2D animation-compatible figures?

Unity Engine
1

I want to animate 2D figures — polygons would do, but figures composed of bezier curves would be even better.

By “animate” I mean that I’d like to drag the vertices or control points around in the scene editor, record an animation frame, and repeat. So when I play the animation, the shape morphs and wiggles around.

Is there such a thing available in Unity?

Thanks,

  • Joe
2

don’t think you can do that in unity…but you can in flash and save the sequence then bring into unity

3

Hmm, well that’s disappointing. But Unity is generally quite extensible — I could probably add something like this, with a combination of runtime and editor scripts.

Would anyone else here be interested in polygons, lines, and other 2D figures that can be animated via the Animation window? Or is it just me?

(Trying to decide whether to polish it up and share it, or just hack out something for my own needs.)

4

There’s probably a market for it considering there are standalone apps to do that very thing.

For example, a few weeks or so back I was researching all over the Internet looking for a an easier way to do animations of 2D objects. I was tired of spending the time using the onion skin approach. Sure that helps being able to see the previous frame but still a lot of work… so I ended up buying Anime Studio Debut 10.

It’s excellent and you use splines and points just as you are talking about. After creating an animation sequence I render the frames out to png files.

5

Thanks for that pointer; I’m evaluating Anime Studio now. For my current project, I think it will be just the thing. It’s certainly not a perfect app, but it’s darn good.

6

Here is a free plugins just to do that:

7

I don’t think that’s the same thing — it looks like it’s bone-based animation of multi-part sprite images, which you can do without a plugin nowadays (I saw this demonstrated at Unite 2014 a couple weeks ago).

But what I’m after is polygons and bezier curves… from a quick read-through of that thread, it doesn’t sound like that plugin does that any more than Unity does. But please correct me if I’ve missed something!