Unity 2D animations how to animate many sprites?

Question

I'm code newbie but I'm doing my first Unity game. I have one problem, which does not allow me to continue doing my game. I have vector top-down soldiers and currently for every part (life bar, head, body, gun and selection circle) I have sprite sheets for animations (like attacking by sword) because he can at the same time eg. attacking and losing life but not walking or be selected. For every part I have separate GameObjects and Animators, like this:

soldier

--lifeBar

--head

--body

--gun

--selection

This make big number of GameObjects which isn't good for efficient I think. Is there another way to do it? Eg. can I animate few sprites in one animator as I wrote it has to look? And if I can animate sprite position instead making big sprite sheets for every animations?

It would be GREAT if I could have one gameobject per soldier and every soldier have one animator which animate few sprites (layers?) positions.

Thank you in advance, this small problem does not allow me to continue doing my game, I very much hope that someone will know how to solve this problem.

something to consider, many teams use 2DToolkit for exactly this purpose. It makes it ridiculously easy to do "sprite sheet animations". although Unity's own 2D is fantastic, it's still, we find, essential to use 2DToolkit, it is ridiculously easier for ordinary sprite animations. — Fattie

Cabby Cabby · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-06T19:23:59

You might also want to look into Spine (http://esotericsoftware.com/). It's great for character animations and I found it pretty easy to integrate with Unity.

Unity 2D animations how to animate many sprites?

1 Answers