[Best way to export for Unreal/Unity engine to date?]

I am mostly interested in exporting for use in Unreal, and then how to use them in Unreal. Anyone got any good resources on that? I'm having a hard time finding the proper resources to do it properly or most efficiently. Does anyone use this for Unreal?

Or, worse case scenario, what's the best way for exporting these to Unity, and using them in Unity?

[If I buy this asset, and open it in Unity can I export the animations to Spriter?]

I was wondering if Spriter has stuff that can read animations from Unity if I export them in a certain way. I don't know if anyone has ever tried it...


Here's the asset in question. https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/13934

[I'm down for more features in Spriter, but right now it doesn't work at all in Unity]

Thanks for the PM Mike, I didn't even check the thread after I made it until just now when I saw that email notification ;p.

Anyways thanks for letting me know you guys are currently working on an official pipeline for Unity.

Yes I will make sure everything is updated to the latest and try again.

For now I'm having someone use sprite sheets in UE4 and another guy work on a 3D game in Unity, but I am very much still looking forward to using the bone animation from Spriter. I bought some mesh-animating plugin to use inside Unity last year too, but I didn't like it, couldn't even figure out how to use it for some reason, but making animations inside Spriter has always been easy and that's why I stuck with it up until now. That's why I'm just waiting for this program to work properly in transferring all the bone animation before trying to make another 2D bone animated game.

So right now, the one that my freelancer is making in UE4 is actually almost done and I can't wait to show it to you. So as I might have mentioned, I bought all the art packs last year, and now I put like 90% of the enemies from all the packs in this game. I don't want to spoil too much, but it is FUN AS HELL to play, and looks amazing. I cannot thank my programmer enough, he has done a tremendous job implementing all my ideas, as well as his own. He actually made certain properties you wouldn't get out of sprite sheets to work with the sprite sheets (skin swapping for one). I highly recommend him to help you part time in finishing the code, he's definitely a genius. He said since it supports json, it will be easy for him to develop something for UE4, and perhaps with more help he can get something going with Unity as well. We'll see, that's another story.

Anyways, so I was wondering, you said everything is royalty free right and we can use the stuff in our own games for commercial purposes, as long as we don't directly sell content from the art packs themselves? I just want to make absolutely sure I am doing this legally before we release the game, we basically used all the original artwork from the packs, and I made custom animations, besides that nothing was changed. I swapped some armor between the different packs, but that was it. So it's cool if we put it up on the Android and other stores with in-game ads and stuff?

Also, do you have an image or animation you would like us to insert in the game before it hits the main menu, to show your brand, so people know we used Spriter to make this game? You know like before a Final Fantasy game starts, it shows "Squaresoft" and whatever other companies they used to help make it. If you have something like that you'd like us to put in, I'd be more than happy to do that

That's basically why I stuck with Spriter for so long. I already invested my time and money into it, I love the art style, and I knew I could make it work if I just added a few more animations, I saw so much potential with this software and the premade art packs. Tthen once our game gets popular enough and I make some cash, maybe I can get more free time to make my own art using Spriter again to animate it, and maybe by then take advantage of the 2D bone system, we'll see. I just needed a way to get the animations into the game engine first, and without taking up too much space with all the dozens of sheets. Now that I hired the right guy, we're finally about to push our first Spriter-based game out there.

So I want to thank you for what you've given us so far, especially with that new feature that allows me to export every animation a character has into custom sized sprite sheets at once. It was a long road, lots of frustration trying to get it to work in Unity, but for now I found a genius that got the sprite sheets to work like bone animation in Unreal, and by next week all of our hard work and time and money spent will finally pay off =]. I'll post a thread again once it comes out.

[I'm down for more features in Spriter, but right now it doesn't work at all in Unity]

It would be nice to actually finish a program that actually works with transferring animation data to Unity besides just sprite sheets, without all of these errors. I don't see a point in spending all this time working on more features within Spriter when the only place we can actually use them is in Spriter. I've had this program for a whole year and have been unable to properly transfer this stuff to Unity or any other program unless I only did Sprite Sheets. Yea, the plugin KIND of transfers animation data, but it gives me tons of errors, gets shit wrong, and it's basically impossible to work with. The latest update to the plugin, and the old one I have, do not work with Unity 5 at all right now. It keeps giving me this error called "Unknown character n" or something and doesn't attempt to make a prefab, not even a broken one, just nothing happens.

[In game weapon switching?]

So I'm having a programmer help me make a 2D side scrolling action game.

He sent me this.
 

There is 1 problem with your animations I can see right now. You do not want to animate the weapon or anything else that is changeable.
What you need to do instead is make a dummy bone for example bone after the hand that the sword will attach to, and it should be centered to the hand.

 

He told me he mainly does 3D animation and doesn't really do 2D animation. So right now I have the Spriter2Unity plugin, back when that was its official name. Now I see it's been updated in April called Spriter2UnityDX 1.0.3 . If I read it correctly, does it allow me to keep the sword in the guy's hand? Because right now the programmer is asking me to delete the sword from every single animation... or can I just delete the sword picture files from the folder and let it just leave the bone behind or whatever data was attached to the sword being attached to the bone? Besides the custom animations I made, its the same exact Run n Gun platformer purple mega man guy.

So do I need to delete the sword, or can the sword be kept in, and he can use one of these plugins plus some code to be able to swap his default sword with other swords in game when the player gets enough points in-game to upgrade, or swaps it out in some menu?

Same goes for the rest of the body parts. Is the only way to change the appearance of the character in Unity to make other selectable characters, or what? This guy is extremely experienced in making games in general, but I'm not sure if he's just missing something that we can do in Unity with the Spriter plugin and stuff.

Please contact me ASAP on Skype, JonHarv, if you know the answer. Thanks.

[How is the Unreal Engine 4 plugin coming along?]

Because I'm dying for it.

[Spriter for Unity 4.3 (Updated, Integrated)]

If you can get Papagayo working for Spriter2Unity I'll suck yo dick.

Or if you know a good work around. Like if I can at least be able to import the lip sync'd mouth onto my character's head for certain animations inside Spriter, and then be able to import that scml to Unity and just add the sound file back on inside Unity. Thanks.

[Did anyone ever manage to fix the Reaper importing to Unity with Spriter2Unity?]

I see. The reason I thought people stopped was because the last update, before Jan 24, was from like July 2014. Glad to see someone is still working on it. How soon do you think the image deformation stuff you're planning on putting in Spriter Pro will work with Spriter2Unity? I heard you're trying to focus more on getting your features to work for Unity. Are you guys also working with Dario with the plugin, or are you making your own official plugin?

[Please post feature suggestions here.]

Hey so you mentioned in November on page 20 you were working on a way to be able to warp images more than we can right now, besides just the rectangle resizing we can do.

http://www.puppet2d.com/#!about/c2414

 

Click features, the link doesnt load the right page. How soon until you implement something like the last 2 or 3 features?

If it's not finished, but the core of it won't be changed, like you said was a problem earlier up this page since you were redoing the features differently... maybe you can release it on a beta version for pro users to try out? I gotta start doing some facial animations that requires more than just the basic rectangle manipulation. You know how they animated the characters in Rayman Legends? Something like that.

[Did anyone ever manage to fix the Reaper importing to Unity with Spriter2Unity?]

No one is working on Spriter2Unity anymore from what I read. Last time it was updated was like in June.

I bought the entire Spriter Art Pack and have imported every single scml into Unity, and everything else came out relatively fine, at least all the body parts and bones came out fine. For some reason, this only happens to the Reaper. All the others import fine (besides certain animations not working the same, such as instant curves).

[Did anyone ever manage to fix the Reaper importing to Unity with Spriter2Unity?]

Basically when I try to import it, it looks like this

 

If someone could modify the Reaper, or the Spriter2Unity on Github, and send it to me.... I'll give you 20 bucks. Hell if you can fix the whole Spriter2Unity plugin for Unity so that it's finally complete, and doesn't suck, and also doesn't make the Animation tab look impossible to configure animations, or at least let me easily update the scml/prefab when I make changes to animations and shit in Spriter. 100 bucks. Come on, any programmers out there wanna make some money?

[Photoshop/Paint/Corel advice to make sword slashes and fireballs]

I'm trying to make sprite sheets that have effects like this http://vxresource.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/slash_effect_002.png

And http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2012/346/b/8/megaman_x_hadouken__remake__by_dragonfaku-d5ntxg0.gif

Just simple tips/youtube videos for making them in photoshop. The energy glow/windy distorting effects (like in the spriter effects pack) are both what I'm looking to create.

Also do you have tips for editting Spriter sprite sheets in photoshop, and making sure that when I save them, I don't get problems with transparency? Like if I decide to have a sprite sheet of the guy punching, and I add some blur or whatever to each frame of the punch, then save it, and I see black/gray/white stuff where it should just be clear... how do I prevent that?

I used to get that problem a lot when I'd edit sprites in Little Fighter 2, trying to add energy beams and crap like that and then when I play the game, there's blackness around the energy beam >=[.

[Quick question, how do I add all scmls to be viewed easily in one project?]

Thanks for clarifying, not sure if it was a bug or not. Also do you plan on adding a feature where I can play an animation over another one? I'm making sprite sheets for Unity at the moment, and I don't want to have too many animations playing at once and causing slow-downs, so I'm trying to put certain animations altogether on one sprite sheet, kinda like how the knight swinging the sword and the sword blur are together. It's gonna be a smartphone game so I want it to be able to work for like Galaxy S2's and stuff, for the poor people. I mean I can do it the slow way and redo the animations, but it would be easier if I can somehow copy and paste say like an impact effect onto the grey guy punching, and then just slide the impact effect's keyframes around to sync things up.

Not sure if this will help give you an idea, but if you've ever used Guitar Pro or Power Tab, when you're writing music, you can write on different "voices". You can see examples on some powertab and guitar pro songs on ultimate-guitar.com where some of the notes look grey, it's cuz those are on different layers on the same instrument. It allows you to do things like write a half note to play at the same time as a quarter note, without making the notes ring out for the same length of time, and it also makes things look visually structured, like writing the bass notes on one layer and the higher notes on the other (good example is Aphex Twin's "Avril 14th").

Maybe you can do that? Where the animations will play at the same time and I can move them around in the viewing window, but edit their animations on their own separate timelines, and then if I export to a sprite sheet it will show both animations together depending on their Z order.

 

[Quick question, how do I add all scmls to be viewed easily in one project?]

I figured it out. You see I was doing what I did before, using the import feature, but for some reason the animations wouldn't load. I first copied all of my art packs to a new folder, then loaded up Spriter, then selected that new folder as the main folder... then when I would try to import the animations, I guess the program was getting confused because the scmls I was trying to import were already part of the folder.

So I tried something different. I closed Spriter and then loaded one of the SCMLS, and tried to import a new scml inside of it. So I loaded the small head knight, then loaded in fire effects, and it worked.

I guess my problem is that when I make a new spriter project and I want to see all the animations from all the scmls inside of one, I have to do the new spriter project in an empty folder and then import everything using only the import feature, instead of dragging and dropping all the folders in there beforehand.

[Quick question, how do I add all scmls to be viewed easily in one project?]

For example when I click player with small head, then it loads all the animations for him. I did it before somehow... or I think I did. Where I could scroll down the right part of the screen, and see all the different effects and player animations one after the other, and I guess they were separated by entities or something.

I bought the whole entire art package on this site a day ago, and I want to mix and edit things together, and quickly be able to see the animations for every little thing in one spriter project. Is it possible?

[Spriter for Unity 4.3 (Updated, Integrated)]

Hey so what do I do when I want to update the scml file? I tried to just drag and drop it in. My first one was called Player1. I updated it in Spriter, then dragged it to where the old one was, while Unity was running. It renamed it to Player2, and didn't create a prefab for it. Do I need to reimport the unity package each time or something?

And will there be a way to do the advanced animation stuff that it can't currently do in the near future, like when the final version of Spriter gets released? Like doing instant movements instead of linear tweens, or when I do an animation that requires me to debone and resize stuff and all that. Or should I just stick to doing it all in Spriter and then exporting them as sprite sheets?

[Please post feature suggestions here.]

Will you have this kind of feature soon? I saw in a video that you have something that looked like a bicep flexing...

How about being able to turn a solid leg with a foot into a 3 point bone system like this dino monster?

]

[I'm going crazy, the feet won't stand still.]

It's not just the feet, the shins move too. And it shows in Unity even worse in Spriter, it makes it look like someone totally fucked up the sprite sheet.

I'm using the latest beta, and even before that it didn't seem any different. When I make the feet bones tiny so the anchors don't move the feet when I try to make my guy crouch from dragging the ass down, in that key frame the feet stay the same way. But when I drag the timeline to see how it motion tweened, the feet dip down, and the bottom of the shin moves through the X and Y axis as well, then they both move back to how they were in the 1st keyframe, except with the knees bent. The two keyframes look fine, but for some reason the motion tween decides to totally fuck them up and move their positions instead of just rotating them about their bones/image pivot points like they should be. I anchored the feet, and the shins, so I could drag the ass down to make a squat, just like in the tutorial videos. And I do have the Pro version.

Deboning doesn't help at all either. It's just making it impossible to use this program. I really have no idea how anyone else is getting their animations lined up when you can't even keep the legs still.

[Rescale all part images?]

You could just make a copy, and do a test on the copy and see how it goes. And then if it works or not, it would benefit us all to hear about it after.

[Not sure if I should keep doing this in Spriter.]

Here's something I made so far. Looks like shape tweening and motioning tweening in Spriter works pretty damn well for facial animation. In fact it's much easier than working in Flash. If only I could use Spriter to make my cartoons as well ;p....... I wonder if that's one of the things you don't want to reveal yet, because that would be awesome.

[Not sure if I should keep doing this in Spriter.]

Thanks it does help.

I was wondering about another thing. I made some face parts in photoshop. I want to animate slightly complex facial movements. Like not just alternating between different heads with blinking eyes, but full on individual eye blinks of varying types, and squinting and crap, with eye lid layers, and doing shape tweens for mouth movements for small bits of dialogue. I have an idea of what to do, but I'm only starting to learn this in flash, and it's not the same as spriter, and I haven't really seen it done in spriter.

I was wondering if you have pointers, or know of tutorial videos that demonstrating efficient facial animation techniques in Spriter.

[Not sure if I should keep doing this in Spriter.]

So I turned the default adventure guy into a stick figure, so I wouldn't have to re-bone everything. I didn't like the way he looked, so I morphed the shapes around inside Spriter. I did it to the Idle animation, and then from there made my own running, jumping, and fighting animations based on the warped character. The thing is, the .PNGs aren't warped themselves, only when they're inside Spriter on those particular cloned animations I did from the Idle animation.

Is there a way to convert the .PNGs to look like how I warped them in Spriter? Or will I have any problems in Unity when I use the Spriter plug-in to transfer them over? I don't want to keep making animations based on this warped character if it's just going to be a waste of time.

If you don't get what I did, I can post pictures in a sec.

Original as it appears when the .PNGs are put together. http://imgur.com/lyrX5rK

The warped version. http://imgur.com/N9Dnh7Y

[Having trouble making fighting animations with the templates]

Hi, I'm totally new at animating, and I cannot seem to make good fighting animations. I can barely make him do a punch with a step, and a front kick. I'm trying to make a very very simple fighting game, which at least 2-3 punches and 2-3 kicks, maybe a few jump attacks, blocking and grabbing maybe, and throwing. Has anyone created these in Spriter or Unity before with the template or something similar? I've been looking for tutorials everywhere, yet all I ever find are walk and idle animations, and to stretch and enlarge the arm and fist when doing a punch. I just don't have the eye or the mind to do it, and I don't want to spend hundreds of hours redoing it and trying to get the timing and everything right for it to look good and for the players to not bitch at me for the punches not hitting when they should when they press the button and stuff like that.

If anyone can just help me make a few animations with the platformer template grey guy I'd be eternally thankful.