible to add specific colliders like this:



or would i need something like 2dcollider gen asset?

 

You can add as many colliders to your bones as you need. You just need to add one child bone for each collider. So, for example, if you had a body bone, you could add three child bones (each with their own collider): upper body, mid body, lower body. Or you could just have a single collider for each bone. In the example, a collider on the body bone without children.

You can add sphere or box colliders, but capsules are not supported. You can easily make multiple child bones, each with a sphere collider to achieve a similar result to a capsule collider.

I haven't used the 2d collider gen asset, other than downloading it and quickly testing it. I'm not sure what its capabilities are.

Also, keep in mind that colliders can be turned on and off at any point in the animation, so you probably only want them active when the relevant body part can attack. For instance, in your example gif, you would turn on the colliders at the end of the kick when the leg is able to do damage and have them off for most of the kick clip.

 

SmoothMoves is on sale for a limited time during Unity's Madness Sale. Grab it while it's hot!



https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/2844​

 

hey. in bone animation. is there an undo button?

 

Ctrl + Z on the keyboard will undo. If you are using Unity 4.3+, you'll need to import the editor update package located at "Assets/SmoothMoves/Editor/SmoothMoves/SmoothMoves_Editor_dll_after4.3.unitypackage". Unity changed the undo system in 4.3 so that is why the editor needs this update.

 

Ah ok. thanks. that worked. quick question... so in your chef animation you have "bounce" set to your base bone. I wanted to do something similar except I want the base bone to be at the center of my guy so that I can make my character do a flip by rotating it, but whenever I set the bone as base it puts it at my chracter's feet. Is there a way I could position the base bone properly?

 

I would start with the base bone's position, then move your child bones around it to their respective positions.

 

So to do this I would have had to position the bones onto the base bone? darnit lol. thanks tho. better sooner than later XP. thanks for the extremely fast replies btw.

 

Hi,

I'm relatively new to Unity, and very new to SmoothMoves. I'm using the latest version of Unity and it seems like a lot has changed in SmoothMoves so video tutorials are a tad confusing to me. I keep getting stuck on selecting an atlas for bone animations and even sprites. I've created an atlas using this video tutorial (Creating an Atlas)l: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y9MarYKrq8&list=UUssh6cY-TCCKc0IqgjRLyiA and it was great. But then I move on to this step (Creating an Animation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjB3_-qbmwY&list=UUssh6cY-TCCKc0IqgjRLyiA and when I get to the part to select an Atlas after changing the dropdown from Type: Transform Only to Image, nothing pops up for me. All that appears in the Atlas selection dropdown is "None" with a checkbox next to it.

Are atlases supposed to be saved in a specific location for the Animation Editor to properly find the Atlas I created? Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. This looks like a very promising tool.

 

Nope, you can save atlases anywhere in your project.

[EDIT]

I think I know what you are referring to. I used to have a drop-down list that let you select atlases that way. This caused problems with projects that had thousands of atlases (yep, those do exist ), making them go really slow. The newest version of SmoothMoves requires you to drag an atlas to the field in the editor, just like you would any Unity object in the inspector. This speeds up performance on larger projects.

Sorry for the confusion!

[/EDIT]

 

Thank you so much for your response. I tried to drag the atlas over to the animation editor, but it didn't seem to want to "stick" anywhere. To clarify, I'm to take the generated [ATLASNAME].png and drag it over to the animation editor? Specifically, the 'Atlas:' dropdown? There's also a blank box just below that dropdown that I tried clicking on - that revealed a "select texture" window - I tried dragging my atlas to that as well, but the editor just didn't want to accept the atlas. Let me know if I'm going about this all wrong

 

Sorry, I misspoke. The drag-drop change was on the BoneAnimationData selector in the BoneAnimation inspector, not the atlas. You should just be able to select the atlas from the dropdown.



It doesn't matter where you have your atlases in the project. Try opening the chef animation in the sample game that is included: "Rise of the Dough". Click on the first frame of one of the bones and your should see the atlases in the atlas selector.

Just curious, are you creating SmoothMoves atlases, or Unity atlases? SmoothMoves needs atlases in its own format in order to see them. I will probably have to take a look at your project if you still cannot see the atlases. Please see this FAQ for more info:

http://www.echo17.com/forum/index.php?topic=247.msg800#msg800

 

What is the best way to transfer an animation clip?

Me and my friend wants to work on same bone animation together. He's doing one animation for the same bone animation while i work on a different aniamtion. Whats the best way to merge our work when we're done? And is there any major thing to look out for to make sure the merge happens cleanly.

 

Here's a FAQ that might guide you in the right direction, especially if you are code savvy:

http://www.echo17.com/forum/index.php?topic=247.msg564#msg564

It shows how to copy keyframe data from one clip to another. You can probably modify and extend it to fit your workflow needs.

 

Hello, can you change easing(like tween quint-in, elastic-inout etc) between keyframes in Smooth Moves when using bone animation editor?

 

There aren't any preset curve functions, but you can adjust the animation curves on the properties: position, rotation, scale, image scale, and colors using the curve editor. Just click on the curve icon next to the property you want to adjust for each bone. Have a look at this tutorial video (about 4:30 into it):

 

I knew SmoothMoves would never miss such a feature Thanks!

 

Is there a shader which can receive lighting (preferably also casting shadow) for Bone Animated objects? Can anyone share shader if you have?

 

Have a look at this post: http://www.echo17.com/forum/index.php?topic=344.msg754#msg754

 

Just tried SmoothMoves for a new project I'm about to begin. I had a number of performance and loading time issues with previous versions of SmoothMoves, which made me rewrite major parts of it.

When I read "- Complete restructuring of how bone animations are built. Shifted most of the work to the Unity editor instead of at runtime on the device. This shortens load time and improves memory usage." in the release notes, I hoped these might be solved.

I did a small test. I created a new scene with 10 chefs (from the example in SmoothMoves).

In an iPad 3 the scene loaded fairly quickly (around 8 seconds). In an iPhone 4 it took 1 minute and 40 seconds...

I took a look at the code, and you're still doing a substantial amount of work at runtime, which could be easily done in the editor and then just loaded when running (which would cut loading times an order of magnitude). Do you have any plans to do this?