New Unity 2019 2D Sprite Rigging and Lighting Tools
With the latest 2019.1 update the Unity team has seriously upgraded the 2D toolset of the editor:
Seems like a lot of those tools were inspired by the Rayman Legends engine. Something I was drooling over 5 years ago, hoping one day Unity would implement some of those. And they finally did!
It really makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, remembering how most of those automated 2D tools and thingies were not available when I was working on Run and Rock-it Kristie in the freeware version of Unity 4 (which back then lacked even the Sprite packaging functionality!) and had to be either developed from scratch or achieved with some cool Asset Store stuff you would need to purchase and integrate into your product.
Oh, The Tools... The Tools...
IK and rigging with bone weighting? Check:
Manual sprite atlasing and setup? Check (atlasing is vital for mesh batching and draw call reduction):
Sprite assembly and animation? Check:
Dynamic level-building tools? Check (with a modded version of the Ferr2D asset):
Dynamic lighting? Check! — With up to 4 live vertex lights and light culling based on camera distance to make sure the game would run at a stable 60 fps on an iPhone 4 (heavily reliant on the amazing but now deprecated Core Framework asset by echoLogin):
It Was... Fun!
You know what I also remember? Almost every day working on the game, I felt excited and driven. It was FUN. Even when it was challenging to solve some technical issues (there were a lot of those, especially for a beginner) or work around Unity limitations or bugs, it felt truly rewarding and would give such a powerful motivation boost that I would continue working until the end.
Until the release.
But the "serious" CG movie stuff I'm doing now? Honestly? Meh. It's so slow and clunky compared to my previous game development experience. Everything needs to be either cached or rendered... I'm also having some grave issues with hair simulation, which I wasn't able to overcome in the last 6+ months. Many operations in the "classic" world of 3D editors are still either single-threaded, unstable, or require some very specific knowledge or particular and elaborate setup... It's almost no fun! No fun means there's much, much less motivation to continue.
It's a problem.
Therefore, this July I'll be checking out the latest Unity Engine and seeing whether most of what I'm doing right now could be ported into Unity. Starting with simulation and scene assembly, and hopefully ending up animating, rendering, and applying post effects right within the Unity Editor where everything is real-time and fun! I miss the real-time aspect! Oh boy, do I miss the ability to tweak materials and see the more or less finalized render of the scene even during assembly. The ability to import assets and build "smart" prefabs (like Softimage Models, but with interactivity and intrinsic scene-aware scripting via MonoBehaviour) etc...
I miss you, Unity!