Simple and Advanced Topics of Animating 2D Characters

A comprehensive and easy to learn guide to make 2D bone-based characters from scratch.

Description

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…).

Who this course is for:

• This course is for people who are starting out with Unity development and want to know more about making 2D platformer characters. It provides some basic info as well as some advanced techniques for making interesting animated 2D characters. You should be familiar with basic C# to read and understand the scripts that we use in this course.