Simple and Advanced Topics of Animating 2D Characters
Making a 2D platformer game is a nice way to start learning about Unity game development. In this course you will learn how to create so-called “bone-based” 2D characters – characters that are made out of separate body parts. The material in this course is divided into 3 Sections. Section 1 features a short introduction to the course.
In Section 2 we will focus on making a simple bone-based character from scratch. We`ll go through the whole process of character creation from setting up an empty Unity project and importing sprite sheets with art to assembling a bone-based character the right way and animating it using Unity`s built-in mechanim animation system. By the end of this Section we`ll have a simple bone-based character that can walk and jump on our improvised level.
In Section 3 we will talk about some advanced techniques of working with 2D animated characters. For bone-based characters correct sorting order in the scene is very important, so in our first couple of lectures we`ll talk about resolving all the sorting order issues. Then we`ll discuss how to apply different looks and different clothing items to your character. This approach is very convenient, because you can have all the characters in your game made from a single character prefab, but they can all use different outfits and look differently. It`s also much easier to dress your characters or re-skin your game if you need. We`ll also talk about displaying some unique items on your characters such as bracelets, necklaces, belts, other decorations. The same approach can be used to display other clothing items. We`ll finish this section by making a more complex character that will have “joints”. Joints will allow us to use the same animated model for characters that are differently shaped (wider shoulders, shorter legs, longer arms, etc…).
Making a bone-based 2D character in Unity
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Introduction to This CourseThis Course presents an in-depth guide on making 2D animated bone-based characters. We'll start by importing sprites into an empty Unity project and gradually work our way towards having several animated characters that can easily change their outfits even while the game is running.
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Downloadable materialsIn this lecture you will be able to download additional resources.
Advanced techniques of working with bone-based 2D characters
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Creating a Project and Slicing Sprites
In this lecture, we will create an empty Unity project. Make sure that you create a 2D project because this will affect the way your sprites are imported into the project. We`ll import the character sprite sheets and slice them with Unity's Sprite Editor tool.
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Setting Up Pivot Points and Assembling Character - Part 1
In this lecture, we'll discuss the logic behind setting up the pivot points for each of our sprites in the Sprite Editor. We'll start gradually bringing in all the sprites from our Assets folder into the scene and assembling our character.
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Setting Up Pivot Points and Assembling Character - Part 2
In this lecture, we'll organize all the body parts of our character in Hierarchy in the most appropriate way for animating our character in future. We'll also apply correct Order in Layer for each of the body parts to get them correctly sorted and displayed in the scene.
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Background and Walk Cycle Animation - Part 1
In this lecture, we’ll start by adding a simple background to our scene and a simple platform for our character to walk on. You will learn how to add new animations to your character. We'll make the first super simple Idle animation.
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Background and Walk Cycle Animation - Part 2
In this lecture, we’ll make a more complex Walk cycle animation for our character. It is best if you find some reference on the internet for “cartoon walk cycle” to recreate the same movements for your character. Our Walk animation will consist of leg and arm motions. We will also move our FrontView game object to simulate the natural motion of out character’s head and torso during walk cycle.
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Controller Script and Animator Configuration - Part 1
In this lecture, we will attach all the other components that are required for our character to start moving and walking in the scene to our character game object. To achieve this effect, we'll need a Rigidbody2D, we’ll use two colliders and we’ll need a simple controller script that will handle our players` keyboard input and transform it into the movement of our character.
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Controller Script and Animator Configuration - Part 2
In this lecture, we’ll finish inspecting our controller script. We’ll spend some time talking about the Animator component and configuring the transitions between animations on our character.
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Bonus - Making a Jump Animation
To make our character more functional and exciting, in this lecture we’ll create a new jumping animation or a jumping state that will actually consist of 7 different animations that are blended using a Blend Tree.
