Referring to an animation software that I use (Moho), it has this cool feature, where you can generate a mesh on top of a Sprite. You can then keyframe all the mesh deformations and breathe life into an image.
I was wondering if Unity could get a keyframable Sprite mesh deformer like this as well? One could add this on top of a 2D rig and animate a rigged character with further mesh manipulation (like easier faking head turns etc).
This feature should be available for Timeline animation as well.
See paragraph “Quad meshes”:
Thank you for the feedback @herra_lehtiniemi
Great suggestion there. FFD (Free form deformation) is something we would like to add to our feature set, but we do not have any fixed date on when we could deliver this.
@Ted_Wikman Awesome! It would be nice to have this feature for rig animation but also as a separate tool for animating any Sprite. This way one could create generic animations for making movement on any possible sprite and make it move runtime.
Also - I don’t know what is possible in the machine learning front, but based on what I was in Unity video about machine learning in 3D objects, I would love to see some kind of auto-rigging-feature. Like giving the machine learning component any 2D sprite with transparent background (or remove the background with AI first), placing rewards and punishments for what is considered “good” movement" and let the rig learn to walk.
I remember this was already possible with 3D in Unity Machine learning, but maybe this could be applied to 2D as well? For example, auto-assigning a collider to opaque parts of an image and using this collider data to learn if the rig is moving “correct”, based on the rewards.
Eventually, one could just throw any drawing to the component and it would learn to move in some way without rigging. One could place higher targets to the movement “try to move like human”, “try to move like dog” etc which would basically be presets on rewards and punishments for the machine learning.
Not to replace rigging, but to complement it or be a quick way to get rudimentary movement to bulk enemies.