This course provides a
full guide on creating animated 2D characters in Unity.
There are 2 main
techniques of animating 2D characters: frame-based and bone-based. We
will create a fully functional 2D character with each of these
methods. You will learn how to bring your 2d characters to life by
making them move and jump around in the scene.
The material in this
course is divided into 4 Sections.
Section 1 features a short
introduction to the course.
In Section 2, we will
focus on frame-based technique. You will learn a lot about
spritesheets. We will go through all the stages of working with
spritesheets from their creation to slicing and creating animations
for our characters in Unity from sliced images. We will create a
simple script that will let us control our character in the scene.
Frame-based workflow is mostly used with pixel art characters and in
all the other cases when you have the art for your character's
animations arranged in separate frame images.
In Section 3, we will
switch to a more advanced bone-based approach. You will learn how to
manage animated characters that are assembled from separate body
parts. Using bone-based approach will let us customize our characters
by adding facial features and clothing items to them. It also offers
a lot of flexibility because you can come up with new animations for
your character in the middle of your game's development. In this
Section, we will create a fully animated bone-based character that we
can dress up in the next Section of this course.
In Section 4, we will
cover character customization. I have prepared 2 clothing kits and we
will try them on our bone-based character model from the previous
Section. You will learn how to change movement velocity and animation
speed of any given Animator state of your character. Several lectures
will be dedicated to making our bone-based character jump. We will
use an interesting technique of creating multiple jump animations and
showing them through a Blend Tree in Unity. You will learn an easy
way to create one way platforms in Unity.
By the end of this course, you will have learned and acquired the tools you need to create your own fully-animated characters.
I have tried to save the
project that I was working in as often as I can so that you can
easily pick up the material from any point in this course. All these
projects and the assets used to create characters will be available
for download with this course.
What are the requirements?
- You can be an absolute beginner with Unity to take this course. This course is very beginner-friendly and I try to explain everything that I am doing as much as I can. We spend most of the time working in Unity Editor. This course is also very light in terms of coding; it features just one script that is created in C# and everything that is happening in this script is explained line-by-line.
- You should install Unity3d to develop the application that we are making in this course. I am using Unity 5.3 to develop the game project in this course.
What am I going to get from this course?
- Add animated 2d characters to your game.
- Along with this course you will get access to a huge archive of 2D game assets from the game that is called Glitch converted from flash into a PNG format and ready for use in any of your Unity game projects.
- Create both frame-based and bone-based character animations in Unity without using any external tools.
- Learn how to make your 2d characters move and jump in the scene.
- Customize your bone-based characters by adding clothing items and facial features.
- Create an “idle filler” animation. If your character is idle for too long, transition to another animation to amuse and surprise your players.
- You will learn how to manage Animator state machines in Unity to transition between different animations that your character can perform.
- You will learn how to set up one way platforms, which is a must have feature for any platformer game.
- You will learn a lot about spritesheets. We will go through all the stages of working with spritesheets: from creating a spritesheet and slicing it into separate sprites in Unity all the way to turning all these sprites into animations on your character.
- You will get a fully functional Unity project of the application created in this tutorial.
What is the target audience?
- This course is for people who are interested in making platformer-style games or any other character-based 2D games. You will learn how to create animated 2D characters and make them move and jump around in your game.
- Also, if you enjoy the aesthetic of the art assets that are used in this course, it is definitely for you. To create characters, I use assets from the game that is called Glitch. You will also get access to a huge archive of art asset files from Glitch along with this course. We have done some work to convert all these amazing assets into high resolution PNG images so that you can use them in any of your game projects.
