Creature - 2D Procedural Bone + Mesh Animation Tool with Unity Support released! (Windows)

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Hello Unity Devs,

I am the developer of Creature. Today I am pleased to announce the Windows version of the Creature Automated 2D Skeletal + Mesh Animation Tool.

Website:
http://creature.kestrelmoon.com

What can Creature do?

Please have a look at the trailer here:

Next check out this live WebGL demo of a character authored in Creature and exported onto the web:

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http://creature.kestrelmoon.com/demo_raptor.html

Creature Unity Integration
Kraken Demo:

How to use the provided Creature Unity runtimes in Unity:

Automated Walk Cycles + Secondary Motion(Cloth, Hair, Flesh effects)

Animating Walk Cycles and complex secondary motion is easy with Creature’s Procedural Motor system. Making a walking character is as simple
as dropping in a set of Walking Motors into the limbs and tweaking the motor parameters:

Want to make a flying bird with a dynamic tail? Drop in some flap motors and bend physics into the skeleton and watch it go:

Easily animate front facing characters with breathing motions using motors as well:

Advanced Sprite Swapping with Procedural + Physics Motors

In addition to bone and mesh animation, Creature also allows you to swap in traditional custom drawn
sprite frames in an advanced way.

Swapped in sprite frames actually deform and react with the rest of the procedural system, allowing you to
produce some rather sophisticated effects:

High End VFX Features in a 2D Animation Package

Creature brings high end VFX features into the world of 2D animation.
With Creature you can do Soft Body Dynamics for squishy characters,
Path Authoring + Transfer and even Motion Capture from a video file.

Game Engine and Export Format(s) Support

Creature supports most of the major game engines. (Unreal Engine, Cocos2dx, Unity, MonoGame, LibGDX, PixiJS, ThreeJS, BabylonJS).
It also supports export to individual image frames, spritesheets, animated GIF and Autodesk FBX (for bone motors)

Full game engine support is written here:
http://creature.kestrelmoon.com/more_info_3.html

Unity Runtimes:

Full Documentation

A good tool requires well written documentation. All functions and features of the Creature animation tool
are documented here:

In addition to writeups, video tutorials of most major topics are also provided:

Game Engine Runtime documentation is here:

Thank you for reading this post and let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers!

2 Likes
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Devil Character animated in Creature:

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At first i thought it was something like spriter or spine but then i saw the video when you animated the triceratop with only 3 images and then you got all my attention.

Tomorrow i’ll be downloading the trial to test it and i’m almost sure you’ll have another client soon.

Also do you think it will be easy to animate fishes i’d love to see a fish video.

1 Like
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Hello,

Thanks for your interest in Creature!

How about some mermaids and a giant turtle here:

Cheers!

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This looks quite interesting! will test it as soon as I will have some time :slight_smile:

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New Kraken Demo showing the Creature Runtimes in a Game Environment with a fluid sim + 10000 fluid particles affected by gameplay characters:

The Creature runtimes/assets and demo can be downloaded here:
https://github.com/kestrelm/Creature_Unity

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Hi kestrelm,
Creature trial version don’t work with windows10 ; i have this error message:

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Hello,

Thanks for the screenshot. I just ran it with Windows 10 on my 3 machines and it runs just fine. The recent tutorials on the Youtube channel are also all done under Windows 10. What is the configuration of your PC and your version of Windows 10? A good number of my clients are already on Windows 10 with no issues. Feel free to msg me privately if you would rather not share your machine configuration publicly.

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Hi kestrelm.

I downloaded Creature and played with it for some time and i absolutely love it. My problem is that i need to make some fishes and i can’t with my limited knowledge.

Let me explain myself.

In your examples (kraken and mermaid) the tails are moving up and down and that’s easily doable in Creature, but i need the tails to move “near and far” because fishes if looked from above will move their tails left and right i don’t know if you understand me.

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Hi kestrelm,

Windows 10 Professionnel ‎(X64)‎
Intel Core i5 750
RAM 6 GO
AMD Radeon HD 6870

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Hello thanks for the info. What is strange is I have one machine that is very similar to your configuration (just more ram) and it works just fine… I will investigate it on more Windows 10 machines and see if a similar issue pops up.

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Hello!
Thanks for your interest in Creature :slight_smile: What you are asking for is some kind of pseudo 3D effect when viewed from the side “near and far”. The feature can be simulated right now via more tedious manual FK motors (a chain of bones where you have to manually shorten and lengthen the mesh). There is no automated motor for that effect you are describing now, however something like this is planned for the future.

Cheers!

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Hi kestrelm,
my bad . I download the Visual Studio 2013 Redistributable Libraries and install it. Everything work fine now. :wink:

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Hello,

Thanks for the update! That is very good to know. I just updated Creature with some cool features yesterday night, including Wacom Pen/Tablet support, more animation shortcuts and more :slight_smile:

Also, I am currently right now going to do another update on the Unity runtimes to make it even easier for you guys to integrate into Unity. Stay tuned!

Cheers!

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Another cool sample, Succubus Character by OTK Games animated in Creature:

Cheers!

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A new update:

This allows you to pose a chain of FK bones in one movement using either the Stylus (Pen & Tablet) or Mouse. Select a chain of FK bones, Shift + Drag to Draw Curve and Pose Bones. This is for Creature Pro.

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very cool update! :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Hello all,

There have been major improvements in both features and performance for the Creature Unity Runtimes in the past 2 weeks.

In working with various game studios, I have sped up the runtimes to run fast, even on older devices like the iphone 4.
Improvements:

  • Point Caching built into the runtime GUI with fast approximation algorithm. This speeds up playback speeds by up to 5x or more. Load times are reduced with an approximation algorithm if toggled.

  • Ability to export and load in compressed character JSON files, reducing asset sizes by up to 10x

  • General bug and stability fixes

More info here:

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Hello,

I have released the Creature runtimes on the asset store:

Also, I have added Leg Motors to animate specifically 3 limb motion:

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Video:

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@kestrelm , sorry for tell you this, but I think the tiger animation look weird… the tiger hind legs are short in that animation