Help with 8-direction rigged animations for isometric character

Unity Engine
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1

Help with 8-direction rigged animations for isometric character.


N.B. I’ve only been coding and learning unity for a few months, so am a beginner.

My problem is as follows: I am designing a 2D isometric character. I have designed the character in photoshop and made sprites for 8 different directions. I have rigged the character in unity with bones and a sprite skin and designed several animations using the skeleton and keyframes for each of the different directions. So these are not sprite sheet animations, they are rigged animations, all living on a different sprite body.

The issue is that I don’t know how to allocate all of these individual game objects to one single player, e.g. if I press down the south animation plays and if I walk up the north animation etc. I essentially have 8 different game objects with different animations. I’ve been reading and it looks like I need to sprite swap and create a library? I don’t understand the process here and there is little help out there. If anyone could shed light on the matter, I’d be hugely grateful.

2

Yeah, I wouldn’t do that. For 8 directions, it’d be super annoying to set up.

The much easier option is to make every direction its own object, and make them all the children of an empty game object, then enable/disable whichever directions you need through code. Each direction would have its own animator/animations to keep things simple.

This is fairly advanced for a beginner, so don’t sweat it if you find yourself struggling.

This is just what I would do. Feel free to ask more questions, good luck.

3

I know how to use 2D sprite animator for simple tasks, but you had used rigging and I don’t know much about it but maybe this video will help you out. Start is about rigging, but in half of video is shown how to animate it left and right with player input.

4

That reminds me, you don’t actually need 8 objects, you can flip the top-right/right/bottom-right directions to the left (or vice-versa), so you only need 5 objects.