2D Character Design for Unity
A few months back, I designed a character for a Unity project that didn’t go very far. I thought I would share some of the character design process here and a video that shows the character in motion within Unity.
1.I started with some rough sketches in a simple drawing app, called Mischief, on the Surface Pro. Mischief has an endless canvas that enables you to pan and zoom around to your heart’s content. It’s a great tool for quick sketches and brainstorming design ideas. You aren’t limited to the boundaries of an artboard and you can quickly pan and zoom to an empty space on the canvas to draw different variations of your designs. Below is the sketch of the character I decided to move forward with.
2. Once I had a rough design that I liked, I moved to Affinity Designer to create a more polished vector illustration of the character. You can see in the screenshot below that the character was created using layers for individual body parts and facial features.
3. The layers in Affinity Designer were then exported as individual PNGs. This is necessary for building a 2D character for skeletal animation in Unity.
4. The character pieces were imported into Unity and prepared for animation as sprites. The character parts were pieced back together within an empty game object in Unity and I used a plugin called Anima 2D to apply bones and IKs to the individual sprites. Then, I took advantage of Unity’s Animator Component to create animation clips for walking and idle states. I used Playmaker to handle the programming for the character. Below, you’ll see a video showing the end result running within Unity.
