A good way to animate non frame by frame sprites?

I see that the Ubi art engine uses bones to animate 2d characters.

I believe I see that cocos 2d uses bones to help animate characters (2nd picture) http://www.cocos2d-x.org/wiki/Animation_Editor_Workspace

What does unity have to help animate characters (or anything) made up of different sprite pieces?

--*edit addition*

I see the stickied post where the guy uses what appear to be bones but does he have to import that skeleton and then just used it to help create baked in sprite animations or are the bones linked in and can be used to retarget animation to 2d characters on the same bone system?
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/2d-puppet-rigging-tips-tricks.245564/

Also I do see sprites and bones http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/release-free-unity-sprites-and-bones-2d-skeleton-animation.219915/ a open source addon

There has to be some tool to aid non frame by frame 2d animation though right?

------*edit again!*

So a quick google for 2D bone animation followed by hours of reading will reveal a bunch of results of people scrambling for nice 2d bone animation in Unity in most cases 3rd party jerry rigged (puns?). I'm rather surprised Unity doesn't have some version built in with its lovely base 2D tools. Its a future thought though, still open to any thoughts and recommendations.

 

Hi, I think this might be what your looking for: http://www.puppet2d.com/.

Its made by the same guy at UniArt (Jamie Niman). Have a look at this article for reference: http://learnunity2d.com/puppet-2d/.

Hope this helped.

.Pollux

 

Yes, the point of building that method was for retargeting, and reusing. But it is not "Bones" in IK sense, it is just hierarchal structure. Rotating the hand will also rotate its children along with it. But you can't pull the hand and have the arm stretch.

For ik, Spine or Puppet2d are good options.

 

Im using spriter+spriter2unity asset for that.

 

Delightful. Puppet 2D is interesting option. It looks like it requires converting your sprite to a mesh, might cause a small accommodation in code reuse but interesting. Great to see someone else making the direct ubi art connection. I'm investigating more.

Spine seems streamlined and nice but it seems to withold semi basic animation features unless you go pro but the ease of import is its other bonus.

Spriter is very affordable, I saw the importer is being currently developed and bugs being worked out. A quick question, which you may know the answers to vakabaka. Does the Spriter importer allow you to use packed images? I know the Spriter 2d program prefers individual images (it can't recognize a sprite sheet and pull out the sprites). Can you easily use a sheet of packed sprites with the animation imported? (Meaning create the animation in spriter then use a packed version of the sprites that have been identified in Unity, or does the fact that there not the identical file pattern mean you have to code in a texture swap?)

Thanks for getting back and for the answers everyone.

 

Hallo,
I can be wrong, but i think spriter do not support packed images now. In next build b9 spriter-pro will support texture packer.

2.Question
if i have made spriter prefab, so it was possible later to change sprites in this prefab. You can use packed images too (if unity support them).

Just try this Spriter have nice free version. I have looked for one animations tool too. But i didnt see, that puppet2d have one demo version, so i decided to try spriter.

If you find something better then say here

ps. sorry for my english, i am using it rare.

 

I use Unity Sprites and Bones for my 2d animation.