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RageTools Pro: Resolution-independent vector animation and text!

Discussion in 'iOS and tvOS' started by MaDDoX, Feb 3, 2012.

  1. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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    Update: RageTools Pro is now available for purchase in the Unity Asset Store:
    http://u3d.as/content/freakow/rage-tools-pro/2Rv




    RageTools Pro provides resolution-independent Vector 2D animation with a number of power features, including:

    * Area-based deformation ('magnets') with Shape-group isolation
    * Radius falloff and linear decay options
    * One-click-setup, pole-less Inverse Kinematics
    * Macro-assisted controllers (constraint) creation
    * Use of standard Unity colliders - compatible with Unity joints, easy to create sand bags and other deformable shapes
    * Works with physics - Let your characters punch out those sand bags - then let it hit the character back and ragdoll him to the ground!
    * Unity Animation Editor and Animation Clip compatible - works transparently with the existing API and tools
    * iTween and HOTween compatible - of course!

    All that working perfectly integrated with the Unity engine, including its free version, assuring it works for all its deployment options (like iOS and Android) without a hitch. RageTools Pro vector technology builds up on the platform-independence concept brought by Unity, providing full resolution-independent graphics. With this tech you preserve your art development investment, being sure that your art will never need to be remade, and it will look perfect no matter what is the destination platform resolution - especially critical with new higher-resolution devices popping up every year.

    RageTools Pro is a set of components for Unity, which requires both RageSpline (http://u3d.as/1DK) and RageTools (http://u3d.as/content/freakow/rage-tools/2nj) previously installed. Besides the Animation-focused components, RageTools Pro also includes the highly-anticipated "RageText" component, which provides vector text generation similar to that of ScaleForm™ right inside Unity.

    RageTools Pro is an optional upgrade product for RageTools "Standard" component set, one of the top sellers in the Tools section of the Asset Store. Among other features RageTools Standard enables SVG import and resolution-independent vector-graphics processing, like in Adobe Flash.

    RageTools homepage
    RageTools Standard discussion thread
     
    Last edited: Apr 21, 2012
  2. Ippokratis

    Ippokratis

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    Hi MaDDoX,
    Congrats on the release, looks awesome !
     
  3. Demigiant

    Demigiant

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    Wow, MaDDoX, this looks so incredibly awesome, and an amazing achievement!!! Can't wait for it to be released :)
     
  4. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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    Thanks guys, keep tuned for the next video, showcasing RageText (the fans favorite!) in detail :)

    BTW Izitmee, does your license work like iTween's? I've seen iTween added to Playmaker (a commercial product) with custom actions and such, if I could do the same I'd love to add a couple sample scenes with HOTween powering button and GUI transitions. What do you think?
     
  5. Demigiant

    Demigiant

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    Sure, HOTween uses a regular MIT license, so you can practically do anything you want with it, and I would be very honored :)

    P.S. I can't see how RageText, in spite of its awesomeness, can beat area-based deformation, which is just super-fantastic, but I'll definitely stay tuned: I now expect magic from you :)
     
  6. monkeypit

    monkeypit

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    Looks great!!! I'm sold its what I need. Are the arms, legs, head and torso separate assets in the animation or was that one object? Also when is Ragetools Pro going to be released?

    Thanks :)
     
    Last edited: Feb 5, 2012
  7. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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    Flattered by your words Izitmee, be sure that I'm also a huge fan of your product, that visual editor completely sold it for me :bow:
    I'll be glad to cook up some interface sample scenes with HOTween - who knows, maybe also a video showing how to set things up from start to finish. Users have been requesting such a thing for ever, I guess the time has come!

    Anyways, I believe people crave most for RageText because every game can take huge advantage of vector text and its resolution-independent sharpness and clarity (vs those ugly blurred bitmap fonts), while not all of them would have a use for deformation animation. Nevertheless, things like deforming vector text for awesome transitions and lively GUI elements should suit everyone, so it's nice having both in the same package :)

    You'll be glad to know that the "Vilas" character and walk cycle goes included with RageTools Pro. Not only it's great to show how to set up things on a production character, it's also huge fun to play with and create new animations, like jumps and punchs. There's also a large section of animation tips in the docs, to get you up and running ASAP.

    As for your question, for sanity's sake I've separated the limbs, torso and head, but you can have it as a single spline if you prefer. It's all up to the artist and you've truly got full control. Deformation influence for those magnets are delimited by groups of splines (called RageGroups). So you can have a RageGroup for the whole body, or just for the arm, it automatically scans the shapes down the group hierarchy and builds the list up for you. You can also add "ignore groups" to each group. This way, for instance, you can have a full-character ragegroup that doesn't affect a certain arm's group, then you constrain (link) the root of the arm to an empty connection point in the torso. In a sense it's like painting weights additively and negatively in a 3D animation program, but in a 10x more intuitive fashion. Sorry for sounding a bit like a salesman, but I truly love how it works - and after 15-or-so years working with all sorts of 2D and 3D animation proggies, let's say I have a decent ground for comparison ;)

    We're just improving things and tying up some loose ends, after all behind all that user-end simplicity there's a huge code base, but we don't expect the closed beta (about to start) to take more than a week or so, then it's prime time.
     
  8. monkeypit

    monkeypit

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    That is great news MaDDoX. Thank you for the writing back, and don't worry about sounding like a salesmen. There is nothing wrong with being proud of your product. :)

    Does Ragetools or Ragetools Pro have any features to create a single texture atlas from a bunch of svg's?
     
  9. techmage

    techmage

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    What about drawcall counts?
     
  10. monkeypit

    monkeypit

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    Good question. I was wondering the same thing about draw calls for both Ragetools and Ragespline at runtime.
     
  11. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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    Nope, and tbh no bitmap-related features are planned for the product. We're focusing on making it the best vector tool ever, it's already a massive challenge on its own :)

    Lemme see.. according to Unity Stats the Vilas animation is taking exactly.. eleven drawcalls :)
     
  12. tgraupmann

    tgraupmann

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    Awesome! The highly anticipated RageText is here!!!!
     
  13. monkeypit

    monkeypit

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    Will Ragetools Pro work with all versions of Unity. Pro and Limited?
     
  14. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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    Yup, last but not least :) Tim is one of our beta testers, the ball got rolling just yesterday on the beta. The Freakow team is very proud to bring this amazing tool for the community. No more fiddling with atlases and having to generate new images for your fonts any time you want your game to support a new resolution - simply set the Edgetune component to "live" in your RageText and it's all set. Adding new Vector Fonts is possible with the included Font Setup macro, the two SVG files used to create the built-in fonts (Atarified and a Verdana derivative) are included, and a new "Group Style" option in RageGroup makes changing the fill and outlines color a breeze. Oh yeah, and moving the outline behind the fill is also one click away of course :) We expect to add support to group gradient styling (for both fill and outline) this week before the product goes live in the Asset Store.

    Exactly, Ragetools Pro works with Unity indie (free download) without a hitch. All you need other than the free Unity is RageSpline (which has just one version). It's never too much stressing the fact that with Unity Free + RageSpline + RageTools Pro you'll be able to do the key things that you can do with Adobe Flash Professional (and Scaleform, a highly expensive Flash-text game-engine component), at a fraction of the cost. Except Flash publishing of course, which will require a separate add-on from Unity, but still, with Adobe Flash you can not (at any price!) publish for iOS, Android, or any of the other platforms supported by Unity.
     
    Last edited: Feb 12, 2012
  15. Demigiant

    Demigiant

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    Ok now you got me drooling for RageText too :) And let's not forget that Scaleform can't do area-based deformation (the only software I ever saw doing something like that - in a functional way - was "Damn-can't-remember-its-name", which I used ages ago for animations, and which exported to SWF, but now it's dead since a long time).
     
  16. monkeypit

    monkeypit

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    MaDDoX,

    Will you be releasing some video of how to set up a character for animation? I ask because I like how Umotion2D allows you to click anywhere on a bitmap to choose the pivot point. Will Ragetools Pro have something similar?

    Also will the upgrade cost anything to previous owners of Ragetools?

    BTW, sorry to be such a pain in the ass with all the questions.
     
    Last edited: Feb 13, 2012
  17. MaDDoX

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    Hmm... what was that, 'Swift'? Anyways, programs like Anime Studio can do that using bones, but they're not as flexible as our implementation - especially because I used them, saw their flaws and aimed to do something better :) In AS you can't affect multiple layers for instance, so you have to group every shape in the same layer that it's going to take that bone, making it *very* difficult to precisely shape your influence. RageMagnet work on groups, which can point to as many "layers" of shapes you want, and (thanks to a new feature in Pro) even exclude shapes from its list that are down in the hierarchy but are part of another group.

    Yup, I want to, possibly a simpler character like an earthworm where I can easily show IK and constraints without taking too much time from the viewer. The concepts, once grasped, can be easily extrapolated to a more complicated rig like the human body - and don't forget the "Vilas" full character rig goes included with the package for your learning pleasure.

    Yup, RageTools always came with "Pivotools" which works exactly for that. Differently from Umotion you can automatically define the pivot center point for a group of shapes using a number of options, and fine tune from there on if you so wish.

    On release we'll have a separate product called "RageTools Upgrader" which includes just the added files (relative to the Standard RageTools) and will cost exactly the price difference between both packages.

    Glad to answer them, and I'm sure it helps many others :)
     
  18. techmage

    techmage

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    I would think you could get this down to just 1 drawcall by using the same material, and one texture. Then the different colored portions of the vector graphic would just have their UV's placed on different spots on the texture to be colored differently.
     
  19. monkeypit

    monkeypit

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    I was hoping the same thing when I asked about an auto atlas feature. Since texture combining is key for draw calls. Its the one thing that I am trying to work around in my art pipeline. Batching out all the colors from a character SVG will be arduous. Makes me want to just go bitmap at this point.
     
  20. nsxdavid

    nsxdavid

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    Technically Scaleform uses texture atlases for text... it's just that it dynamically creates those textures on the fly from vectors (which, in reality, is how all font rendering happens these days). It will revert to vector rendered font if the glyph is too big to fit well in any of the atlas textures.

    But the big question is, can RageTools Pro handle the difficult-to-solve problem of humongous Asian character sets? This is something Unity cannot handle, at least on mobile. And even on desktop, the dynamic font system is not consistent enough to use.

    David
     
  21. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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    I hope you guys realize that draw calls is no long the "key performance bottleneck" in anything at or above the iPhone 3GS. Which's like 96% of the market or so. We have other factors that are far more punishing for performance than draw calls when you're animating, most notably the mesh reconstruction routines on RageSpline. We've added a number of mesh refresh scheduling options but it's still a point of concern. Absolutely not a problem for RageText though, due to its "quick mode" which simply switches the meshes in real time instead of re-generating them.

    AFAIK, that's because ScaleForm is mostly used as a 2-pass solution, shader-combined over the 3D rendering of the actual scene. Doubtfully ever practical for a mobile device and its constraints on multiple-pass rendering. RageText presents a one-pass solution with the fastest possible "lowest-common-denominator" shader. If you're using only 2D vector objects, fonts and art assets do use the same shader, just switching the vertex colors, meaning batching already occurs between assets and the font-rendered elements. Sorry but I can't imagine how a texture atlas could optimize anything with this method.

    If you have a letter shape and a ISO code associated to it (whatever character set you use), RageText can render it. Period.
    I imagine the setup time in the vector package might be long due to the intricacies of the asian char shapes, and you might need to extend our font setup macro code since it comes prepared for latin characters (with common accented characters such as é, ã, ü, etc), but it's definitely do-able.
     
  22. nsxdavid

    nsxdavid

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    Setup time? What is it you have to setup? Kind of lost me there.
     
  23. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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    RageSpline doesn't support holes, ie. hollow shapes. Like you see in characters like "P" and "O". Since there's no way to automate the import of those kinds of shapes "directly", currently you have to pre-process these characters in a vector editing app so they can be rendered by RageSpline. We intend to address this soon with another RageTools component, able to create a new compound shape from two or more subtractive shapes. Still on early stages though, but our objective is to make the conversion from a font to a RageFont as one-click as possible.

    Even now, I wouldn't say the pre-processing (or setup) time is that much longer than what you'd take to apply a contour in a gfx program and adjust the kerning manually on a regular bitmap font. With the advantage that, once it's done for RageText, you never have to do it again just because you've increased the outline width or changed the fill color - as you have to do with bitmap fonts.
     
    Last edited: Feb 15, 2012
  24. nsxdavid

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    Yikes... yeah you definitely have to get your splines doing holes. Just not really practical for fonts before that. Arguably for any, but for Asian fonts that have thousands of characters.... nut uh.

    BTW, I am a RageSpline licensee.... one critique: RageSplines are really impressive, and you can do a lot with them. But, unless something has changes since I looked last, you can't do additive blending with them. Normally that's not a problem, there's source.... just modify it. Well, unfortunately, the RageSpline code needs a lot fo DRYing out because it took an amazing number of changes to even rough in the concept... because of the constat redundant expression of alpha that only works correctly for non-additive blending all through the code.

    David
     
  25. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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    I definitely won't argue that Asian fonts would be a nightmare to do :) For latin characters is definitely not as hard as it sounds though, just a few clicks for each letter that has one or more holes. I'll make a video showing it, it's on my to-do list for too long but with RageText incoming it became a top priority.

    To make things clear, RageSpline is not our product, we just use its API. Off the top of my head, additive blending is definitely possible with a different shader implementation, but tbh I never dug into the matter.

    I'm sure Keely would be interested on any code change suggestions, he has taken many from forum members and recently from our lead dev - and they will show up in the next RageSpline release. Nevertheless, I'm sure Keely never expected the code to be used and abused to the extent that RageTools and some high-end users - like yourself - need.
    It's just too good a concept for us to conform ourselves to its present incarnation limitations, so we keep pushing it forward :) At the very least, I did take your notes though, be sure of that - and thanks!
     
    Last edited: Feb 16, 2012
  26. nsxdavid

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    I didn't realize you didn't do RageSpline... apologizes. But, just so you know, additive is more than a shader change because of how fades are done.
     
  27. MaDDoX

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    I did a "group fader" script for groups of splines that works okay (to be perfect it'd need to store the group elements original transparency), but I haven't messed with the RageSpline shader so I wouldn't know. So thanks, I'll definitely have to carry out further researches on that.
     
  28. lipana

    lipana

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    Hi again,

    It's been a few weeks since I last posted, I hope you're nearing release :D

    I had some more questions regarding RageText.
    Is it also suitable for small sized text?
    And what's this about having to setup the font?

    Heh, I guess what I'm really hunkering for is some screenshots/demo.

    Thanks!
     
  29. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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    Hi, sorry for fading away a bit, Unity 3.5 has posed some nasty performance problems to RageMagnet, that has delayed a bit but we're steadly getting things performant again with the help of some major profiler digging.

    Yeah, no problem with that, you've also got full (and dynamic) control on how you want your antialiasing, instead of having to use some image editor presets. This way you can have small text as blurry or crispy as you want it.

    Basically you have to import an SVG file with the characters properly separated in individual layers. For hollow letters (with holes, like "O", "P", etc) you also have to transform the compound shape into a simple shape, which generally requires a boolean option. After import the kerning and other needed adjustments are generated through a user-adjustable macro, so the not-so-easy part is just on your vector editing program. RageTools Pro goes with two ready fonts, Atarified (similar to the original Atari font) and Verdana, which can be colored (fill and outline) very easily, so you won't always need to generate a new font. More will be added along time as well, and our ultimate goal is to have this as single-click as possible, so we're researching ways to add compound shape support and helper macros for the illustration softwares too.

    Have you checked "Fun Gallery"? All text is entirely generated with RageText:
    http://www.freakow.com/games/fungallery/fungallery.html

    Thanks for your questions lipana!
     
  30. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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  31. Yann

    Yann

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    Checking the Asset Store several times a day... can't wait for this great release !

    Btw, here is a suggestion for a future version : since your new text features look very promising, I think it could be interesting to create an input field prefab that would work just as a normal one, but in the 3D space : with IME support, a flashing cursor and text selection. This last feature has always been a big lack in all the available GUI add-ons for Unity, AFAIK.
     
  32. MaDDoX

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    Thanks Yann, I'm glad to say that RageTools Pro is now... LIVE! :)
    http://u3d.as/content/freakow/rage-tools-pro/2Rv

    Good point Yann, and that's one of the things we've talked about extensively. In a sense you can already do it, since you just need to set a regular string field to change the vector text generation, thus you can hook up to any simple key reading component and it'll do the job. Nevertheless, having input as a built-in feature would be nice indeed, especially for the automated (and customizable) cursor and text selection showing.
     
  33. MaDDoX

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    A user sent me a warning that this topic's first post still had outdated info on RageTools Pro, fixed.
     
  34. helioxfilm

    helioxfilm

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    When can you make a tutorial video on RageMagnet?
     
  35. gambit

    gambit

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    I don't rember a license agreement with the original rage tools, is there anything special I need to do or add to my games if I use rage tools now?
     
  36. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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    I'm a cooking a new tutorial video on Pivotools for split-parts character animation, then it's RageMagnet's tutorial time. My idea is showing how to rig, deform and animate an earthworm, enough to show all one need to know about magnet + constraint + Ik in action.

    Nothing at all, it uses the standard Asset Store license.
     
  37. outtoplay

    outtoplay

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    So.... Already have RageSpline. I would need to purchase Ragetools $70 and RageTools Pro $80 to use RageTools Pro?

    ouch.
     
  38. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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    You can simply say RageTools Pro cost is $150. Although I'm suspect to say, compared to what other similarly priced products in the Asset Store offer, it packs quite a punch. If you compare it to the cost of one of its similar packages like Anime Studio or Scaleform, then it's a dime tbh.
     
    Last edited: May 2, 2012
  39. MaDDoX

    MaDDoX

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    Hey guys, just a heads up that tomorrow is the last day of our super-promo. And now that we have acquired RageSpline from Juha Kiili and reduced RageSpline's cost to mere $55, you have until tomorrow to buy the entire suite for unbelievable $145 - almost 40% total savings from what it costed last month!

    Don't miss out the opportunity, besides RageIk, RageText and RageMagnet, remember the game-changer RageSprite component will be included in RageTools Pro as a free upgrade :) RageSprite works with incredible performance on mobile devices, our technology feeds dynamic batching to as low as 1 draw call without any user intervention, and of course being 100% true-vectors means you'll never have to redraw those sprites again! If you haven't seen it in action yet, check its first demo: