Hi

How does one use animated characters with bones in a 2d game ?

Let me clarify my question:

So I know from what I have researched that you can have bone animations in flash and also make games with it, but flash handles bone animations by itself (you create the actual animations within the program).

But for software that don't have such options by default, is there a way to create the animations in another software import them somehow? Or is there a trick to do it? Or do you just have to make your own framework for this?

Thanks

It wouldn't be difficult to implement programmatically, but I would imagine there are a million tools for it.

Are you looking for a suggestions for a tool?

http://esotericsoftware.com/

You honestly don't need Spline from Esotoric, as useful as it might be.

Essentially, all a bone is, is technically a transformation matrix which effects multiple different vertexes. In most circumstances, the visual representation of a bone is just a symbol for the artist.


When you transform a hierarchy of bones, you tend to start with the root node, and multiply them all the way to the end.

Here is a resource.

http://what-when-how.com/advanced-methods-in-computer-graphics/skeletal-animation-advanced-methods-in-computer-graphics-part-1/

I think he's asking for software to set up animations. He seems to have disappeared though, so we may never know.

I did a hands on with Spine article a few months back and showed how to use the results in a LibGDX game. Spine has runtimes for many of the most popular game engines.

If Spine aint your thing, there is also Spriter, Creature and the free Dragonbones package. You could roll your own solution but that seems to me a bad use of time and a classic example of NIHS.

Wow, nice article. Thank you very much.

In my case, I've been working in some animations in flash, and I've send movieclips from Flash to DragonBones properly; like Spine has an armature feature in order to work with bones or hierarchy.

The second step is to send this animations to Unity (I would prefer to not animate in Unity). Also, I know that I can comunicate DragonBones with Spine, but the free version doesn't allow to export the archives (I need an image and a .json file) to Unity, and this is a feature very nice that I'm trying to find or solve directly from DragonBones (becasuse it also exports this kind of files: .png and .json) but I haven't achieved good results.

This is the asset that links the Spine work with Unity: http://esotericsoftware.com/files/runtimes/unity/spine-unity.unitypackage.

So, has anybody tried this somehow with satisfactory ending? It would be very nice to me to find a manner, and I would be very gratefull if somebody can help me.

Thank you