What you'll learn:
- Create custom bone-based animated characters in Unity 3d
- Work with sprite sheets in Unity. We'll cover importing, slicing and setting up the pivot points.
- Assemble bone based 2D characters, organize all the body parts in Hierarchy and prepare for animating.
- Create Idle, Walk and Jump animations for your character. We'll make a Jump animation with an interesting technique that involves Blend Trees.
- Configure transitions between animations in the Animator component.
- Write a simple controller script that will let our character move on the level and jump.
- Use ScriptableObject assets to store outfits of your character.
- Apply outfits from your custom-made assets to your character changing the way he looks.
- Display extra clothing and decoration items like bracelets, necklaces as a part of your character's outfit.
- Make characters with joints that will be able to “turn into” differently shaped characters while using the same animations.
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…).
