Question Some questions with 2D animation

Hi guys,
I got some questions for you, regarding graphic style and animations.

If you have played tank stars, you m8ght have seen those tanks look 3d with the way they turn around and move their top part in the garage although they are 2d sprites. I really wonder how the creators have achieved it. What I need to know is, how such kind of animations are made. How to make 2d assets look 3d. I also found about something called 2.5D so if you know about that too please help me by sharing. I would really thankful if you can help me with this.

There is a video, so you can have a better idea on what I said. If you noticed, the tank in the video is 2d but it shows 3d movement like turning around. What i want to know is how its done.

 

They use specialized software like Spine to achieve this: http://esotericsoftware.com/

There's a Unity asset called AnyPortrait that does the same thing, but much cheaper: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/animation/anyportrait-111584

AnyPortrait is going on sale soon too, if you want to wait a bit.

Spine is the closest thing to industry standard though, so if you're really serious about making this kind of animation, I'd probably go for that. It also has the benefit of working in various engines and even for 2D animation outside of games.

The way they achieve the 3D look is by creating a weighted mesh and warping the sprite. It's basically 3D animation, except for 2D sprites. Here's AnyPortrait's mesh building tutorial as an example:

This can be a very long and tedious process.

I personally use Unity's built in 2D Animation, here's a tutorial for that:

It's really easy to learn (way easier than Spine or AnyPortrait) and you can make stuff really quickly with it, but its' super buggy and is missing dozens of features Spine and AnyPortrait have. For example, you can't animate vertices without bones, so you'd need to add dozens of bones just to mimick a 3D look, whereas in Spine, there are ways of moving the vertices around without bones.

Unity's 2D bones are also incredibly bad for performance, so you need an extra package called "Collections" to get above 60 FPS. With Spine, you can export a 2D sprite sheet, which uses up much more memory, but way less processing power. It's not always better, but it's nice to have the option; especially if you want dozens, or hundreds of characters on screen at once.

People use 2.5D to mean different things. The most common meaning is a 2-Dimensional platformer made using 3D assets. An example would be New Super Mario Bros.

Another meaning would be something Like Paper Mario, where 2D sprites are used in a 3D environment.

It could also be a 2D game that allows the player to move between various 2D planes, giving the illusion of 3D.

People use it to mean different things all the time, and it doesn't really matter.

 

Thank you so much for the information, it really helped me to get a sense of direction. Wish you best of luck ....

 

My pleasure.

Also, just wanted to note that it's very possible that Tank Stars used something like Adobe After Effects or Adobe Animate for their animations. it's also possible they used their own in-house software. Most big studios have proprietary software for stuff like this.

The software I mentioned in my post is accessible to everyone (some of it for a price), and it's very easy to get working with Unity.

 

Thank you