Question: Best pipeline to achieve modular, pseudo top-down, animated character rig
Overview
I'm working on a top-down scifi survival horror solo project and running into a wall. I need to find some way to build a modular, top-down character system so that I can easily focus on quickly creating a lot of gear/equipment/character customization options without necessarily hand-drawing each frame for resulting animations.
The perspective I'm working with is "Pseudo top-down" i.e. the entire character is visible and can move in all directions.
Context
- I'm using Aseprite for asset creation
- My characters are drawn on a 32x42 canvas
- Thus far all character pieces, hairstyles, clothing have been drawn and animated to fit over top of each other and be layered together.
- The game will be built on a 32x32 px "pixel-perfect" tile grid so my solution will need to support this.
Attempted Workflows
Thus far I've attempted two different workflows:
- Hand drawing every frame for every animation in Aseprite. I don't mind to do it but it restricts my armor/clothing to be entire sets - which is not really what I'm after. Also, it's incredibly time consuming which would be fine if I could still maintain modularity.
- Separate each piece of the character (arm, leg, torso, head) and rebuild the character in Unity - pretty much leaving me with built-in rigged 2d animation - which is pretty finicky and can be irritating to setup without importing PSB files and using Unity's built-in PSB file importer to set up/skin a character with multiple sprite libraries.
- Additionally, this animation style doesn't do well with movement toward/away from the camera. It's difficult to "sell" forward/backward movement with only 2d bones.
Solution?
Is there a workflow or something I'm missing? Surely I can't be the first to pursue something like this and I'm missing something?
Is it possible to build a 2d character rig at the appropriate scale and just assign sprites to each bone? Is it possible to do so and create decent looking movement animations in 4 directions? I'll attach a few images of a couple characters for context.
Thank you in advance for anybody who can offer insight/assistance!
