Best Sprite animator/editor?

I'm going to try to gets some practice in with some sprites, animation, and hit boxes while my artist works on the characters.

I noticed the editor in construct isn't so great, what do most people use?

Thanks!

Anyone have any thoughts on GIMP for animation?

Cosmigo Promotion is a major sprite making tool. A lot of folks use Photoshop as well.

Anyone have any thoughts on GIMP for animation?I'm not an animator, but I work a lot with GIMP. Just like Photoshop it is a workhorse for everything related to graphics.

The layer system offers layers, sets and subsets, wich helps organizing the animations. You can do onion skinning manually by setting the transparancies of the layers. There's an animation player that plays layers as animation, complete with definable fps and playing speed.

What you don't get is a timeline. But for sprite animations to be used in Construct you'll barely need it.

I think it is an alternative if you can't afford a professional animation suite. You get almost the same functionality, it is more or less the comfort that is missing. Without this comfort it takes a little bit more time to get the same results.

Ok, I played with it a little big last night and it seemed pretty straight forward with how to make the animations. I couldnt figure out how to do the animation player OR how to time each frame for animation. Any help on that? :)   Thanks for all your help!

As far as I know you can only time the whole sequence, not individual frames.

The animation player is one of the things, where comfort is missing. It plays all layers that are on top of the hierarchy. Before testing any set or subset, you have to move the frames of those sets to the top and delete all other sets and layers.

Here's a decent free one too

code.google.com/p/grafx2/wiki/Downloads

I use Paint.NET, witch i think is amazing for pixel art and general effects and layer support, not really good for making big animations though.

Specifically for pixel art, huh?

pyxeledit.com

humanbalance.net/gale/us

Those are the only two I recommend. Not to mention, they are free and specifically made for pixel art animations. Both support transparency, palette swapping, a 1x viewing window, and GIF exporting. Tilemapping is supported in PyxelEdit.

take a look at this website: spritetools.com

It's not a pixelart(that is good btw <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle" />) but you can totally use this animator for your game.

Also there are a video tutorials at this website of how to create sprite animations from scratch.

good luck

I recommend you check out Spriter (http://www.brashmonkey.com/) it's a great software for animating, you can use Bones (Which is EXTREMELY handy) and it's only 25 bucks. I think they are working on porting it into C2 as well?

Either way, you can make some really fluid animations using spriter, and it is actually really good at tweening your animation frames as well.

I would definitely recommend it

ive also heard about "brashmonkey" spriter.

I highly recommend the graphicsgale, the best and simple program for pixel art.

Great tips! Spriter by Brashmonkey is an excellent and powerful tool that integrates with C2. Graphicsgale looks really good for drawing.

For anyone wanting to create sprites on an ipad (and ipod/iphone!), Spritesomething is a very nice app. I've used it to create animated sprites for C2. Its not free but its a nice way to be able to work on assets for C2 while out and about.

wow, i've been looking for something like this. Just downloaded sprite something on my ipad, and it's great! I'm going to use this when im traveling to draw up some stuff! Thanks fishbottle !