I am beginning work on a 2D game and am curious about which route to take in regard to animation workflow. I have the full Adobe suite so can do my sprite art with Illustrator/Flash/Photoshop and then import spritesheets into Unity.
Alternately, I could create loose images like in the fun UFO/alien tutorial thingy the folks at Unity put out. Stylistic preferences aside, does anyone have any strong arguments for doing one over the other? I’d welcome all perspectives.
Depends on your target platform. If you’re going to target mobile, skeletal animation systems will save you a lot on texture memory and lets you easily reuse animations. The system we’re using at work is called Spine but if you don’t need meshes and deformations that Spine will be getting, you can do the same thing with the animation window in Unity 4.3.
I recently tried exporting some sprite sheets from Flash CS6 and then imported them into Unity, choosing to slice them automatically. Flash seems to change its mind whether each frame in the animation will appear from left to right or from top to bottom in the sprite sheet. Unity automatically numbers the sprites which can lead to a bit of confusion and animations looking a bit mental. The only work around I’ve found for this is to renumber each frame if frames go from top to bottom. Only started looking at this yesterday so there might be better options. What appealed to me about using Flash is Unity’s inability to separate PSD layers upon import, which Flash imports and lines up on the timeline with ease.
I use Photoshop for most of my work, apps, games, etc.
It works pretty well and I rarely need anything else.