Simple and Advanced Topics of Animating 2D Characters | Free Udemy Course

This 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.

In this lecture you will be able to download additional resources.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this Section we will add more visual elements to our battle scene: player portraits, mana pools, a rope to measure time until the end of the turn, a simple background image. We’ll create one more prefab that will represent creatures in our game. We’ll have our first discussion on how dragging of cards and creatures works in this game. And we’ll use a tweening engine (in our case – DOTween Engine) for the first time.

For bone-based characters correct sorting order in the scene is very important. This becomes apparent as soon as you bring more than one character into your scene. Your characters might get interlaced in a number of weird ways when they walk on top of each other. In this lecture, we’ll discuss several ways of fixing these issues.

In this lecture, we’ll take a look at a script that helps us resolve sorting order issues if all of your characters are on the same Sorting Layer. At the core of this script there are two methods. One of them recursively searches for all the game objects that our character consists of, another method searches the list of game objects that we can obtain with the previous method for all the SpriteRenderers.

In this lecture, we’ll continue inspecting the SoringOrderFix.cs script. Now that we know how to obtain the list of all the SpriteRenderers that our character has, fixing the sorting order is relatively simple. We have to modify the Order in Layer by adding a certain value to it.

In this lecture, we’ll take a look at an interesting technique that will let you create your own custom assets in your Unity project that will help you hold some data (for example, stats of your characters or – like in our case – all the information about their appearance). Using custom assets is very convenient for many reasons. You can easily create them through the right-click context menu in your Assets folder and edit them in the inspector.

In this lecture, we will try to apply the info that is contained in our OutfitAsset to our existing character using an OutfitApplier.cs script. We'll use the most basic functions of this script that might be generally called “character re-skinning”. The inner workings of this script as well as some of the more advanced functions that it provides will be discussed throughout the remaining Lectures of this course.

In this lecture, we will take a look at the most basic functions of our OutfitApplier.cs script that allow to re-skin characters (change sprites on body parts and clothing items that already exist on our character prefab).

In this lecture, we will try to add some extra items to our character like necklaces, belts or bracelets - items that were not present on our character`s prefab. We’ll study the part of the OutfitApplier.cs script that is responsible for displaying these extra items.

In this lecture, we’ll start making a more complex, improved character with “joints”. Joints will allow us to use the same animated model for characters that are differently shaped (wider shoulders, shorter legs, longer arms, etc…). I will show you how to transform our existing character into a character with joints by adding a couple of extra empty game objects in Hierarchy. You’ll find out about a useful script/tool that allows you to re-establish the connections in your animations after you made some changes in the Hierarchy.

This lecture we’ll create an extra OutfitAsset, but this time we’ll use another sprite for the Torso of our character, which will result in him having wider shoulders. We’ll configure the OutfitAsset and our new character with joints to work both for our previous skinny characters and for this new wide-shouldered one. 

Thanks a lot for watching this course. It’s been a pleasure making this course for you. And, of course, good luck with your interesting 2D games and unique 2D characters!