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[ryansumo]

I'm playing around with spriter right now as a rigging tool for my animations.  I plan to export to PNG and then use those PNGs as animation frames in Unity.  Considering we are using Unity, does it make sense to just buy Puppet2D so there is direct integration with Unity instead of using two different pieces of software?

[clockwrk_routine]

you should take a look at this https://github.com/mythgarr/Spriter2Unity
just include your spriter project folder inside your assets folder and it'll import them as prefabs and create animations for you, which can be used with unity's animator. this includes sprite swapping.  works with spriter free too

[ryansumo]

Oh awesome this look like it'll be really useful!

I'm curious about your own workflow with Vagante.  Are you using Unity as well?

[clockwrk_routine]

Nope, Eugene's building the engine in C++.  workflow, it's pretty straight forward pixel work, in photoshop/aseprite.  The engines setup to reflect any changes I make to gfx with a hotkey, so I can test right away.

I've been using photoshop a lot more recently, particularly when I'm coming up with a new design, getting the colors right but if it's something I need to animate I'll take the base design into aseprite and rough/detail the frames.  If I'm working with effects, like explosions, I'll rough in the frames in aseprite blocking in general colors, and then polish it in photoshop.  I did find this video on animating in ps the other day, so I can stick to it as I prefer it for everything

[Geti]

Fwiw I really dislike puppet2d due to all the massive usability issues (no undo or undo leaving the world in a broken state, graphics scales based on characters with sizes in the 100s, mesh deformation and weight tweaking not working regardless of following the tutorial video to the letter, etc). I'm slowly forming the opinion that 99% of unity plugins are absolute cancer, and the rest of them are just for asset creation and don't participate at runtime (shader forge)

[ryansumo]

Thanks for the feedback guys, especially on puppet2d.  You've given me a lot to chew on.  Spriter is ok, though since this is the first time I've worked on with rigging software I hae no point of comparison.  For the relatively simplistic animations I'm going for perhaps it makes more sense to simply hand draw all the key frames.

[Geti]

I've heard of people using blender for this kind of stuff, fwiw. Map the sprites to a bunch of planes like you would in puppet2d, then bind them to bones and only animate the bones in one plane). Might be more technical but you'd get 100% control of the deformations and also be able to do shape key (vertex transformation) based animations if needed; you could also probably set up a ragdoll with a bit of work!

[clockwrk_routine]

Spriter currently smooths textures with no way of turning that off, so it's less than ideal for low-res sprites as they just look like blurs.  Exporting is fine it's just in the program itself.

^I've tried what geti suggested the process can get very cumbersome, having to rig in 3d space, weight paint each plane, and also deal with blenders interface, which I've lost a lot of animations too.  But yea you do have a whole lot of control over the animation but maybe more than what you need.

If they are relatively simple animations, and you aren't doing any physics based interactions on individual parts, I'm pretty sure you can use unity's built in animator and build up a modular sprite that way.  It's limited as you can only rotate and scale sprites.  I think it'd be also possible to do sprite swaps at runtime.  

[jgrams]

you can use unity's built in animator and build up a modular sprite that way.  It's limited as you can only rotate and scale sprites.

If I can ask a stupid question: what else do you want to do? Shearing/skewing? Some sort of non-linear transforms?

--Josh

[clockwrk_routine]

I guess that'd be all you need.  In other software like spriter/spine/blender you have more control over the shape of textures, like deforming along curves or bones, stretching/shrinking a particular area of a texture, which help make modular animations less rigid.

[funshark]

I'm currently using puppet2d, and apart from some issues ( that i'm reporting regularly btw ), I actually prefer using a unity integrated tool than messing with some unfinished importer that are never up to date.

There is still a lot of room for improvement but I'm trying to help on that too.

Spriter or Spine have also a lot of issues ( workflow, crashes, bad UI choices, you name it ) so I don't think they are any better currently.

[migrafael]

Spriter was still unfinished when we started working on Greedy Guns. We've been using Spine and it's a charm. Amazing UI, super light, integration with unity.

If you are using spriter you definitely should find an unity importer for your animations . Exporting to png kinda defeats the purpose of the whole cut-out animations. Kinda

[ryansumo]

Thanks for all the input guys.  The animation I'm doing is really relatively simple, and tbh a lot of the terms you mentioned here are flying over my head.  Looks like I have a lot to learn about even the most basic of art tech.  I've got a better understanding of my needs now though, thanks to all the comments.  I'll explain  our workflow below for the benefit of anyone who is in the same situation as me.

Since we're working with 2dtoolkit my programmer came over and described the workflow he was using to get my previous assets in the game, which is essentially importing individual PNG files into Unity and allowing 2dtoolkit to turn them into texture atlases(?), then creating frame by frame animation clips in Unity.  This may not be the most efficient way to do things but at least it's something I can wrap my head around.

@base64: thanks for that video, I'm sure it'll come in handy!