Mike at BrashMonkey

Holy Crap! That's amazing work and thinking isaacburns! Great job! -Mike at BrashMonkey

It will eventually, and in fact, any particular Spriter plug-in could be made to do that even now, But of course, it would require you to make sure the bones are set up the same, with the same names etc, between animations. We can't promise when it will be built into Spriter itself, and of course then the creator(s) of each plug-in would need to impliment it as well. -Mike at BrashMonkey

Hi Everyone, Mike at BrashMonkey here. As some of you might remember, from early on, when it was our intention to have first party plug-ins created for many popular game authoring systems, Torque support was near the top of our list. As we could not afford to hire an engineer outright, we had struck a deal with a skilled programmer who was nice enough to work on Torque2D support for Spriter in his spare time for the extremely modest rates I could manage to pay him out of pocket as well as the promise of a share in the revenue generated from the eventual sales of the pro version of the plug-in. As mentioned in a previous thread, the amazing speed and enthusiasm with which members of dev communities are creating free and open Spriter support for countless authoring systems proved to us we needed to rethink our pursuit of 1st party plug-ins all together. To those ends, Mike Ness has generously agreed to share what he'd accomplished so far with the Spriter and Torque communities so anyone interested can contribute to its development and so that full Spriter support can be available for all Torque 2D users as soon as possible! Now I'm passing this post over to Mike Ness (the engineer) to fill you in on the technical details. Thanks so much Mr. Ness! --------------- http://www.brashmonkeygames.com/brashmonkey/spriter/T2SpriterDemo.zip Thanks Mike. The source archive contains a modified copy of the Fish demo that I was using as a test case. The Spriter code is in game/gameScripts and consists of three main files: spriter.cs, spriterData.cs, and spriterEntity.cs. spriter.cs contains some helper methods to load SCML files, create entities, etc. spriterData.cs contains the Data class which is responsible for reading and storing the SCML file data. spriterEntity.cs contains the Entity class which uses the Data class to build an entity and attach it to a scene. Currently the code only loads the first mainline animation frame and displays them as a set of t2dStaticSprites. No animation is implemented at this stage. My plan had been to continue developing these torque scripts in order to implement the whole of the Spriter functionality without the need to recompile Torque. Later, I planned to write some C++ classes to take advantage of increase performance when recompiling the engine was appropriate. Integration with TGB was also in the back of my mind, but lower on the priority list. The next obvious step forward with this code would be to implement the animation system. Feel free to use (or not use) this code however you wish. When I started this project I was new to Torque, so perhaps there are more efficient ways to accomplish the things I've done here--if so, use them! And I look forward to seeing what the community does with this project. Thanks, Mike Ness

Great art kaktuzlime! Really well done and awesome visual style.

Hi rintoulj, Thanks for the kind words and welcome to Spriter! All the features you're asking about (using precreated animations as guides for key frames and a way to auto space key frames to specified FPS) will end up in Spriter some time in the relative near future. For now, you can of course put a temporary sprite in all key frames and set it to display your reference frames. (I'm doing that myself atm)..but obvioulsy once theres an automated way to set up actual guide images for frames it will rock! For the timeline think...right now t he only way to space it out is manually, but this too will change within the next few months. Most of the really complicated features for Spriter 1.0 are nearly finished, so cool features like these which will greatly improve workflow will soon be our focus. cheers, Mike at BrashMonkey

Hi Redwyn, Thanks for the kind words. We're determined to make Spriter the ultimate 2d game animating tool. We've only just begun adding the features which will make Spriter a joy to use and a huge asset in any games production tool kit. That said, no matter what tools you use to create 2d animation the fact remains that the more a game's point of view is in perspective (such as top down, isometric and the view you're using) the more work and expertise is required from the artist. For any view like this, when animating a humaniod character, you can no longer rely on 2d bones and the simple rotation of the same limb images across the screen to create natural movements such as walking. Many images need to be created representing the limbs in actual forshortenedperspective. By far the best way to acheive high quality results in these types of games is to create and animate 3d models, then export the finished animations as sequential images that you could then not only load in as guides to "rotoscope" over to create he final, optimized animations in Spriter, but also you can cut them up to get the seperate body part images you'll need. Tpically what you'll be reusing alot in this perspective are both the centralized parts like heads, chests etc, but also limb parts which repeat position in natural movement (like the arm swinging forward and back during a walk... the same images can be used for movement in both directions). Furthermore, you'll notice in many classic games which use this perspective, the characters are symetrical, so entire frames can be reused, flipped to finish the second half of an animation (such as walking) or even standing at idle is actually half a person with a mirror image to make the second half. So, long story short, games that use these angles are much more work for the artist...which is why you inevetibly see games like this use drastically fewer frames of animation, symetrical characters etc. I'd suggest you get your hands on free 3d humaniod posing and animation software like DazStudio asap and start to learn how to animate in 3d (at least to use as a guide and then "paint over") I hope this info was helpful. cheers, Mike at BrashMonkey

Hi Peach, Once all critical Spriter Pro features are finished and stable, time will be spent to create a low-res pixel-art friendly mode and set of features for Spriter. Part of this will be making sure grabing, manitulating and seing tiny images and bones is not a problem. For now, did you see up at the top of the canvas window there are options to hide or lock bones or sprites. This will help you avoid grabbing images when you want to grab bones. cheers, Mike at BrashMonkey

Hi everyone, In case you missed Shawn's original thread, There's a Kickstarter campaign with just 12 days left to go. Please check it out and help spread the word if you can. http://kck.st/V4qKu3 Here's the original thread he had started: http://www.brashmonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1146 Thanks, Mike at BrashMonkey

Really fascinating character design, benotter. Great job! -Mike at BrashMonkey

Very Cool. Thanks miletbaker! Mike at BrashMonkey

Keep all these awesome suggestions coming everyone! We're reading them all and giving every potential feature a lot of thought to make sure Spriter becomes an absolute joy to use. Please keep in mind though, many of these features will necessarily have to wait until all the features we've already promised are present and accounted for, and Spriter in general is very stable. thanks, Mike at BrashMonkey

I think those are great suggestions, Andrige Mike at BrashMonkey

Exactly right cgmonkey! No matter what method you use to create sprite-work, 3/4 or isometric view requires more art that cant be re-used as easily. The most effective method by far is to create and animate 3d models to use as references. This is the aproach we will be using when we create isometric game art packs..but this is a long time from now, because we have several side-view art packs to do first. Mike at BrashMonkey

To quote Edgar from the Facebook page: "alt click and drag out to make a new bone, currently selected bone will be used as the parent for new added sprites and bones. you can edit parentage with the new hierarchy window (mostly self explanatory), or the reparent mode (fun, but not as simple to figure out with being shown). holding shift while changing bone angles uses 2 joint ik, and hold right click and release on the proper control to use constraints on child bones. again, if it's confusing, it'll make much more sense after a video. makes it very fast to do alot with little effort" The reparent mode is entered by pressing the R key. Exit that mode the same way, by pressing "R". In this mode you can reposition bones and by clicking and dragging from sprites to the blue circles on bones you can assign those Sprites to those bones. You can also assign child bones to parent bones this way. It take a bit to get used to, and the video will make it much easier to pick up right from the get-go. cheers, Mike at BrashMonkey

Thank you all so much for your support and patience. We're not trieng to just get Spriter done fast, We're trying to get it done right. Once there's new tutorial videos, documentation and examples we hope it will be obvious how important it is to us to not copy previous animations programs, but to make every aspect of our tool more flexible and great for work flow. Mike at BrashMonkey

I'd check with our Spriter plug-ins section here and the Cocos 2d forums to see that the state is on any Spriter support and to find out how to use it. best of luck, Mike at BrashMonkey

Hmm. I guess your best bet is to post about Spriter in forums specific to the Moai SDK comunity to dtum up interest in Spriter and making a plug-in. Best of luck. In the mean time, We'll do our best to make Spriter so fantastic everyone will want to support it for every dev system. Mike at BrashMonkey

Wow. Fast progress! Awesome work. Mike at BrashMonkey

@ sAtanasov Very cool. I love how it's style is like classic Japanese illustrations.

Welcome to the forums grimfang4, and thanks for working on Spriter support for C++! cheers, Mike ay BrashMonkey

Do you mean example code for using Spriter data in an IOS game via Xcode? Do you mean where to download Spriter for Mac? I really don't understand your question. please rephrase the question or clarify so we can help. -Mike at BrashMonkey

hi DoubleElite, What VictorT said was right on the money, but also, don't worry, once all the key features are in, time will be spent to give Spriter a pixel art friendly mode, which will let you work, preview, export and export as full frame PNG's all with no filtering at all to perserve your exact pixels and colors. This is not likely to happen until late December or slightly later though. cheers, Mike at BrashMonkey

Hi abls1, Did you unzip the monster project? Did you load Spriter and choose File/Load Project or File/New Project and then either load the .SCML file or point to the monster folder? Are you saying when you load Spriter you can't even select those options from the menu? Maybe screen record what you're doing so we can tell if its an actual issue with the software or just a missunderstanding due to its current lack of documentation.

Spritesheets will be supported. My best guess is a Spriter to JSON converter will be created by other parties before we could get around to it.

Hi mildanach, Great (and timely) question. That and other important features for workflow will be implimented soon. Mike at BrashMonkey