benlchristianson

So I'm sitting here playing with spriter pro for the first time, using a character model I made especially for the program. I have very little animation experience though, so the best I can really make right now is a very simple idle animation. I'd really love to get to the point where I'm capable of making something along the lines of the shambling skeleton animation included with the spriter pro download, because it doesn't seem to use many more techniques than the very simple bone-attached-to-sprite animation technique displayed in the tutorials found on the official brashmonkey youtube channel. But I think what I'm really lacking here is a knowledge of the theory behind sprite and bone animation. As in, how I should be going about designing assets that will be animated, what things to keep in mind, how they're animated, etc. Are there any channels, guides, or tutorials for that? Aside from just plain raw practice, obviously. I know practice is a good foundation, but it always helps to know what direction you're going in. I guess this might be kind of a weird question to ask, but I'm definitely looking forward to your guys's responses. Thanks in advance!

I'm interested in the possibility of adding normal maps to the png's and sprites made and animated in spriter, and I figured I'd come here first to see if anybody knew how feasible that possibility is. I know that there are programs out there designed to combine sprites and normal maps, like sprite lamp, but those are to the best of my knowledge designed for sprites which are animated just be cycling from one png to the next. I'm more interested in using normal maps on spriter's sprites, which use tweening and all of spriter pro's fancy features I'm eagerly awaiting to use. I get that it's not possible to implement normal maps in spriter directly, I'm planning on doing this in unity's 3D engine. Can I apply a normal map texture to an animated sprite animated in spriter and imported to unity? Would I have to take the normal maps made for the sprites and animate them too, or something? I want to figure out how to do this before I turn around and buy something like ndo2 and the full pro version of spriter, I don't want to pay for these programs if what I want to use them for isn't possible.