kestrelm / creature_unity

2D Skeletal Animation Unity Runtimes for Creature

Creature-Runtimes

This is the runtime for Creature, the advanced 2D Skeletal and Mesh Animation Tool. This runtime is for Unity 5.0 and up. It allows you to load in, play back and control your authored Creature Characters in the Unity environment. Mecanim support is also provided.

For more information on how to use the runtimes, please head over to this site

Features of the Unity Runtime

• Support for both JSON and Fast Loading Binary FlatBuffers formats
• Optional High performance Point Caching playback
• Skin/Item Swapping for different character meshes/regions
• Animated Region Ordering
• Game Agents + Controllers for customized Gameplay code
• MecAnim Support
• In Game 2 Bone IK
• Bend Physics support for dangling bone chains via Unity PhysX
• Smooth Animation Blending/Transitions
• Unity UI Canvas Renderer Support
• Support for Creature Flow Particle FX for Flipbook Style Animations
• Gap Step Animation Compression Support
• High Performance CreaturePack variant for character crowds, background scenes, secondary characters
• Builds on all platforms ( PC/Mac/Linux/Console/Mobile )

Notes on deploying Creature Animations in Unity

Please note you have the following options to deploy Creature animations in Unity:

• Standard CreaturePlugin, all the features for main character gameplay requirements
• CreaturePack, for character crowds, NPCs and scenarios where very high performance playback + loading is required
• FBX, you can export a character as a FBX asset from Creature if it just uses Bone Motors ( Bone Skinning ), allowing you to use the full Unity Skeletal Animation pipeline

Deploying for iOS and other platforms

If you are having issues with deploying for platforms like iOS ( UnusedBytecodeStripper2.exe did not run properly etc. ), you should give the following a go:

1. Remove the CreatureFlatData.dll from the Distro directory

2. Create a new folder in your project and include the files:

Creature FlatBuffers Source

3. Build and deploy your project

This should remove any sort of DLL dependency on your project.

Creature 2D Side-Scrolling Platformer Demo

This is a simple 2D Side-Scrolling Demo authored in Creature and Unity. Characters are animated with the Creature 2D Animation Tool and brought to life in the Unity Game Engine using the Creature Unity Plugin.

Download the full Unity source + assets of the demo here.

Creature Unity Game UI Demo

This is a demonstration of multiple Creature Animated characters playing in a reconstructed Game Starting Menu UI scene. The Reaper character and even the buttons are all authored and animated from within Creature.

Video of the Demo is here.

Download the full Unity source + assets of the demo here.

Artwork Credits

Reaper: Katarzyna Zalecka. CC-BY-SA 3.0, Ancient Beast

Background: David Revoy, CC BY 3.0

Buttton Frame: Ironthunder, CC-BY 3.0

Hummingbirds! ( Creature Pack Demo )

Hummingbirds! is a demo done using the lighter weight Creature Pack Plugin. It showcases an entire scene ( flowers, birds ) all animated in Creature and played back in Unity using the plugin in real-time.

Creature Pack Plugin: https://github.com/kestrelm/Creature_Unity/tree/master/CreaturePack

Live WebGL Demo: http://creature.kestrelmoon.com/WebDemo/BirdPacksDemo/

Demo Trailer: https://youtu.be/NpaTAHtHU_E

License

The Creature Runtimes operate under 2 License types depending on whether you own a Licensed copy of Creature or not.

• People who own a licensed copy of Creature: You use the standard Creature License included with the runtime code. TLDR: You are free to publish/modify/sell your product with the Creature runtimes without needing to state you are using the runtimes/put the copyright notice in your code/app. If you already have been using the Creature runtimes as a licensed owner of Creature, nothing changes :)

• Everyone else: The runtimes are released under the very permissive Apache License :)

Both Licenses allow for private use and do not require any disclosure of your source code.

creature_unity's Issues

Strange assignment in CreatureModule.Creature

global_uvs[i + 1] = global_uvs[i + 1];
something is wrong there...

Unity Static Event Triggering

In CreatureGameController.cs:
public static event eventTrigger OnEventTrigger;

This needs to have the "static" tag removed from it. With static enabled, if you ever have multiple Creature-animated sprites in the scene, you will have events triggering on all of them when it's triggered for a single instance. Without static, it properly triggers on a single Creature instance.

Unity Animation Event Triggering

In the CreatureFrameCallback class, this line:
if((int)Math.Round(frameIn) >= frameIn)

needs to be changed to:

if((int)Math.Round(frameIn) >= frame)

Otherwise, animation events trigger randomly/sporadically, instead of at the intended time.

Unity SetActiveAnimation and Blending

CreatureRenderer.SetActiveAnimation() needs to call creature_manager.SetAutoBlending(false);, otherwise if you blend two animations, and later call SetActiveAnimation in order to do a non-blending transition, it will loop the previously blended animation improperly (since blending will still be set to true) instead of using the new animation you set.

Overlay Animations

Hello! Like most of game studios we have this problem using Creature:

We have a character with 4 animations : a "Run" animation, a
"Jump"animation, a "Shoot with Gun" animation and a "Shoot an arrow with
elbow" animation.

In theory we should make the animation Run( or jump) being OVERWRITTEN by
the animation " Shoot with gun" JUST for the arms whenever it happens at
any time! Usually this is achieved with the Layers in Mecanim in Unity.
But How Can I manage this situation? You don't have any tuturial about
it, in your tutorial you simply blend between two animations which is
almost never the case in games where you need to change the shooting
weapon.

How can we address this? Thank you very much.

Unity Layers Override

It has been added the functionality of overriding an animation for certain bones ( useful in runner games, where we have a layer for the arms shooting and the lower layer for the body) but this is accessible only via code.

In unity in mecanim there is already a Layer system where one can set Override/Additive layer where you can set the animation on different layers and it the upper layer has an animation just for the arms it will automatically override the animation for the arms at the lower layer.

It would be cool to make use of this in mecanim instead of the code.

MISSING SetActiveItemSwap(String region_name, int swap_idx) in CREATURE PACK

public void SetActiveItemSwap(String region_name, int swap_idx)
{
active_uv_swap_actions[region_name] = swap_idx;
}

MISSING SetOverrideRegionAlpha for CreaturePACK

// Sets an override opacity/alpha value for a region
public void SetOverrideRegionAlpha(string region_name_in, float value_in)
{
region_override_alphas[region_name_in] = value_in;
}