Smooth Moves - 2D Skeletal Animation











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SmoothMoves FAQs

Showcase

Watched a few videos. Looks really user friendly and useful. Good job.

Thanks Robin

This definitely looks pretty slick. Great job. If I go down the 2d route, I’ll be looking at this one for sure. Seems really easy to use :smile:

Thanks David. Ease of use was my primary goal. I created Smooth Moves out of frustration at all the hoops I had to jump through in 3d animation packages to get a 2D animation. Just seemed like way to much work for something so simple. I hope the Unity community finds it as useful as I do.

When is it going to be available? I see no links to the asset store in your first post and I’m very interested.

Hi Dwarfius. Thanks for reminding me about the link. I had forgotten to provide that after Unity approved my code. You should be able to link to the store from the original post now.

Looks very interesting and I’ll probably buy this soon. One question, does this work with Flash target in Unity 3.5?

Hi himatako,

Looks like Smooth Moves won’t work in Unity’s current Flash setup due to the fact that I use AnimationEvents to trigger changes in the textures, user triggers, colliders, depth changes, material changes, etc. Looking at this thread from the person that is writing the flash exporter, it appears that AnimationEvents will be available for Flash in the future, however:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/116534-Flash-Player-AnimationEvent

Not sure when or if this will happen, but I’ll look into some possible alternatives to using AnimationEvents.

Ah, that’s too bad. One requirement for my next project is Flash target, and I’d love to use this with Unity in order to save memory instead of going with frame-by-frame animation. I’ll wait until it fully functional with Flash target then :slight_smile:

Hi echo17.

just bought the plugin, amazing work.
I was hooked the moment I saw the workflow in your tutorials.

I’m especially amazed at the ease of mixing the animations textures.

I liked it so much, now I’m porting my project over to use it (still using placeholder assets, I’m integrating it before the work gets tough)

anyway, just found a bug (simple one) wanted to let you know (not sure if there’s another place for it, so I’ll just add it here)

if you add a keyframe for the shield at frame 3,
a keyframe for the Arm_R on frame 4
then select the shield,
then point the mouse on the keyframes use the scroll wheel to move the currently selected frame
the shield is still moveable even though the currently highlighted frame is frame 5 if you move the shield, frame 3 gets updated.

I’m still trying the plugin, but I think if I’m to request anything, it would be some keyboard shortcuts for renaming the bones animation clips.
that after clicking “rename” all of the current text should be highlighted so I can type right away.
if possible, let scrolling on the bones actually scroll the bones list :slight_smile:

EDIT:
also, one of the positive side effects of allowing changing the texture in each frame, is that it can actually have Sprite Animations (like in the other 2D packages), however, in order to do that, it would help greatly if you can sort the textures in the atlas by name.
(example, I have the animations “BloodSplatter000” through to “BloodSplatter029” (a particle effect), if I add them one by one, they remain sorted, so that when i set them in the animation editor, I know which one goes where, however, if I select all of them in the editor drag drop them on the atlas editor, I lose their sorting then lose track have no ability to actually set them up in the animation editor (this is especially hard for particle effects))

so, if possible, when dragging many sprites to the atlas editor, sort them by name before adding them.

Hi nab477,

Thanks for purchasing Smooth Moves. I’m glad you find it helpful.

The ability to modify the last set keyframe of a bone, even when the timeline cursor is over another frame was actually by design. That is how I prefer to animate, but I can see your point in how it can be confusing. I’ll look into adding an update to change this behaviour.

Good idea, I’ll add that to my list.

I actually tried to do this, but Unity doesn’t have a way to set the GUI textbox’s selection, at least none that I could find. I’d rather not create my own textbox just for this feature, but I’ll see if there are any other alternatives.

If you are referring to the scroll wheel of the mouse scrolling the bone list, I tried that too. The problem is that I’m using a GUI scroll view for the actual visible bones. so that if the bone hierarchy gets too deep you can scroll left and right. I use a horizontal slider on the left so that you can move the bones up and down and the timeline keyframes will follow. Since the scroll view is there, it takes over the scroll wheel and won’t allow you to trap the event for the horizontal slider. I toyed with that for about a day before I just decided that moving the mouse with the slider would be acceptable for the first release. I’ll definitely revist this for future releases, however.

Great idea, I’ll definitely add this to my list. Yeah, one of the great things about Smooth Moves’ texture switching mid-animation is that you can achieve classic sprite frame animation inside of a skinned mesh. I really need to make a tutorial on that since it would certainly be a great selling point.

Thanks for your comments and detailed descriptions.

Hi echo17,

I sent a PM, but thought this would be a far better to post a little bug I encountered…

Firstly, this is a fantastic plugin. I have had a number of problems with a 2D model I created and imported from Maya… Making this a lifesaver! Just thinking about the problems I will avoid down the line puts a smile on my face!

I’m recreating this asset with Smoothmoves and am really happy with the speed I have been able to recreate my model. This is a great timesaver!

However, I encountered a little problem that I was hoping you would be able to help with.
I was recreating my 2d cat’s walk cycle. I had done one of the rear legs and was copying the keyframes to the other rear leg albeit staggered by a couple of frames so the legs move independently. I had copied almost all the keyframes successfully and finally had to copy the last keyframe and paste it over keyframe 0 so that it would loop. When I hit paste, it asked whether I wanted to overwrite the keyframe to which I said yes. Then most of the interface vanished leaving only the window’s frame and the grid. When I restart Unity, and reopen the animation editor, my other animations are still there, however, when I select the walk cycle, everything vanishes again leaving only the frame and grid.

Any thoughts or suggestions as to how I may repair this file would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you for your time in this matter,

Hi mplaczek,

Fantastic cat model!

I just sent a reply to your PM, but am copying here. I had email notifications turned off on my private messages, but that is fixed now. If you could send me your project as a Unity package, I’ll take a look at the files and see what I can do.

[EDIT]
I think I might have found the problem. It looks like the bug occurs when you paste over the first keyframe. The first keyframe of every bone has to have all of it’s properties set for the editor to use as a basis. By copying over the first keyframe it is overwriting some of these properties and causing the editor to fail when trying to render the animation clip.

I’ve made a modification to the editor dll that will only copy and paste position, rotation, and scale properties of a keyframe. That will eliminate this problem in the future. I’ll get this published today, but it could take a while for Unity to approve the update.

If anyone wants the latest editor build, you can send me your invoice # from your purchase email to:

support@echo17.com

I’ll verify the invoice and email you back the updated dll so you can avoid having to wait on an approval.
[/EDIT]

Fantastic,

Thanks for the quick reply! (oops, I had my PM notifications turned off too!) And an even bigger thanks for getting a fix sorted out in practically no time at all :shock:

I can only take half the credit for the model, my wife did the artwork… I just chopped the thing up and stuck it all back together to animate :slight_smile:

…this is going to be fun!

Hello all,

I’ve just submitted my latest update to Unity for Smooth Moves. Among the fixes / changes are:

1.3.0 Updates:

Bug Fixes:
-Copying keyframes now only copies the position, rotation, and scale so that other keyframe data is not lost when copying over frame zero of a bone.
-When using the mouse wheel to scroll in the timeline, the gizmos will only show if the timeline cursor is over the currently selected frame.
-When previewing an animation, the ability to select bones in the animation window is disabled.
-Prefabs will now regenerate animation states when instantiated
-Labels can now be seen in Unity Pro due to new color theme.

Features:
-“R” keyboard shortcut for renaming bones and animation clips.
-When renaming bones and animation clips the item name is selected for easy replacement.
-Bones and animation clip lists now scroll with the mouse wheel
-Textures are shown in alphabetic order in the texture atlas editor and the texture selector window inside of the animation editor.
-Texture names are displayed beneath textures in the atlas editor and the texture selector window inside of the animation editor.
-Dark theme to match Unity Pro
-Contrast button that will toggle the darkness of the background of the animation and pivot windows.
-Z position with animation curves. Depth still determines the draw order, but z position can be used to interact in three dimensions with other 2D objects. z position also allows perspective shifts to give your animations more depth if using a perspective camera. The pos-rot set keyframe shortcut still only sets the x y positions along with the rotation without setting a z position.
-Bone animation data stats in the inspector.

If anyone wants the new dll’s now instead of waiting for Unity’s review process, you can send me an email to:

support@echo17.com

Be sure to include your order / invoice number so that I can verify your purchase. The invoice number should be somewhere in the subject or body of the email depending on which method of payment you used.

Hi All,

I went ahead and sent in version 1.3.0 to Unity for approval. The list of features can be seen in the previous post.

I will be increasing the price of Smooth Moves to $75 with the next release, so if you are interested, now is the time to buy!

This looks amazing. The first 2D game I develop will definitely make use of this.

Thanks OmniverseProductions!

Just bought it and i am half thrue the tutorial videos and have to say that this is a great 2d animation kit that is well made.
You have thought about so many things and it feels easy too.
Happy that i spend money for such a good thing :slight_smile: