13. Applying skins to your characters

With the new v2.2 version, PaperZD now allows you to apply 'skins' to your characters, enabling you to quickly change how they look while maintaining the same animation logic that has been previously coded.

Changing skins is the perfect way to:

• Change attires of your character.
• Modify equipment or body-parts on composite sprites.
• Create a master AnimationBlueprint for enemies that behave the same, and just changing the way they look.

You can create a skin by right-clicking the Animation Source that will be affected by the asset and clicking the "Create AnimationSkin Asset"

This will now create a new AnimationSkin file. This file is responsible of mapping the animation played to the custom flipbook you want to render instead, allowing you to change how to display your character in runtime, without having to modify your animation logic.

The file comes pre-filled with all the animations that the source currently has registered, enabling you to quickly map the animation to another flipbook instead.

If at any point you add more animations to your source, you can quickly sync the skin file to it to add any remaining animation that isn't mapped.

For multi-directional characters, the array of animations matches the 'Animation Node X' name when selecting the direction on the editor, and starts on the topmost node, moving in a clockwise manner.

To apply the skin you simply call the following node, specifying the asset to use.

The "Layer" argument is used when creating composite animations, which will be seen on the next chapter. For now simply use "Layer 0" which points to the main render component.