Update: RageTools Pro is now available for purchase in the Unity Asset Store:
RageTools Pro provides resolution-independent Vector 2D animation with a number of power features, including:
Area-based deformation (‘magnets’) with Shape-group isolation
Radius falloff and linear decay options
One-click-setup, pole-less Inverse Kinematics
Macro-assisted controllers (constraint) creation
Use of standard Unity colliders - compatible with Unity joints, easy to create sand bags and other deformable shapes
Works with physics - Let your characters punch out those sand bags - then let it hit the character back and ragdoll him to the ground!
Unity Animation Editor and Animation Clip compatible - works transparently with the existing API and tools
iTween and HOTween compatible - of course!
All that working perfectly integrated with the Unity engine, including its free version, assuring it works for all its deployment options (like iOS and Android) without a hitch. RageTools Pro vector technology builds up on the platform-independence concept brought by Unity, providing full resolution-independent graphics. With this tech you preserve your art development investment, being sure that your art will never need to be remade, and it will look perfect no matter what is the destination platform resolution - especially critical with new higher-resolution devices popping up every year.
RageTools Pro is a set of components for Unity, which requires both RageSpline (RageSpline | Sprite Management | Unity Asset Store) and RageTools (RageTools | Utilities Tools | Unity Asset Store) previously installed. Besides the Animation-focused components, RageTools Pro also includes the highly-anticipated “RageText” component, which provides vector text generation similar to that of ScaleForm™ right inside Unity.
RageTools Pro is an optional upgrade product for RageTools “Standard” component set, one of the top sellers in the Tools section of the Asset Store. Among other features RageTools Standard enables SVG import and resolution-independent vector-graphics processing, like in Adobe Flash.
Thanks guys, keep tuned for the next video, showcasing RageText (the fans favorite!) in detail
BTW Izitmee, does your license work like iTween’s? I’ve seen iTween added to Playmaker (a commercial product) with custom actions and such, if I could do the same I’d love to add a couple sample scenes with HOTween powering button and GUI transitions. What do you think?
Sure, HOTween uses a regular MIT license, so you can practically do anything you want with it, and I would be very honored
P.S. I can’t see how RageText, in spite of its awesomeness, can beat area-based deformation, which is just super-fantastic, but I’ll definitely stay tuned: I now expect magic from you
Looks great!!! I’m sold its what I need. Are the arms, legs, head and torso separate assets in the animation or was that one object? Also when is Ragetools Pro going to be released?
Flattered by your words Izitmee, be sure that I’m also a huge fan of your product, that visual editor completely sold it for me
I’ll be glad to cook up some interface sample scenes with HOTween - who knows, maybe also a video showing how to set things up from start to finish. Users have been requesting such a thing for ever, I guess the time has come!
Anyways, I believe people crave most for RageText because every game can take huge advantage of vector text and its resolution-independent sharpness and clarity (vs those ugly blurred bitmap fonts), while not all of them would have a use for deformation animation. Nevertheless, things like deforming vector text for awesome transitions and lively GUI elements should suit everyone, so it’s nice having both in the same package
You’ll be glad to know that the “Vilas” character and walk cycle goes included with RageTools Pro. Not only it’s great to show how to set up things on a production character, it’s also huge fun to play with and create new animations, like jumps and punchs. There’s also a large section of animation tips in the docs, to get you up and running ASAP.
As for your question, for sanity’s sake I’ve separated the limbs, torso and head, but you can have it as a single spline if you prefer. It’s all up to the artist and you’ve truly got full control. Deformation influence for those magnets are delimited by groups of splines (called RageGroups). So you can have a RageGroup for the whole body, or just for the arm, it automatically scans the shapes down the group hierarchy and builds the list up for you. You can also add “ignore groups” to each group. This way, for instance, you can have a full-character ragegroup that doesn’t affect a certain arm’s group, then you constrain (link) the root of the arm to an empty connection point in the torso. In a sense it’s like painting weights additively and negatively in a 3D animation program, but in a 10x more intuitive fashion. Sorry for sounding a bit like a salesman, but I truly love how it works - and after 15-or-so years working with all sorts of 2D and 3D animation proggies, let’s say I have a decent ground for comparison
We’re just improving things and tying up some loose ends, after all behind all that user-end simplicity there’s a huge code base, but we don’t expect the closed beta (about to start) to take more than a week or so, then it’s prime time.
That is great news MaDDoX. Thank you for the writing back, and don’t worry about sounding like a salesmen. There is nothing wrong with being proud of your product.
Does Ragetools or Ragetools Pro have any features to create a single texture atlas from a bunch of svg’s?
Nope, and tbh no bitmap-related features are planned for the product. We’re focusing on making it the best vector tool ever, it’s already a massive challenge on its own
Lemme see… according to Unity Stats the Vilas animation is taking exactly… eleven drawcalls
Yup, last but not least Tim is one of our beta testers, the ball got rolling just yesterday on the beta. The Freakow team is very proud to bring this amazing tool for the community. No more fiddling with atlases and having to generate new images for your fonts any time you want your game to support a new resolution - simply set the Edgetune component to “live” in your RageText and it’s all set. Adding new Vector Fonts is possible with the included Font Setup macro, the two SVG files used to create the built-in fonts (Atarified and a Verdana derivative) are included, and a new “Group Style” option in RageGroup makes changing the fill and outlines color a breeze. Oh yeah, and moving the outline behind the fill is also one click away of course We expect to add support to group gradient styling (for both fill and outline) this week before the product goes live in the Asset Store.
Exactly, Ragetools Pro works with Unity indie (free download) without a hitch. All you need other than the free Unity is RageSpline (which has just one version). It’s never too much stressing the fact that with Unity Free + RageSpline + RageTools Pro you’ll be able to do the key things that you can do with Adobe Flash Professional (and Scaleform, a highly expensive Flash-text game-engine component), at a fraction of the cost. Except Flash publishing of course, which will require a separate add-on from Unity, but still, with Adobe Flash you can not (at any price!) publish for iOS, Android, or any of the other platforms supported by Unity.
Ok now you got me drooling for RageText too And let’s not forget that Scaleform can’t do area-based deformation (the only software I ever saw doing something like that - in a functional way - was “Damn-can’t-remember-its-name”, which I used ages ago for animations, and which exported to SWF, but now it’s dead since a long time).
Will you be releasing some video of how to set up a character for animation? I ask because I like how Umotion2D allows you to click anywhere on a bitmap to choose the pivot point. Will Ragetools Pro have something similar?
Also will the upgrade cost anything to previous owners of Ragetools?
BTW, sorry to be such a pain in the ass with all the questions.
Hmm… what was that, ‘Swift’? Anyways, programs like Anime Studio can do that using bones, but they’re not as flexible as our implementation - especially because I used them, saw their flaws and aimed to do something better In AS you can’t affect multiple layers for instance, so you have to group every shape in the same layer that it’s going to take that bone, making it very difficult to precisely shape your influence. RageMagnet work on groups, which can point to as many “layers” of shapes you want, and (thanks to a new feature in Pro) even exclude shapes from its list that are down in the hierarchy but are part of another group.
Yup, I want to, possibly a simpler character like an earthworm where I can easily show IK and constraints without taking too much time from the viewer. The concepts, once grasped, can be easily extrapolated to a more complicated rig like the human body - and don’t forget the “Vilas” full character rig goes included with the package for your learning pleasure.
Yup, RageTools always came with “Pivotools” which works exactly for that. Differently from Umotion you can automatically define the pivot center point for a group of shapes using a number of options, and fine tune from there on if you so wish.
On release we’ll have a separate product called “RageTools Upgrader” which includes just the added files (relative to the Standard RageTools) and will cost exactly the price difference between both packages.
Glad to answer them, and I’m sure it helps many others
I would think you could get this down to just 1 drawcall by using the same material, and one texture. Then the different colored portions of the vector graphic would just have their UV’s placed on different spots on the texture to be colored differently.
I was hoping the same thing when I asked about an auto atlas feature. Since texture combining is key for draw calls. Its the one thing that I am trying to work around in my art pipeline. Batching out all the colors from a character SVG will be arduous. Makes me want to just go bitmap at this point.
Technically Scaleform uses texture atlases for text… it’s just that it dynamically creates those textures on the fly from vectors (which, in reality, is how all font rendering happens these days). It will revert to vector rendered font if the glyph is too big to fit well in any of the atlas textures.
But the big question is, can RageTools Pro handle the difficult-to-solve problem of humongous Asian character sets? This is something Unity cannot handle, at least on mobile. And even on desktop, the dynamic font system is not consistent enough to use.
