Three Free and Useful Unity Tools

Unity is a great choice if you are looking to make a game easily and for multiple platforms from the same code base. The asset store allows one to find assets whether those are scripts, 3D models, tools, sprites, or anything else you could imagine. There are both free and paid assets on the store. Today I want to talk about three of my favorite and useful tools for Unity. The best part is all of these are free, so strap in and let's get started!

1. Anima2D | The most advanced 2D Skeletal Animation for Unity.

The first tool I want to talk about is called Anima2D. Anima2D is a free asset on the Unity store allowing one to easily rig and animate sprites straight from the unity editor. The tool is similar to other 2D animation programs such as Spine or Synfig Studio. I love this one because instead of having to animate in an external program and then import files, it is all taken care of without ever leaving Unity.


Interested in learning more? Check out the official documentation or view this youtube series on the tool:

2. Cinemachine | Unified procedural camera system for Unity.

Second on the list is Cinemachine. This bad boy can take care of everything related to cameras for you. Just import the Cinemachine package add a target and boom you have a smart camera that can follow transforms, add damping, and smoothly transition to other cameras in a scene. This can easily be used in tandem with the timeline editor to make dynamic in game cinematics and much more.

Want to dive in? Check out the official documentation or view this Unity youtube series on the tool:

3. Tiled and Tiled2Unity | Tile maps in Unity.

This one is actually made up of two technologies used together to import tiled maps into Unity. Tiled is a free tile map editor that has a ton of neat features including custom properties, collision editing, and more. Tiled2Unity takes this Tiled data and translates it to a usable prefab in Unity. The really cool thing is Tiled2Unity will also translate your collision data into a collision mesh in Unity. I highly recommend checking this out if you are interested in making tile based 2d Unity games.

Once again, if interested check out the documentation for Tiled for Tiled information and visit Tiled2Unity for instructions on using Tiled2Unity. Here is a youtube video explaining the process.

Thanks for reading!

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