Unity What tools are you using to animate 2D images?

[BooBee Productions]

Hi everyone,
so we have been looking at adding more juice to our 2D images during the past days and are struggling to find the right toolstack.

For your amusement, here is a (sllightly exaggerated) showcase of what we were able to achieve:

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We are creating 2D adult games in Unity and are simply curious how others are doing it. Are you highering people to do the animations for you? Are there sources you can recommend?

If you are doing animations yourself, what tools are you using?

Thanks for sharing, happy to learn more

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I use Blender for just about everything. I have a bit of a workflow for animating 2D art... but for the past few years I've been focusing on developing my character art creation and coding, so I haven't been able to focus on doing animations yet (at least not regularly animating), so I haven't had the time to make good documentation of how to mimic Live2D with Blender. But I see in your animation you are able to do a few things, bending, large area distortion, joints (the animation itself looked pretty good, not sure if skill or if the tools are helping). The issue with blender is its very 'raw.' you can do a lot of the same effects, but it takes a lot more set up and a good technical understanding of how the technique works, and there aren't very many helpful tools unless you make them yourself (ie making a smart character rig to automate some things, such as physics). Something that might help you, or may be a limitation in your tools, is the ability to cut up the art into layers. but often this process requires good photoshopping skills. I want to do simpler 2D vector like character art (TBD if shaded), so it takes less time photo editing the layers.

 

[Droid Productions]

We use

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for Paradise Lust, and I also use it (though far less intensively or skillfully) for Love of Magic. It's easy to get into, the runtime is excellent on unity and the tools really good. If you have real animators on your team they'll love it (we have 3, so it's worth the cost for us).


There's also Unity's new built in

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; they're far more simplistic, both in terms of runtime capabilities (realtime IK, etc) and in terms of the editor. Having said that, the price is right (free with Unity).

 

[JakaiD]

Using the AnyPortrait plugin for Zombikini PinballZ.

 

[UnifoxStudio]

At first I used the build in skeleton animator of Unity, it's great to begin.
Now I use

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, it's really powerfull and can make more than the build in of Unity.
Would love to hire animator ... One day For now I'm doing it myself

 

[BooBee Productions]

But I see in your animation you are able to do a few things, bending, large area distortion, joints (the animation itself looked pretty good, not sure if skill or if the tools are helping).

Thanks for sharing your experience with blender. We used an online tool for those very first animations we did:

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During the past weeks, we developed a basic understanding of working with the Unity skeleton animator..
Idle animations already look kinda decent:

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We will check out AnyPortrait and Spline, too! Thank you for taking the time to share!

Good luck with your games