Documentation - Click on the View Documentation link in the Package Manager.
Compatibility:
Animation V2 is designed to work with 2018.3 and is currently incompatible with any other version (this includes 2019.1).
The maximum supported version for Animation V1 is 2018.2. For future experimentation with this feature we highly recommend moving to 2018.3 to use Animation V2.
Upgrade Path:
Animation data from your V1 projects should work in Animation V2.
Please share your experience with the tools by replying to this post or creating a new one. How does this feature help you achieve your desired outcomes? What works as expected? And what doesn’t? We’re excited to hear back from you!
The PSB importer is very easy and save a lot of time compared to Anima2D
The new “Skinning Editor” Window is crystal clear for me! (i love the Preview Pose tab ^.^)
I have some request/questions:
Is it planned to rename bones in the “Reparent Bones” tab or in another bone list system?
Can we have an option to import PSB layers by order instead of name?
In a previews post (V1 forum), it was mentioned than 2D skeletal Animation package will be compatible with Anima2D Spritemeshes… Any idea how to do it? Or any new about this subject?
(And the more essential for me!) Is it possible to batch multiple spritemeshes? Actually it seams like no. When the Sprite Skin Script is enable Unity won’t batch Sprite meshes between them. Any suggestion? Or is it planned in a next update?
The PSB file format requirement effectively prevents me from using v2. The doc says that’s a “current” requirement, so I’m hoping it doesn’t stay current for long. Very disappointing.
After 3 days of testing, some new problems/errors occured for me.
-The copy/paste tool for geometry wont work.
it return the wollowing error:
“Unable to convert copied data to Skinning Module paste data.
UnityEditor.EditorApplication:Internal_CallGlobalEventHandler()”
-Sometime, PSB files return 8BIM/8B64 error with no reason.
All my layers are in a “Standard” Blend mode & No Effects/Mask on it.
Only way found to fix it is to create a new file and copy/paste all the layers in it.
i’ve search in file data a whole day but don’t find what was causing the error.
-No possibility to use a sprite create directly in unity with the Sprite Editor.
the PSB Importer don’t regognize it.
This sprite while be delete with a reslice or can’t be use to create a sprite mesh.
Resulting new layers in the PSB file to create new parts, and more sprites in the atlas.
-Options for atlas in the PSB Importer.
Talking about the automatic atlas generatie by the PSB importer, is it possible to include the sprite mesh in the sprite position calculation? or use the custom Outline? I don’t know, but right now, a lot of space is loose in the atlas for no reason.
Possibility to have an option for the automatic PSB atlas? Like padding scale etc?
-The Orange outline From Hell!!!
And plz, for the love of mankind, make an option for setup/discard the ugly orange outline into the Geometry Tab!
It cause a lot of pain to work with precision. (Edit: Settings/2D/Animation/Sprite Outline Size)
Must go now, thanks to reading my lamentations.
Hope they will help you.
Is there any plans to support another file formats like PSD or a similar format but open source? Having only the PSB option is a little bit disappointing.
-No possibility to use a sprite create directly in unity with the Sprite Editor.
the PSB Importer don’t regognize it.
This sprite while be delete with a reslice or can’t be use to create a sprite mesh.
Resulting new layers in the PSB file to create new parts, and more sprites in the atlas.
[/quote]
example from developers - meshes from single PNG-file
/or maybe I misunderstood You/
Thanks for helping me with the outline! I hadn’t thought about looking in the settings! My bad -_-
For those who search this specific option, it is here “Preferences/2D/Animation/Sprite Outline Size”
And for the impossibility to use sprite with the sprite Editor, I misspoke, sorry.
I can’t use a sprite create directly in unity with the sprite editor when i used a PSB multisprite file.
The PSD importer don’t understand and ignore it or delete it.
No problem with a single sprite.
Thanks for the tip of renaming the psd, but it didn’t worked for me I guess it can be because I export my psds from Gimp or Krita, not Ps, and when I try to rename them Unity just doesn’t recognise the files.
I hope they add support for other formats in the future, I don’t think is good to force people to use Ps for this
Do you plan to add 2D avatar body mask? …and maybe mecanim muscles system(for good IK)? Override and Weight in Animator Layers is not enough to control a realistic animations.
I have a very strange problem. I created everything and my sprite is ready.
But when I try to edit it again, it does not show any bones (Create Bone is Selected), so I cannot edit it… But if I click a lot, eventually my bones will reappear and then everything will work as expected.
Am I missing something? Is there a shortcut to make the bones reappear when editing? It was working fine before version 2.0.
Edit: I found the reason, you have to select the right thing on project view to edit the bones :
hi! Great work on this asset so far! i really love it. i have some confusion as to the most efficient way to set up my sprites and bones for individual animations. i think these are mostly variations of the same question but ill be detailed for the sake of in the event they are all solved differently. yes im a noob so please handle me with pink gloves. my current questions are:
1-what is the proper work flow for having the skeleton swap sprites in mid animation?
eg. i want the arms sprite to change when it reaches a certain angle, then change back at another but the rest of the body to stay the same during a run sequence. Should i: be importing the other arm angles on the same sprite sheet and just turning on or off visibility during the animation?
2-What is the proper work flow for swapping the entire sprite set on the skeleton when switching between animations?
eg. I want that the sprites for the character are completely different during the jump animation than the run animation. should i: again have all the separate jump sprites on the same sprite sheet as the run sprite sheet and use the same skeleton just having all visibility for running turned off and turning on jump visibility when jump is activated? or should i use an entirely different skeleton and sprite sheet for the jump animation?
my character is rather complex and there are a lot of different animation angles so i would need to frequently swap a lot of sprites for different animations. when i tried importing all the spite combinations in one shot, its a lot of sorting through. is that the way im supposed to do it?
3-if a character picks up equipment that changes only a small part visually of the overall sprite while equiped … again should i have this on the same sprite sheet? or use separate png and add to the existing animation and character sprite (also i dont know how i would do that lol)
I’m gearing up to work on a new game and exploring workflow options, and I really want to use these skeletal/psb import packages in production. They already do some fantastic stuff, but it (and animation/sprites in general) have some quirks that might keep me from being able to use them. If any refinements to the workflow/features are on the roadmap for the next couple months, I’d love to be a part of testing them and providing feedback.
Edit: My first comment/feature request I realized is already present in the form of sorting groups. I feel like quite the bonehead for not knowing these have been an option since 5.6! I’m so used to rolling my own solution for stuff, I sometimes forget to check what Unity has already added.
Second, a clean way to swap a character to an entirely different set of sprites (for different poses) is something I’ll need. I see one simple way to do it now, but I’m not sure this is efficient. I’m planning that each pose for a character will be parented to a root gameobject, my Animator component will be on that root gameobject, and I’ll just animate the active state of the children to toggle on/off the needed poses. Related to this: the .PSD importer doesn’t let you place the resulting sprites in an atlas of your choice - it makes a new, separate one for each .PSD. If I want to have different poses for one character, that either necessitates that each pose is its own atlas (not the end of the world, but a bit wasteful), or I put all of the poses in a single .PSD, which really isn’t practical. I hope it’s planned to have the packing tag be respected with this new system.
Lastly, something jumped out at me related to the animation process in Unity. This isn’t a 2D specific issue, but just a general animation workflow issue from the perspective of an animator of 15 years or so. As a maya user, I’m used to being able to select an object in my scene view to bring up its animation curves in the graph editor. Want to adjust the wrist rotation? Click the hand, and only it’s curves show up in the graph editor. Unless I’m mistaken, Unity’s animation window can only focus on the curves for an object that you click on in the object list within the animation editor, rather than in the scene view. This is fine for simple hierarchies, but I’m a little concerned about this when I’m getting into characters with large amounts of bones.
Really looking forward to what improvements are on the horizon for these packages, and sprite animation in general.
Sorry about the delayed response. (It seems my entire team has gone into the festive mode). I’ll try to answer as many as I can. Again apologies.
I’ll address this one first. Here’s the back story: Right now, we in the midst of re-engineering the internals on how we deal with assets and importers and their respective lifecycle. One of the things we want to address is to have the flexibility to let the user pick which importer to handle a specific file format. But that work is extremely complex. Therefore it will take a bit more time. Until then, any files with extension “.psd” will be handled by the TextureImporter. Therefore we had to elect another file extension to trigger the new PSDImporter. We named this new package as PSDImporter because we fully intend to be able to import PSD. But until the internal upgrades are done we can’t do that yet. So in short, rename your .psd to .psb to use the new feature. Please stay with us a little while longer.
Performance in general: Here’s another backstory: As you may know about the work with ECS in Unity. Basically it makes things go many times faster. Wrt 2D Animation, we too have an ECS powered deformer. We hope to ship that in the next cycle. It is 1-2 order magnitude faster that the current performance. However the ECS work is still evolving rapidly therefore it will take a bit of time to stabilize it. When this ECS deformer is done, we hope it will be the fastest (deforming) in the industry and the sprites are also batch-able (fast rendering)
I don’t remember this. Let’s clarify. We will not invest in Anima2D beyond critical bug fixes (and for a limited amount of time). so it is unlikely we will make this somehow work with Anima2D. However, there are APIs available to access the mesh information. With elbow grease I can imagine how someone (not us) could do this.
Switching sprites in clips, reskining entire character and other related ones: We are working on the UX around this. It is quite involved. Especially with the new Nested Prefab workflow that just launched. We don’t want to be a bespoke nested-prefab like workflow. So we want to make sure whatever we do we are properly using nested-prefab properly. Also it involves a lot of UX in the animation/keyframing side of things, which I will discuss with my peers in that area. Thanks for pushing in this direction. It gives us clear data on where we should focus on.
We’ll debug this. Thanks. Please file as many bug report as you can. It helps.
This has to do with the animation system. As long as the bones are name compatible (same name, same hierarchy structure), the clips will work. Will it look correct that then depends on more stuff (skinning, bone distances etc)
The atlas in generated by the PSDImporter is not meant to be the final atlas to use. Please consider packing the sprites into their actual SpriteAtlas to make sure that the texture usage is optimal.
You mean, you can’t define a new sprite in the SpriteEditor, let us try to repro. Or you could send us a case. Stay tuned.
We thought many times about this. It’s just not possible due to the non-humanoid form. Without freeform avatar, it is quite hopeless to super impose a t-form onto a 2D character.
Do you have a visual reference on what you are trying to achieve?
Yes, definitely. That’s the final piece of the puzzle. I’ll share when we know more.
Yes, the selection UX is very complex. We will be refining it with the help of your feedback. please send us more of your experiences.
this is something that we are very interested in. Please give us more time to work on this. Thanks.
I will monitor this thread during the holidays. Happy holidays and keep the comments coming.
Thanks for contributing, ColossalPaul! I didn’t expect a Unity response over the holidays.
As I’ve been working with more “real” files instead of just simple tests, I have a comment regarding the PSD importer - it should probably show a progress bar or something so that you can see how it’s progressing through larger files. I fed it a 30-40 layer 2k texture and it takes quite a while to import, in fact it seemed to crash until I told the import settings to downsample to 1k, but it’s possible it was just taking several minutes.
Thanks for the replies! Unity sucessfully imported a psd file with layers generated in GIMP after I renamed it to psb as directed. It does grumble though. This message (one for each layer, for each event) appears a lot:
[quote=“KhyC, post:5, topic: 725306, username:KhyC”]
I guess it can be because I export my psds from Gimp or Krita, not Ps, and when I try to rename them Unity just doesn’t recognise the files.
