Assets for 2D animation

News & General Discussion
1

Hy guys. wanna ask about 2D animation assets that you’ve bought.
FYI, I started learning unity this February.
In my current project (almost finished), I’m using unity’s built-in animation system, and at some points it starts to annoy me.
like when I first using it, after finishing all the prefabs, I can’t use the animation to another bcos of different hierarchy names,
or the animation gets error if there are 2 objects with same name.
I had about 50 enemies and did the animation 1 by 1 because of that.
Now I know a lot about animating and I feel like I was really stupid. :stuck_out_tongue:

before I know unity (it wasYoyogames’ GameMaker) I’m using Spriter and really like the bone-ing system.
So basically I just want to animate things easier with bone-ing,
I’ve set my eyes on these 3 assets anyway

Uni2D
actually I don’t really care about the custom physics engine etc. All I want is just the skeletal animation system.
It can make a Single sprite “bend” as you like (in the teaser vid). It’s just what I want.
like when you want to animate Flags, Hair, or idle-animation that will look more alive.
I would’ve bought this, but it only got 4stars rating and the review said something about incompatible with NGUI.
and about the developer’s slow response. I can’t find the patchnotes too. this worries me.

SmoothMoves
seems great with it’s 5stars rating and so many good reviews. When it say skeletal I thought it would be more less like Uni2D’s skeletal. but as I see in the screenshot I can’t find BONES in it. so what’s so major about this plugin?
and I don’t know too if it can “bend” sprites like Uni2D does.

Puppet2D
the price is really something compared 2 above. and in it’s demo video it kinda looks like Spriter.
maybe this is unity version of spriter. but there’s a review that lists many disadvantages of this asset.

maybe you can share your experience on each assets. or if theres a plugin thats better than Uni2D’s skeletal animation system.
I need to buy this as soon as my current project finish, about 2weeks ~ a month. Thanks a bunch :smile::smile:

2

Ive tried them all and funny enough, we have ended up using just unity for animations. We use 2dtk for levels and props and thats it.

I used Smoothmoves but its a nightmare for programmers because of some prefab crap, basicly theres alot,and i say ALOT, of rebuild animation everything u change something.

All skeletal assets like Puppet2d, Spriter etc etc is really overrated unless u really need to use them. Ive found that it depends on ur characters. If u have a giant boss, skeletal helps alot. If u have several small characters, Unity works just fine, and the beauty of it is, they work flalwlessly for programmers in put in the game. All these other assets provide some,if not a crapton, of problems sometimes to simply get working in the game.

So yeah, now we use Unity’s animation system thats actually really good, prefab them and we can swap gear or bodyparts easily and tweak them, without the hassle of rebuilding or having the programmer loose hair over some buggy thing that causes dvelopment to crawl for a couple of days.

The only negative is that each part needs to be moved individually ofcourse, u can parent lets say the foot to the leg, but i still gotta rotate it for itself. Takes alittle longer, but once u get a hang of it, its a breeze to work like this. I like the skeletal system in theory, but turned out, atleast for me, i really dont need that kind of structure inside my characters.

Maybe if i wanna do cloth and hair in 2d i’d wanna use something to help me out, like skinning meshes, but then again, u can always draw several frames to make hair and cloth move naturally:)

3

We use 2D Toolkit for most things because there’s a few outstanding problems with Unity animation:

  1. 2D toolkit appears to be faster than Animation and Mecanim
  2. Not able to swap a sprite with another sprite on same GameObject, ie collections, without it become quite unwieldy.
  3. Animating is weird for sprites - we also found we had to duplicate the last frame or it would take a shorter amount of time than the rest of the animation. Is this normal?

Overall the workflow feels like it’s bolted into the rest of Unity, and I understand that, it’s just ended up looking a bit sticky-out. It’s integration isn’t the best ever for some projects. On the flip side it has nice fill rate savings and such.

4

Wow thanks a lot man. looks like everyone recommends me 2DTK.
but as I surf around the site, I found that 2DTK is using frame-by-frame/spritesheet animation, which is really inconvenient to implement in gear-changing characters. that for each gear piece you have to create its own animation spritesheet (idle,walk,jump,attack,combos,skill,guard,dead,etc) am I right?
but as Kelde said that this thing is just for level designing, and the animation can still be done using unity’s built-in. I won’t note this as cons.
and for the UI, can I still use NGUI? I’ve used NGUI for 2 months and it’s now my best friend lol :stuck_out_tongue:
I’ve known almost anything about it. and if I have to learn 2DTK’s UI system wouldn’t it be time-consuming?

is “skinning meshes” is what Uni2D does in its skeletal animation? or can you do it wiithout any plugins? :face_with_spiral_eyes:

FYI, I don’t use any component contains “mesh” in my current project. or any 2d plugins.
it’s a left-right survival shooting, everything uses “Sprite Renderer” (environment and characters) and the floor and other limits using BoxCollider2D.
and for the next project we (3 of us) decided to make a 2D platformer, and I’ve found that 2DTK and Uni2D fits well to create that game.

I wanna hear about Uni2D so if anyone is using it please share :wink: