TheDanaAddams

I haven't been able to properly take it for a test-drive, but I seem to have found at least one issue on the Mac version. Creating bones with Alt+click+drag seems to be broken - it will only create bones if they are above a certain length. I am unable to create short bones. (Though I am very happy that no matter how long it is, the default X scale is 1!) Regarding skins... I distort the sprite, then try to use the right mouse button to adjust the distortion box, and the sprite snaps back to its default position, with the bounding box all out of whack. But I think I might actually be using it incorrectly - I'm assuming the right mouse button is supposed to be used BEFORE you start distorting, not after. If that is the case, then I think there's no issue; I just tried to use it backwards. But if right mouse is supposed to allow you to adjust the box after distorting, it doesn't work right. (Though I'm pretty sure I just tried to use it backwards.) Also regarding skins, there was something in the video about using shift to sort of soft-select surrounding distortion points, but that doesn't seem to work at all.

This seems to be a thing that works engine-side, so I think it will work with spriter-animated stuff as long as the engine you use supports both that and Spriter.

Speed curves for ease-in-and-out are already working, and coming in the next beta. Something I would really like to see is the ability to create an alpha mask to hide any selected object within the mask - I recently animated a creature clambering out of the ground, and it was incredibly difficult to make it look like it was actually crawling out of the ground, by hiding the parts of the body that were 'below ground' and adding lots of dirt to hide the parts of the body that were coming out... it would have been much better if I could have drawn a box around everything below the shifting dirt, applied a mask to the creature's assets, and had that masked off. (You can see the animation in question at roughly 1:15 in the video below.) This would be a huge benefit to cartoony characters who pull their items out of "hammer-space" as well; reaching into a mysterious portal, and having their arm vanish past a certain point... I'm sure there are a lot of other situations when part of something would need to be masked off, and having the entire asset hidden doesn't work for the animation.

The easiest way to do this is to set your time range to the framerate you wish to animate multiplied by the length of your animation in seconds. (A 1 second animation at 30fps would be a range of 30. 1.5 seconds, range of 45, etc.) This way you can set things up as you're used to - then, when finished, you can set the range back to the length of your animation in seconds multiplied by 1000. (1 second animation = range 1000, 1.5 second = 1500, etc.) Ticking the scale keys box will space them out properly, and in a sense, convert it from 30fps to 1000fps. =) Hope that helps!

There is actually a fairly easy way to reposition a complete animation, as long as it's okay for you to add another bone. Here's how I did it: Start with your finished animation: Add a new bone, not parented to any others. This will be our Repos bone: Select it, and set translation/rotation values to 0, scale values to 1, and alpha to 100: This will put the new bone at a perfectly neutral position that's great for repositioning: Select your Repos bone, then copy, and paste to all keys: Hold 'B' to enter parenting mode, and hold shift while clicking the root bone of your rig. This will parent across all keys: Now move the Repos bone to the place you need it, and repeat the prior step - select your (now repositioned) Repos bone, then copy, and paste to all keys: Voila! This is the fastest, easiest way I've been able to think of. Hope it helps. (I had to do some repositioning, and this is how I did it.)

This would be very useful - this feature of Maya is a real time-saver. Don't have to worry about breaking down the sound file with a dope sheet. Such a long, tedious job. Ideally, sound should play back when scrubbing.

I've had the same issue - even without deleting the object; just selecting a new one, the values will persist. Of course, the bigger problem is that - though I love working technically, and would enter values a lot in other software - altering values through object properties seems to ignore all inheritance switches, as well as IK locking...

I mention it in the guide video guide I made, actually, right near the start, if you want a more visual example, but what I like to do is set the time range to the FPS I want to work with. I like animating at 24fps, so I'll set the range to 24 for a 1 second loop. You can't play it back at this speed, but you can get in the ballpark with 2% playback speed. When that's done, you can stretch it back out, by editing the range with the 'stretch keys' option ticked. If you're animating at 24fps, and you have 24 frames, stretch keys to 1000. If you're animating at 30fps, and you have 45 keys, stretch to 1500. You get the idea. (I hope) Not ideal, but it's a workable solution.

As some of you may be aware, the game Don't Starve is very open to modding - and recently, has added tools to allow for custom animation with Spriter. I created a video demo to run through some features and methods, designed to help other modders use the program, and it was suggested that I post it here, too. Hope some of you find it helpful, even if it is rather basic! Be sure to check out Don't Starve, and make some cool creature mods, or something. ;P Apologies for the terrible audio. Somewhere between filtering, to make it audible, and compression... I ended up sounding like a radioactive chipmunk.

We definitely need the ability to "freeze" values - to keep the position they are set to, but have an assigned value of zero. For example, I rig my character, and one of the bones is translated to the worldspace value of +3x and -5y, with rotation 180 degrees, and scale of 0.6x and 1y. I freeze the values on the bone. That bone now displays local translation and rotation values of 0, and scale values of 1, but retains its world values and thus holds its position. I can now "zero out" the rotation and translation, to return it to the default "freeze" position - though the return to default scale would probably be the most useful, during regular usage. Altering values manually, in the Object Properties tab should also respect the different inheritance switches (I'm pretty sure it ignored switching off scale inherit when I tried to scale by entering values) and especially the IK locking, which it definitely ignored when I entered translation values. I'd also suggest the ability to add "Spring IKs" across a series of three bones, for quadrupedal hind-legs. Like so: An absolute must-have would be a graph editor. Here's the graph from one part of a cycle I did in another piece of software: You can see translation values for X, Y, and Z axes. The points are keyframes, obviously. The addition of speed curves brings Spriter one step closer, but the real power of the graph lies in the ability to overview everything, and offset as needed. You will see data for the loop expanding past the actual cycle, but this just allows for smoother looping. From the graph, we can retime things, add offsets for nice - and easy - overlapping action, slide the amount of rotation, translation, scale, etc. up or down as needed... the graph is easily one of the most powerful tools at an animator's disposal - especially when working with cycle-based animation, as in games.