Hi, Keely said on 2D thread that there would be no skeletal/bone animation in 4.3, so before I go all in on Spine animation software, I would like to know if it’s possible to use the Animation Editor dopesheet coupled with Child/Parent architectured Sprite collection to come to the same result, let me make my point clear: ME WANT NOOO SPRITESH*T ANIMATION, so much space wasted, time wasted, and texture memory wasted, if what Unity really says is that they forbid Bone animation well then won’t you say ir loud so we turn to other options, but my guess is what is meant here is just no skeletal rig editor like standard 3D Blockbuster modelers.
If that is the case, and we still can make hierarchy pivoted sprites that translate animation to children, no biggy at all, but if any given sprite is only animated exclusively independently (that would be wierd anyway) then I’ll have to lose some time learning Spine (only alternative, can you believe it?) which I need elsewhere.
I hope I’m wrong, that post from Keely really freaked me out.
Short answer is yes, sure you can.
Unity isn’t forbidding bone animation, it is just not adding it as a native supported feature at this point. Practically speaking, Unity doesn’t have a 3D bone animation editor either. Unity is not an animation tool, it is a game engine.
There is really almost nothing to “learn” in Spine. It is simple and intuitive. It is designed for animators as a tool to create animations in format designed for game use. But is definitely isn’t the only option, just the newest and most targeted. You can do you 2d animation in a ton of ways, Flash, ToonBoom, Blender, Maya, Max, AfterEffects, DragonBones and many more.
Lots of games in Unity used rigged 2d animation (including some top games). How you get that animation into Unity depends on your tools and needs. That isn’t changing or going to be broken with 4.3. Probably there will features in 4.3 that will make parts of that more efficient, and better optimized.
What a relief, if the dopesheet functionality is robust enough, I don’t care about anything else, one could actually make bone-animations right in Unity just without IK and gizmo bones.
BTW I just discoved Uni2D plugin which offers awesome Skeletal Animation with complete 2D orchestra, so that should provide extra security if native 2D doesn’t live up to expectations, thank you.