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Animation for Sprites

Hey everyone!

I purchased AC just a few days ago after watching the tutorial and seeing how intuitive it is for action lists and dialogue, and I'm really excited to use it!
However, I'm not sure what would be the best tools for animation with AC. I'm aiming to have an 8-direction character for reference.

I have used Adobe Animate in the past for Unity projects, but I always have to manually re-center my pivot for individual frames so that the animation will not look "jumpy." Even after this, the animations still look at bit "off."

I've recently been looking into other software, since I really want smooth animations for my characters (using IK would be preferable), but I'm not sure which would work the best with AC.

With that being said, has anyone successfully integrated their Spine Pro animations or any of the Unity 2D animation packages in their projects made with AC?

Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

Unity Version: 2020.3.17f1

Comments

  • Welcome to the community, @ABABAB.

    When it comes to character animation, it's certainly my hope that the choice of what technique/software to is more down to creative intent than technical limitation.

    AC's 2D Demo's player character was actually done in 3D, and then tweaked to look 2D afterwards - in my experience, this approach can help for consistency, since the same animation is being used for each angle.

    Using IK/bone-based animation is also an option with AC - so long as you can use an Animator component, then AC can use it.

    Things do admittedly get more complex if you want to use bone-based animations and different directions together - as this often involves relying on separate rigs for e.g. right-facing, up-facing etc. A common approach is to move all of your rigs into a shared parent GameObject, which itself is a child of the root, and make this the character's "sprite child". As part of each direction animation, you can then enable/disable the appropriate rigs as necessary.

    When it comes to Spine: a number of community-provided integration scripts can be found in the wiki here: https://adventure-creator.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Integrations

  • edited December 2021

    Hi Chris,

    Thank you! Glad to be here!
    Thank you so much for the information. Regarding the hierarchy you mentioned, would it look something like this? (Sorry can't get the indentation right for some reason, I was trying to make all the *-facing rigs shown as children of the PlayerSprite)

        Player
         |___ PlayerSprite
                    |___ right-facing rig 
                |___ up-facing rig 
                    |___ ... 
    

    I might have misunderstood this, but it seems that the spine tutorial I was looking at only relies on one bone, so would this mean that I only need to have 1 rig as the child?

    I'll take a look at the spine integration documentation in the meantime, thank you again for the response!

  • Regarding the hierarchy you mentioned, would it look something like this?

    Yes, that's what I was getting at. Though, I'm not saying it needs to - depending on your character's design, and use of sprite-swapping for e.g. the head direction, it's certainly possible that a single rig is all you need. In that case, you could do without the "PlayerSprite" object in your mockup and have the rig be the immediate child:

    Player
        -Rig
            -Bones
    
  • Sorry I missed this! Thank you for letting me know--I'll try to see how my sprite animations turn out and will try out both methods!

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