darktoad

I'm playing around with Spriter in more depth now and some of what I wanted can already be done (albeit with varying difficulty): 1) Exporting to png enables me to crop to a specific view of the image, but I don't think I can zoom? A workaround would be to output at much higher resolution than I need and downscale in a batch process. 2) Bones can scale sprites, and with creative use of sprites, alpha, and photoshop puppet warp I can probably get many of the effects I'm thinking of. 3) A depth mask can be done by batching through all my sprites and making a new set that in different solid shades of gray and then swapping all my sprite parts at the appropriate time as a companion file to the main animation.

EDITED: I missed something actually quite important (to me) I haven't gone back through the posts in this thread either. My apologies if I'm posting duplicates. My project isn't quite ready to jump fully into art, and I've held off on using Spriter until the features are more aligned with my needs. Here are the things that would make Spriter a go-to tool for me: 1) Output Controls: The ability to specify a view around the art that crops to particular areas on output. Defining multiple views and output resolutions would enable artists to generate content more easily. RPG's for example may need a portrait and full-body views of a character, but if the character is assembled in Spriter, it's an extra set of work to frame up and crop later. 2) Gradient Color Remapping: Remapping the color values of a sprite part's texture to a gradient strip (ideally created within the app and saved to a "palette" for reuse. This is a very powerful tool for building visual variation easily and is getting used more frequently in game development. 3) Deformer Bones: Special bones that can deform the sprite part they're linked to in a more granular way than squash and stretch can. This would allow less model segmentation and cool effects like bulging and bending. 4) Depth Mask Output: Generate a depth mask per frame; a greyscale image that renders each part as a flat color based on their sorting. The top piece would be white, the bottom piece black - with shades of grey between. Artists working on 2d games with dynamic lighting, can take this in combination with other textures and create ambient occlusion maps and various other effects. They can basically build all the other maps outside Spriter, but the depth info isn't available until they've combined everything in Spriter (and sorting can be changed per frame). 5) Morphing: Cross-fading sprite textures as part layers, with registration points to enable feature alignment (the texture/UV coords are basically being deformed to accomplish this alignment). This would enable really subtle animations to be built, and possibly with fewer discrete sprites.

@Lucid: Thanks for the reply! @Mr.Ugly: Yeah, true... it's is fairly trivial to create a set of proxy parts. I retract my suggestion. I do wonder about the per frame data though. How will it be exposed to the user? Let's say I want to re-balance all the values in there, will there be a quick way to do this, like editing a text file or tweaking a dopesheet / spreadsheet?

Very excited about this program guys!! Posting these as suggestions, but maybe there's already a way to do this... Ability to cancel mid-operation (position,rotation,scale) For example, I've selected a set of parts and in the middle of rotating I realize I started rotating the wrong parts, or maybe I'm just playing around and want to preview how the rotation would look. If I hit 'Esc' while I'm rotating these parts, it could cancel out of the operation without needing to undo. Simplistic paint I'd like to hack some really simple shapes together, or sketch out some ideas without having to jump to my workhorse image editor (Photoshop). These would basically be placeholder art that I'd reskin later.