Being able to use light effects on a 2D image within the game is pretty huge for making it look pretty and making effects or plot devices (think lightning on a dark and stormy night). You can also light it as a mesh (the default Sprite Renderer cannot be lit). With the Blender approach it’s a mesh in Unity not a Sprite so you can do all the transforms that mesh’s support.

Which also means that it’s harder to adjust them to react to other actors, objects, and scene elements once you get it into the game. But the down side is that you have to import the animations into Unity and it’s pretty hard to modify once they are there. With the Blender animation option you are animating in Blender (which I like much more than animating in Unity). The two biggest differences for me is that 1. The differences between them at the effort and usability/flexibility layer are many and subtle. I’m looking to see if there are any advantages to using Blender as a 2D Animation tool using meshes over Unity’s Spline Sprite based animation system. This is the end result of the process described: Sprightly Spring Deer This is a follow on from the workflow discussed in the previous post: Preparing 2D Art for Animation.

Blender 2d