Recommendation for skinnable 2d top down sprite animations

Unity Courses Ask
#1

Hi there, I have done some researching and tried some things but would like some advice to profit from your experiences… in oder to not waste time on a futile approach for what I am trying to achieve.

My goal is

  • having a base humanoid top down sprite which is animated for walking and attacking in 4 directions with melee and ranged weapons.
  • being able to reskin this sprite in various degrees (ideally limb by limb), in oder to create different types of enemies and characters

If this proves to be working I would go along a similar way for different body forms such as quadrupeds, spiderlike creatures etc.

My idea is to have 2d top down pixel art assets which I could skin the animations with in order to create variety.

What would be a good way to aproach this?
Is there a course or tutorial you can recommend that cover such an aproach?

I am somewhat experienced with c# and with unity and know my way around photoshop, so this is something I‘d like to build on…

All help is appreciated :grinning:

#2

Hi,

From what I read, this sounds as if you are looking for a course on how to create your own assets. Unity is just a game engine. You import your assets, and that’s it. You don’t draw anything in Unity like you would, for example, with GIMP.

Maybe the following course could be interesting for you:

See also:

#3

Hi Nina, thanks for the heads up :slight_smile :slightly_smiling_face:

I am afraid, but I may have phrased my question badly.
I know how to create assets in aesprite, photoshop etc, fortunately, this is not my issue.

What I would like advice on is: how to set up a system in unity, which requires me to animate (using unitys animator) only once with placeholder sprites for legs, arms, torso head etc. And then being able to use this animation for all my humanoids and swap out the placeholders for the limbs by code in order to make characters look diferently without having to create sprites and animations for all combinations of all variants of clothing and equipment and body forms…

Is a technique or approach for something like this covered in depth in any course?
Or does maybe someone from the community have any advice from experience on how to do that? I could go for YouTube where there are some tutorials for similar things … but I’d like to avoid having to test 17 things and fail 16 times before finding a good aproach :slight_smile:

#4

No, that’s not covered in our courses.

But maybe this tutorial might be a good start:

This might also be interesting:

Once you did that, you could do some research to learn if and how it is possible to swap sprites during runtime. Maybe you’ll have to test a few things in your project.

Also please feel free to ask our helpful community of students for advice over on our Discord chat server. :slight_smile:

#5

Thats great advice, thanks Nina, I will look into this!

#6

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