Hey does anyone know how in maya to render an animation and export each image separately as a png ?

In you Render Settings be sure you set up your output files like so:

<img src="http://i34.tinypic.com/mv125l.png">

Pick "name.#.ext", "PNG", and set your end frame to whatever the end frame of your animation is. You might also want to check your image size settings and the quality settings on the Maya Software tab.

Then close the Render Settings window.

Now go to Render -> Batch Render, and it'll render your frames and number them for you. Unless you specify a different location in your project settings, they'll probably be in C:\Documents and Settings[i]whatever\My Documents\maya\projects\default\images.

Took me a minute to remember how to do it (the batch render part), I haven't used Maya in a looong time . Oh well, now that I've reinstalled it I guess I have an excuse to start modeling again.

Edit:

Oh yeah, make sure that Alpha is ticked, and that you don't have a material linked to your viewport (you probably don't, it's something that you have to do manually). Oh, and of course be sure to pick the correct camera

I believe the paper doll idea is exactly what I'm looking for. Not for everything, but for my first lil creation I believe that would be the perfect way to go to get a hang of things and be happy enough with the sprites that it didn't leave me feeling like I wasted tons of time on anything.

Oh, I thought that's the look you were going for anyway. Anime Studio can do deforamtions, but most 2d bone animation that I've seen is essentially paper doll style, like Flipside (

).

Runs much better than last time. I don't know how many ships there are, but I can make a bunch before I get down to about 30fps, which is pretty much the playable-unplayable border.

http://my.smithmicro.com/win/anime/index.html

Anime Studio will do what you want but it costs $50, and then you'll have to learn the program, and then you'll have to create a workflow to export your characters and clean them up and import them as sprites etc, etc, etc. It'd probably be just as easy to slog through the process of animating things by hand in the long run.

Not to mention 2D character deformations tend to look a little funny and bendy at the joints. But it does things like paper doll animation too, I think.

You can use GIMP or something (or Photoshop or Flash if you have one of those) to fake the paper doll thing. Draw your body part in pieces (forearm, hand, foot, leg, whatev) then set those pieces aside. Then when you make a new frame, copy your pieces and rotate and place them where they need to go. Flatten your frames or take a screenshot or whatever, and then make the next frame.

Just a warning though... if you use a paper doll method to make animations, it will end up looking like you used a paper doll method to make your animations. In other words, not so good, unless that's the look you're going for. The reason those sprites that were made from a 3D model look good is because, well, they're 3D renders. If you have a program like Poser you can dress up a model and export some frames from the canned animations no prob (when shrunk down to sprite size, it's hard to tell it's Poser).

Really though, nothing beats putting in the time and effort when it comes to animation. I know it's tedious (it bores me to tears) but the only way to get quality work out of it is to put quality work into it. And that pretty much means tedium.

XP SP2

The plugin won't load for me, same error as Highimpact.

But I do hear the sound in flud's example

ELSE ensures only one action happens per trigger, which fixes it.

All right... I learned something today

I've been doing my switch toggles since before Else came out, and never bothered to rethink how to do it. Old habits die hard, I guess.

Yeah, as Chef says "Canvas and Physics DNA just won't splice."

Physics has no way to do pixel collisions. Canvas can only do pixel collisions. You'll have to think of some other way to do what you want.

New idea for the image editor, specifically for animation of sprites:

A checkbox labeled "Propogate Changes." When you check this box, all actions you do on one frame will be repeated on all the other frames. For instance, placing the hotspot, flipping x or y, selecting an area of color, erasing the area of color, etc.

The selecting an area of color I think would be the most difficult part, because an animation will have that color in different places on each frame. But it would be useful for removing the transparency color from the background of sprites imported from a sprite sheet all in one shot.

Anyway, most tools wouldn't need to have any extra special attention paid to them. A pencil mark on one frame would make the same mark on every frame. It's just tools like the select-area-of-color tool that would need special attention. Crop is another, because some frames the area to trim transparent pixels might be larger than in others.

This would make the process of importing sprites a whole lot easier, since right now it's like an assembly line of flipx-nextframe-flipx-nextframe-etc, placehotspot-nextframe-placehotspot-nextframe-etc that just bores me to tears and is another reason on the list of why I hate making game art.

I say keep it. Anything that adds functionality to the animator is good.

I get around 60 at the start. For every five ships I add it drops by 20fps, so at 20 ships it's running at around 20 fps. Which dips to 13-14 if I start flying around.

*insert Joke about you guys thinking Ashley was female*

Hey now, I only made that mistake once when I was a newbie.

(I'm just glad nobody called me on it )

Whoa, this is sweet. I mean, the parallax thing is sweet too, but the UI thing is sweet. I just tested it out with a little "Include event sheet" action and my eyes popped out. You can have a whole other layout running in your layout without the Layout object

It's like we're getting a new feature in between builds! Keep 'em coming, what else haven't you told us?