2D Skeleton Animation

Is it possible in Unity2D, to without any 3rd party add ons, create a 2D Skeleton animation? If so, are their any resources on this?

If a 3rd party tool is required, which ones are free? I don’t seem to find anything related to Unity2D and Skeleton Animations but a few expencive programs and some people who managed to do it without said tools.

There is no explicit 2D skeletal animation built in to Unity Currently(4.3). But, you can do basically the same thing using the Transform Hierarchy.

You would setup a gameobject hierarchy in the same way you would create a bone hierarchy. When an object is rotated/scaled, all children will rotate/scale around the local (0,0). This is like the starting point of each bone.

Then you would add an animator object to the top-most parent object. Finally, you can create your animations.