Hi, I’m new to both Unity3D and 2D games. I want to make a 2D game that uses “cutout” style of animation like OMG Pirates! and Battleheart. I have read many post about the “cutout” animation of MikaMobile, and had some practice. Now I have some questions about the related tech.
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One is about the texture swap. I am now using bones for texture information, that is using a floating bone to store information when should I swap the texture. However, there’s one problem. This texture swap method has to be consistent with the character action.
For example, the character does an attack animation using a sword, and I want to make special effect that a track follows the sword. I can swap different textures of the track that can match the sword’s position. However, how to do if I want there is a “big” special effect that lasts a long time that exceeds the attack animation. I cannot combine the effect into the character’s animations because it cannot do other animations while it animates the special effect. What I thought is to make the special effect into a different mesh which can do its own animation. But there are other problems, deciding the position and playback speed of the special effect is not easy. For example, how to decide where the special effect should be? Should I make a floating bone in the character mesh and use its position information to decide where is the sword track?
Also, I have seen that in Battleheart, the character’s eye blink and tinting characters (shader animation) is not consistent with characters’ animations (idle, move, attack). How to achieve these effects? What I thought is use a different mesh with one bone to control the texture swap or color value of the character, or use Time.deltaTime to control the speed of the animation. But that looks disorder with the original bone control way. -
Another question, which shader (just built-in shaders is OK I think) is better in iPhone 2D games? Transparent/Diffuse, Unlit/Transparent, or some mobile shaders? Because its 2D game, I just need alpha blending and no light.
By the way, in addition to animate colors and alpha values, what else technologies are used in the Battleheart’s special effects? I don’t know if it needs other tech or just swap texture to obtain the fancy effects. -
About the background and camera. How to setup the background and camera like OMG and Battleheart which characters can move up and down rather than just move left and right. What is the angle between background (just the earth in the game) and the xy plane (if the camera face z axis)? Also, how to move the characters up and down? I mean, just really move them up and down in the 3D scene (always keep z value zero), or change z value according to y value (now I use this one to figure out that the higher characters are behind the lower characters).
Also, now I’m using the Orthographic Projection, it looks OK now, but I’m wander if it needs the Perspective Projection because something I didn’t notice.
Last question (I know it is already too much = =), how to detect if one character hits another character? Right now all the characters move on an inclined plane. I cannot figure out how to use collider trigger or ray casting to detect.
A lot of questions= = thanks~