I am not sure if these are features that have already been suggested, and if so, I apologize, I'm sure one day I will read all 40 pages in this thread but not quite today.
After trying the free version of spriter for a day or two I was convinced and bought the pro version.
I have continued messing around a little bit and checked the forums out,and have had many ideas about animations that would be fun to make and that I might find useful in my game project.
Several features sprung to mind that I think would be neat, if possible.
I have no idea if these would be considered extraneous, a lot of code (too much) to implement, or too niche-oriented or some other reason its not feasible, practical or possible, or goes beyond the scope of spriter, or perhaps some are already planned or have been thought of by others.
Another possibility is that some of the things I might just might already be implemented or at least be far easier to too than is worth making it a feature.
At the very least I would hope somebody might get a fresh idea for a new animation.
Anyways here goes:
1. Instead of onion-skinning the sprites only, allow the user to select whether to show sprites only, bones only, or both in the onion skin.
2. Allow a sprite to have a 'no-draw' zone or even it's own 'canvas' that if a part of it were to pass beyond a certain point that it would not be displayed there.
Alternative: Allow an object (or another sprite) to be created (think 'mask') that would block some/all sprites set behind it in z-order (even where this mask has transparent pixels.)
Secondly, instead of simple blocking the sprite past a certain x or y coordinate for instance, one could select between that and using a different image.
Reasoning: There is a large amount of interesting things one could do in an animation with this feature.
- Pull a tall rabbit out of a short hat
- Have something rise from a dimensional portal
- Cartoon effects like peeking out from behind a thin tree or other object even though the char is too wide to hide behind it in reality.
- Open a rolled up parchment
- Turn on a lightsaber. Ok this one is really easy to do with only two images of course (rounded endpiece and multiples instance of the shaft portion), but it would trim the .scml file down a bit.
- Felix's Bag/Mary Poppins' bag. Same concept, making something tall come from something it shouldn't be able to.
-Have a char walk behind something translucent where for instance part of his leg is covered but not the whole thing and seeing the character through the curtain would make him either darker, blurry, a different color etc. You could then have those parts of the character that Are obscured use different sprites.
The possibilities are endless.
3. Allow a mode that creates a sort of pseudo3d effect where one would set the perspective and spriter could decide where to foreshorten the body parts, and when an object crossed the perspective, and a different 'face' could be shown.
eg: A character has his arms held straight out and started spinning. If spriter knew when to switch images for body parts it would be a lot less work to create many animations.
This above all else I might suggest as a feature edition is probably the least likely to see light, as even I know it might be far too much of a hassle to implement, and also accomplishable with a 3d animation program much much more easily.
4. Allow a sprite to be a parent to another sprite, such that the child sprite could only paint on its parents non-transparent pixels. Would be good for various graphic effects.
5. Allow all the pivot points to be displayed or hidden at will as you can do with bones and sprites.
Also perhaps (though not sure how useful this would be) allowing a pivot point for a sprite to be set at its parent bone's coordinates?
6. After seeing the papagayo (sp?) preview for the new release, I remembered seeing a similar feature in a 3d program, allowing you to dynamically adjust a character's facial expression with facial recognition through a webcam. Perhaps something similar is possible in 2d.
7. Have a ability to show the animation frame by frame or in small n-frame chunks as an alternative to playback.
I am sure you guys are always busy concocting various things for spriter but I figured a little public brainstorm never hurt anyone.
Hope at the very least I haven't completely bored anyone with my wall of text, and that at least one of my 'suggestions' is considering interesting xD
EDIT: I would like to say that even without any additional features, Spriter is definitely one of my favourite programs I have had in my uhmm, toolbelt. Keep up the great work guys. :P
