I can’t imagine you were the ONLY one to have requested this feature…? Is the Unity community really that small still…?
You’d think the very soul of the company (the Unity Editor) would need some strong bones (animation/textures/worlds) to support the weight of all the meaty features afforded by its malleable interface and deep API.
Sad thing is, Unity boasts about its nifty graphics pipeline, and yet basic graphical stuff like this is still mysteriously MIA?
I apologize for beating a dead horse here, but I’m gonna do it just in case that one guyfromUnity Team is listening:
Framework stuff, like vertex animation, should have been simple to translate from 3D into 2D, as it should have been included in the 3D pipeline a long time ago.
@awesomedata Apologies, did not mean to overlook your post. As I had mentioned in my reply to another, we’re in prototyping stage but didn’t get into more details.
So here’s more info for all
2D Character rigging workflow will be focused in the Sprite Editor. This provides a smoother and neater workflow.
Create edit bones, hierarchy of bones.
Auto and manual mesh tessellation
Auto and manual vertex weight assignment
Free Form Deformation
Inverse Kinematics
We’re not ready to go into Experimental yet, but we’re working towards it.
Hi, could you be more specific? It doesn’t work for me either, what tag are you speaking about? GOs are untagged. Does it work for you in play mode? Atm looks broken in experimental.
Thanks for the heads up! – I’m very pleased to hear about the FFD implementation! –
One other question – Would we be able to also change meshes and parts with FFD in mid-animation, and return them to what they were when the loop transitioned back to the start frame?
Generally - work is well under way but is still awhile away before a preview. @Sylmerria - What performance issues are you currently facing with Anima2D?
@awesomedata - FFD will be one of the later features worked as we do want to concentrate on the core first. On you question, its something we are generally looking at, as it does relate to some rigging features but in terms of animation it is quite a difficult thing to tackle but definitely something on our radar. I have not see this really implemented even in rendering software yet. Have you seen it being used somewhere that works well?
@Johaness_Reuben – I know the following is a lot to read, but please, bear with me – I assure you it’s worth your while!
Check out “Unity Sprites and Bones” – it does this (in Unity!) already (for free!), and it is open-source! So does “Dragonbones Pro” (which is also free and works in Unity, but highly undocumented). As does so many other tools. I can get you a list of tools that do it if you really need them. Just say the word. But those two tools do this style FFD right out of the box – in Unity! – so, tbh, I really have no idea why you guys went with Anima2D (no offense to its creator) due to its bone-based nature.
Most animators I know (I’m a 2D animator myself!) want to have full-control over deformation while animating (minus the basic location/rotation – but only in SOME cases, because a lot of times we do want control over rotation/location sprite/image aspects of individual parts too!!) – Bottom line is, bone-based 2D animation is sub-par in so many ways (even to its viewers!), but the major reason is because it rarely affords artists full-control over how it looks, visually, at any given moment. This is, unarguably, 2D’s biggest strength against 3D, and not focusing on that strength will lead to a sub-par tool, and ultimately, sub-par animations.
So I have a proposal to help solve your bone-based issues – see below:
As for FFD, I think you guys might be overthinking it, and here’s why:
First off, as mentioned above, animators don’t need bone deformation on their control-point animations. If you give them a way to select multiple control points and move (or smear!) them simultaneously (with a soft-brush, for example), we can easily achieve the same effects manually (such as breathing or 3D ‘rotation’ – without the immense tedium of setting up complex rigs/weights, for meshes with unnecessarily high polycounts like in tools like “Creature”) that we’d have used bones for! – Outside of subtle movements like that (and the overall location / rotation for the whole appendage!), we will never use bones for anything but location/rotation of the whole form/appendage.
To solve your technical woes – here’s how you can approach FFD like this in an artist- and programmer- friendly way:
First off, generate the mesh every frame from simple cages and control point offsets that relate to specific verts used in that generation (remember, Unity does multiple cycles per-frame – one of these could easily be used to generate the mesh for display). This technique is already in-practice in tools like Archimatix and EasyRoads, and works for complex multi-story, multi-room, 3D structures in realtime just fine (take a look at videos of Archimatix – it does exactly what I’m suggesting… in realtime – and in 3D), so what’s stopping it from working in 2D instead?
I doubt 2D control point motions + mesh regeneration (based on those control points) would cause Unity to hiccup at all since speed depends on triangle count most of all, uv offsets are already predetermined, and only a super-tiny amount of CPU is used per-frame to generate the meshes you see (since pretty much nothing is being transformed [especially multiple times!] which is usually the major pain point in this type of animation!), plus, with 2D, you’ll already have those meshes/textures/uvs in memory in some form – all that’s left is to generate (not deform!) them based on your control points’ new animated locations.
So “Free Form Deformation” is essentially a misnomer in this case – but the goal (and the outcome!) is the same, for far cheaper than is traditionally achieved!
–
This type of animation does not need bones to work – in fact, it works much better if there’s nothing but a single transform controlling their location/orientation, as they’d never be weighted to anything (aside from 100% to the transform of the appendage), assuming you allowed their control points to be manually animated separately from the bone’s influence.
Also, don’t forget the smooth/smear brush I mentioned – give it a proportional falloff to smear or move verts (control points) around, and artists like me would love you guys forever!
“Paul Tham December 5, 2016 at 8:43 am
Anima2D will remain as a separate package. However, together with Sergi (now in Team 2D) we are building this feature directly into Unity. The end result will be seamless and not a Unity with Anima2D preinstalled.”
You should ask in here , like i did (Anima2D was integrated into that asset), and nobody replied, so prob. not (usually i get no reply when feature is unavailable, which is still bad imo, they should just say so)