Hi,
I’m working on a 2D game in Unity using skeletal animation and I’m trying to figure out a scalable way to handle character visual variants (especially hair).
My setup idea:
- Characters are animated with bones (head, body, arms, etc.)
- Hair is animated using bones as well (strand-like movement)
- I want multiple hair styles (potentially dozens)
The problem I’m running into is this:
I saw a demo where each hand pose had its own set of bones (e.g. thumbs-up hand vs open hand), and both bone sets were animated simultaneously in the idle animation, with only one being visually used.
Character and it's rig from Unity 2D animation demo
This made me think about my own system:
If I follow the same approach for hair, I would end up with:
- a separate bone rig per hairstyle
- potentially hundreds of unused bone sets being animated at runtime
That feels obviously wrong and not scalable.
Character and it's rig from my game
So my questions are:
- Should hair ever have its own separate bone rigs per style?
- How do production games typically handle animated 2D hair with many variants?
I feel like I’m overcomplicating this and accidentally heading toward a system that won’t scale.
Thanks for any advice