A powerful Sprite animating tool in the works

Hi all,

I've spent over a year now creating a tool that will let artists and game designers create the sorts of animtions found in classic Genesis games like Vectorman ad Alien soldier OR modern masterpieces like Odin Sphere for the PS2!

The tool is just today being sent to some artist friends to begin the beta testing/feedback stage.

The tool lets you create animations by combining many small images into individual animation frames. Each part can be moved, scaled, rotated, and changed in translucency. each part can also be switched between normal drawng mode, Add drawing mode, or subtract. This method is very fast for the artist, and extremely efficient for file and memory spce.

Not only does this tool let you create the animations, but it lets you put unlimited colision rectangles and "action points" per frame.

I'm hoping one or more the the briliant programmers that are part of this Construct community will create a plug in for Construct that will allow all of us to benifit from this tool. (I'm working on a Game in Construct)

For those interrested in this tool, you can download a set of short videos I've recorded showing the tool and how it works.

you can download those videos here: (sorry its a big zip file..over 100 megs)

http://www.holymonkeystudio.com/temp/SpritER%20vids.zip

Please leave feedback and help encourage the great extension developers here to help make this tool work with Construct.

Thanks much

Can you export the animations frame by frame as PNG/Gif/Sprite Sheet?

This is my first post on these forums, I signed up just to comment on your post.

I've downloaded & watched your videos & based on what I saw this is an excellent tool. Per frame animation is preferred over something tween based, I've been looking (and have found) tools like this one in many places across the internet, all of differing features. I have a few suggestions for your tool.

By the way, my interest in this tool would be strictly for animation purposes, apart from needing to integrate it into an engine or game.

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I'm not clear on if this already exists or not, but replacing images within an animation, like adding or subtracting parts (like say a head at differing angles). If it doesn't already exist, it's a must.

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For the Part Info: dialogue (when importing lone images), one feature you could add (& it isn't necessary but it would be incredibly useful) is Mesh Deformation.

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Onion Skinning would be a preferable feature (choose number of frames shown & which frames, like forward and/or back).

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Not sure this exists either- Export frames or save as animation images, for example a series of GIF's or PNG's sans the data hierarchy: not the pieces, but the whole character frame images (with background transparency, possibly resolution options).

All that said, your application would be very useful to allot of people, please let us know of your progress.

Thanks for the responses guys,

I do plan on putting in a feature to export the frames as PNG images. (although ironically this is not really the intent of the tool, Itr certianly still has uses)

The onion skin is a great Idea.. I'll definately impliment that after taking care of polish and bugs.

thAnks much for the great suggestions.

I looked through the videos and it does look like a pretty good piece of software. Being able to set up hitboxes and action points like that would be very helpful.

How does it work when you're finished and want to export your work and use it?

If you could get this to work with Construct I'd probably use it.

Right now the tool spits out a plain english INI file... I'll be working with one or more programmers to have a plug-in made for Construct that would allow Construct to import and use all the data from this tool.

Once my tool has all its core features finished and is well debugged I will be creating as much press as possible for it and trying to encourage as many game authoring engines as possible to develope support for what my tool exports.

Wish me luck

Interesting. Will this be a commercial, free or opensource tool?

I am releasing this tool with all the features you see in the video and actually several more features for free. (once its fully features and debugged) I hope to eventually release a commercial version with even more features mostly related to making workflow even faster and more comfortabe for an undecided but very modest fee. (this is mostly to give a good excuse to users to give me a little financial support than anything...the free verson will have all the important features. )

This fee would be in hopes of supporting my efforts to do two things: 1) spend as much time as possibe building support for my tool for as many game engines as possible and 2)making a brilliant WYSIWYG multi layer tile map/level editor tool. (also initially for Construct, then for any other game engine people want to build support for.

I'm actually building this sprite tool using Multimedia Fusion 2 Devoper.. It's possible once I start making a 2.0 version of the tool that I will releas the MFA file of this version as free to use by any MMF2 Dev owner... thats as close to opensource as this version of the tool might ever get.

When will a downloadable version arrive?

I'm working hard to remove known bugs and am adding alot of features, some to add useful functionality and mmany to make the interface much more customizable. Unless something terrible upsets my work schedule or I find a major and hard to tackle bug, I should have the first public beta version ready for download in 2 weeks tops.

I'll try for one week, but you know how it goes, as soon as someone mentions a release date it pushes back the actual release date by a year.

I'll keep you all posted. Thanks for the interest.

YESSSS! Now my game art won't look like BBQ'd roadkill!

Well.. unfortunately for it to be really useful to you, an extension will have to be made for construct to support it OR I need to make a feature in the tool to export the assembled frames as full PNG images. Both will happen, but both are going to be anywhere from a month to much longer than a month...especially for the extension.

Also, don't forget this will be a beta, so there's always the risk of loosing your work due to some big bug or unforseen data corruption. (Both of these posiblilties are very unlikely, but never the less, I'd suggest you don't spend too much time working on big game projects with my tool until its a little past beta...just to be safe.)

As soon as I release the public beta I'll try and focus on making the exporting as 24 bit PNG files working..but of course I can't make any pormises..I'm really not sure how long that will take.

thanks,

Holymonkey