Spriter animation tool for pixel artists.
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=18830
Printed Date: 13 September 2025 at 2:59am
Topic: Spriter animation tool for pixel artists.
Posted By: BrashMonkey
Subject: Spriter animation tool for pixel artists.
Date Posted: 06 May 2014 at 11:51am
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Hi Everyone,
This is Mike from BrashMonkey. I wanted to share with you a new video I made which showcases the new features In the latest build of Spriter which can be extremely useful to pixel artist or anyone making a pixel art based game. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np-XNmSSp-c - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np-XNmSSp-c If you're new to Spriter, it's a modular animation tool which lets easily create highly optimized 2d animations for games, which you can either export as sequential PNGs, sprite strips or sprite sheets, or, ideally use the actual Spriter project file you'd use in your game engine to recreate the animations on the fly with just the handful of “body part” images. For those who can use the actual Spriter data in their game engine, Spriter offers the ability to not just create animations, but to also designate an unlimited number of collision boxes and “action points” per frame, as well as to trigger sound effects and even variable changes at any point in each animation. You can download the latest version of Spriter (build B8) from http://www.brashmonkey.com - http://www.brashmonkey.com You can see a quick overview some of Spriter's key features in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLnkiZAA_jg&feature=gp-n-y - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLnkiZAA_jg&feature=gp-n-y If you'd like to provide feedback, suggestions, or feature requests, please join our forums at http://www.brashmonkey.com/forum - http://www.brashmonkey.com/forum , or email us directly at mail@brashmonkey.com Thanks very much for your time and much valued feedback. |
Replies:
Posted By: Hapiel
Date Posted: 06 May 2014 at 3:28pm
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Thanks for making a video! Spriter is a really cool tool with a lot of benefits for (game)animators. I do have some critique on the usability for pixel art though... What you showed in the video seemed to be nothing new.. I hoped for some cool new features, but most what you did was use standard high color/high res images, animate them and generate 'pixel art' out of them in post processing.. This is effective if you need to export to a specific palette, but not effective if you want your pixels to look nice. Not for static images, not for animations. On top of that, your export seemed to contain some unintended mess from the animation. For example at 2:33, if you look at the ass of the horse you will see the colors shifting, while in the original animation the ass is completely static! The stuff in the end is good (12:40), tweening motion (and only motion) on an exact pixel raster can save time if you happen to need to make that kind of animation. This is rare in games though, but perhaps for videos or intros it can be useful. It is possible to make spriter more interesting to pixel artists (the kind that does care about control over the details of their sprites). Ideas are: Outline control, whatever happens, the whole silhouette or specific parts always have a 1px outline Improved rotation algorithm, one that respects pixel clusters instead of only calculating single pixels. Improved scaling algorithm, one that respects pixel clusters as well. Perhaps these two researches can be of inspiration, and perhaps the algorithms can be used! http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/ - one and http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/downscaling/ - two There would be one more way how I can imagine using Spriter: Creating animations out of different body parts, but without using any dirty tools (rotation, resizing). Import pixels, export the same pixels. The only advantage this has is that some parts are easy to replace then later in the process (like a head). Parts that move a lot (arms) would still have to be redrawn for each frame, but it could save some time or help recycling animations. However, this is (except for the motion tweening part, like the up and down movement of a head in a walk cycle) also possible in photoshop with clever use of the layers... I hope there will be an even more pixel art friendly spriter in the future! Good luck with the development :) ------------- |
Posted By: BrashMonkey
Date Posted: 08 May 2014 at 3:50am
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Thanks for taking the time to make such thorough feedback, Hapiel.
A few points about your points: 1) Point sampling, true pixel art non filtering and not allowing partial pixel coordinates are all very new to Spriter. As is a massive improvement to accuracy when clicking bones/images when working with tiny images..basically before, working with tiny low-res images was near impossible in Spriter. 2) The unintended mess in the final art and in that video is because that video was made before pixel art mode and point sampling were available in Spriter. With those new modes, and by exporting as a sprite-sheet or strip instead of sequential images while exporting from Spriter (this is also new to Spriter), the color shift between frames can be completely avoided. 3) I definitely agree, if we can implement a cleaner algorithm for transforming pixel art with cleaner results that still don't invent new colors what would be great. I'll pass the links to those two algorithms to Edgar (Spriter's programmer) to see if either/both could someday be used by Spriter. 4) Lets not forget, x and y flips and perfect 90 degree rotations produce pixel perfect variation of the parts, which can definitely be useful. 5) The potential for using pixel art animations in a game engine as actual Spriter data means the ability to swap out armor, weapons, etc etc at run-time, as well as setting and controlling collision rectangles, spawning points, sound effect triggers and variable changes all in Spriter in a very visual and intuitive manner... on top of just being drastically more optimized for file/texture space usage... 6) What I just mentioned above will make awesome "Treasure-like" giant modular bosses in retro games drastically easier for game developers and pixel artists/animators to add to their games. cheers, Mike at BrashMonkey |
Posted By: Hapiel
Date Posted: 08 May 2014 at 6:27am
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Originally posted by BrashMonkey
1) Point sampling, true pixel art non filtering and not allowing partial pixel coordinates are all very new to Spriter. As is a massive improvement to accuracy when clicking bones/images when working with tiny images..basically before, working with tiny low-res images was near impossible in Spriter. Great reply! I was indeed not aware that 1 was a new feature, this is improvement for sure! I guess I overlooked the amount of extra value this has for the things you mentioned in 5 and 6, this is indeed very useful for run time control and modular bosses :). I should give the software another try soon! ------------- |