Hey there! Thanks for the reply!
So when you say place holder, how exactly did you implement this mechanic when you have, say, a RUNNING animation and the character can wear different armor and hold different weapons. Each arm is bending, rotating, torso is rotating, weapons is moving at different angles etc etc
Unless the objects are perfectly vertical or horizontal, it seems like pinning a sprite over a placeholder would not work because of the unique movements each animation has?
Short of animating everything using funky math around an image point, how did you do this? Did your characters just have very basic animations?
I'm thinking at the very least each limb/armor piece needs it's own animation?
I tried Spriter out but the limitations of the animation GUI is a huge downgrade for quality animation. I use Toonboom Harmony and get extremely fluid animation. I do like the functionality with construct 3 but it seems like the trade off for the sprite functionality isn't worth the bad animation and frustratingly backward UI limitations (thank you however for the recommendation!)
Anyway, I'm more interested in your method 1. Can you enlighten me?