CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidiosanimationunity-game-engine
george_mx
george_mx

Reputation: 376

How to do 2D animation in Unity

So I'm doing a 3D game for kids for Android and iOS in Unity, but i'm new in game developing and it's been really difficult to plan the assets.

We need to create 2D animations (paper like characters) and the characters have to be really detailed with great animations.

We have been thinking of several options:

We could create frame by frame animations but our designer says there has to be at least 24 images per second (because of 24 fps per second) with this the app will be very big.

Other option is to create 2D models in Blender and animate them there, but it's a lot of work and could take a lot of time.

The last option is to have the pieces of the model an animate it throughout code but it's a lot of work and I believe the quality of the animations would be low.

What's the better way to create 2D animations in Unity?.

Thank you!

Upvotes: 4

Views: 3388

Answers (2)

Ben Pious
Ben Pious

Reputation: 4805

Just because the app runs at 24fps doesn't mean you can't just display the animations for more than one frame of the main loop. It might not be smooth, but then again looking at the sprite sheets of games like super street fighter it doesn't look like they're at anywhere close to 24fps (the sprite sheet for Dhalism in SF3 Alpha is a 210kb .gif file on my computer, and there's less than 252 frames of animation on it. Likewise, the total storage space take up by every character sprite in Dustforce takes up a mere 7mb, though those sprites are just 192x192, maybe too low-res for you. They do look like paper though). I doubt that anything involving blender would take longer than hand animating -- Blender does key frames for you.

Upvotes: 0

markp3rry
markp3rry

Reputation: 734

Have you explored the 2D sprite engines that are available in Unity? Whoever said "Unity isn't really an engine designed to work with 2D stuff" is talking guff. I have just started working on a hobby 2D game and am using a Unity plugin called Orthello (see WyrmTale website for info). It handles sprite sheets, animations, collision detection and more without you having to write loads of code to do this. The learning curve is a bit steep and the examples on their website aren't the best but I found replicating the sample solutions that come with the download the best way to get something working.

There's also a similar tool called Sprite Manager 2 but you have to pay for that (I think). Check out the asset store for more information.

I would be really interested to hear if Orthello is what you're looking for and how you find working with it - please let me know via http://markp3rry.wordpress.com if you can.

Upvotes: 1

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