Fast and efficient 2D Animation

Discover Unity’s skeletal animation for 2D.

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All the tools you need included natively

Create smooth skeletal animation, directly within the Sprite Editor, with rigging, tessellation and bone creation. Use the PSD Importer to import character parts directly from multilayered artwork and animate the characters with keyframes or curves in the animation timeline. 2D Inverse Kinematics (IK) simplifies animation by automatically calculating bone positions and rotations required to achieve a target position.

Why use 2D Animation

Save time

With 2D Animation’s bone-based system, you can reuse sprites to bring characters to life, alter frame rate or modify the animation instantly. Using layered images with PSD Importer saves you additional time as you don’t have to export sprites individually and reassemble the parts.

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Smooth and adaptable animation

Sometimes an animation needs to change at runtime, for example, to create a smooth transition, to adjust the animation speed to the character speed, or to make the character’s feet react to the ground. Discover how Inverse Kinematics can help immerse your characters in your world.

More animation with fewer assets

Traditional animation requires considerable memory for large characters and high frame rates. With skeletal animation, you can make all the animations from a single sprite: reuse animations to create variations by changing individual sprites or adding customization.

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Key features

Mesh and bone generation

With Sprite Editor, auto generate or manually create the mesh for your Sprites, create a hierarchy of bones and define the weights of those bones over the vertices of the mesh.

Native solution for all platforms

Compatibility of 2D Animation with newer Editor versions and the tools ecosystem is supported. Cross-platform development and seamless integration helps reduce dependency issues or additional import and exporting work.

Animation tools

Animate directly in the Scene view, using the Dopesheet view or animation curves, and trigger Events. You can use Animator to handle animation transitions, or Timeline to make cutscenes orchestrating several animation clips. The Particle System adds effects or 2D physics for realistic behavior of some character parts.

Sprite Atlas

Consolidates several textures into one, reducing draw calls and optimizing performance. Include your 2D animated characters and other elements in the same atlas. You determine how the textures are packed with configurations per platform, and an API gives you full control over the tool.

Advanced features and API

IK aids animation by calculating the chain of bone movements required to achieve a target position. With Sprite Swap you can change entire characters or just parts using the same animation and rigging. And so much more.

The latest graphics features

Enhance your 2D characters with the new 2D Lights system for volumetric effects with normal maps, Shader Graph to create shaders visually, or Burst to greatly boost performance.

Resources

Unite Copenhagen 2019

Get an overview of 2D rigging in Unity and understand when to use it. You’ll learn if it’s the right solution for your specific use case.

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Documentation

See how you can make use of 2D Animation and its various features. The Scripting API section details how to use the APIs in the package.

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PSD Importer

Import layered Photoshop files directly into Unity. This is a great timesaver when you create characters with several limbs and parts for use with 2D Animation.

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Sprite Rigging at GDC 2019

Learn about the new unified Sprite Rigging workflows, and get a sneak peek of the 2D Lighting system.

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2D Tips Lighting Round

Learn productivity tips and performance tricks for 2D projects to get the most out of Unity 2D tools.

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2D sample project

Lost Crypt is a 2D side-scroller sample project that showcases all of Unity’s 2D tools. It uses 2D Animation to animate the main character.

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The evolution of 2D game tools

Explore how Unity’s 2D toolset has evolved to include a host of powerful graphics features such as dynamic lighting, materials, shaders, and post-processing.

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Unity believes in 2D

Our native tools are optimized for 2D workflows and designed to reduce roundtripping, accelerate productivity, and empower teams to bring stunning 2D worlds to life across platforms.

Discover 2D tools