Mike at BrashMonkey

Hi everyone,

We value everyone's feedback and we want everyone to have fun with the contest and to feel it's fair. Our plan is to have other contests in the future where we will likely try other methods of judging based on everyone's suggestions. For this contest however, it would be inappropriate and potentially illegal for us change the rules (or form of judging) sense the contest has already begun.

There are many reasons we went with this simple YouTube approach for our first contest.

1) It eliminates the need for individual official judges and potential perceived “conflict of interest”. We have in the past and still do work with and sometimes commission many members of the Spriter community to do official work for BrashMonkey, and it would have been terrible for them and for the quantity and quality of entry animations if none of those artists could participate.

2) Popularity is not only a good thing for Spriter, its a great thing for artists. Really popular YouTube or social media people who enter the contest will bring with them all their followers. Each entry will directly link to a playlist with all entries and will have carefully worded text in the description asking that they click like on the art of their choice only after having seen all of the entries, and mentioning that they can vote for multiple entries if they so choose. This should mean each artists creations will be seen by a lot more people than would otherwise be the case, and even if fans of a specific person click like on that person's entry, they might very well also click on yours. This means increased visibility for all of the artists and publicity for your art and whatever game or art project you're working on.

3) We intentionally chose a subject matter for the contest which is fun and very flexible.. which would overlap as much as possible with projects artists would already be working on... so that work you were already creating or would have to create anyway for your personal projects could be entered into the contest. This allows all potential entrants to decide how much effort to put into the contest.. the potential of winning is very real, but in general, one should only enter contests if the other, tertiary benefits alone would make it worthwhile (publicity, practice, excitement, or, in this case, free advertising of a sort for your project if you use one of its characters as your entry). This way, winning is a potential bonus and you don't feel like you've wasted time and effort if you don't take home the grand prize.

We hope our decision at least makes sense and that despite the potential for your favorite artist or yourself to not win, we hope you'll agree its still worth it to enter and find out - as well as to reap the other benefits, if you perceive them to be there. Also, the more successful this contest is (amount of exposure the contest receives, amount of participation, etc), the more often we can have contests in the future, which can explore new themes, new prizes, and new methods for judging the entrants.
One last note about the benefits of increased visibility. Don't forget, we have a community marketplace. If you are not creating the Boss Animations for your own project, you could put it in the marketplace and potentially sell your creation to other game creators for them to use in their games. The contest would be a great way to introduce your for-sale animation to a larger part of the game making community.

Cheers
-Mike at BrashMonkey
 

I made a fix for this.
Edit: My fix was merged. Just update to the latest version.

You already have them:

You'll find the Essentials in the following directory: 
<Steam Installation Directory>/SteamApps/common/Spriter/Art Packs/Essentials 
 
cheers.

Select the object you want a keyframe for and then click "key selected" near the top right of the timeline bar.

Very nice!  An excellent milestone.
 

Simple animations working   (arrow keys to up and down anim)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8mnhWOnho8nZ0pHTmZ6dVNiLUU/view?usp=sharing

Spriter has guide lines like Photoshop does.. if you left click and drag out from the Rulers on the side of the canvas. That can be handy.

Awesome! Thanks for working on this and sharing with the community. Please contact Edgar (Spriter's programmer) directly vial email: lucid@brashmonkey.com if you run into any issues which require technical clarification regarding the data format etc.
 
cheers.
-Mike at BrashMonkey

That's just a guide image

The only method I can think of is to export sequential PNG images then use another program which can automatically combine sequential images into animations.

I know there are some free programs which can do this if you Google it, but most likely you could do some great stuff with something like After Effects or Vegas Pro.
 
 

What a great challenge!

Welcome, scarletwing.
Unfortunately image deforming (aside from simple rotation and stretching) won't be officially supported until Spriter 2 is released (which will be a free upgrade for all Spriter Pro owners), but that's still at the very earliest I'd assume many months from now.

however, you might want to look at the great work by community member bwwd, who has put excellent use to the unfinished and unsupported experimental "skin-mode" feature already present in Spriter.
 
If I understand correctly, what he does is use skin mode to animated things such as hair and clothes, then renders those out from Spriter (having hidden all other sprites) and then replaces the skin-mode versions with standard Spriter sprites which use the image swap feature.
 
 
cheers.

Congrats! Nice looking stuff.
Best of luck with the project.
 
Cheers.
-Mike at BrashMonkey

The issue you're having is because you have the source rectangle set to "custom rect..." yet you have left, top, right, and bottom all set to zero.. This is exporting each frame as zero pixels wide by zero pixels high.   Switch this back to "trim rect to animation" and that should resolve the issue. (or set proper coordinates for the custom rect settings)   cheers.

Created a character for a Sonic-like game: Jump the Shark.
Here he is as pixel art with NES-like constraints (3 colors).  Sorry about the bad color contrast, but I'm not fixing this one at this time because it's only here as an intro.

And now, Clawburr, an enemy for Jump. This was my first attempt with Spriter.

Clawburr exists to test Jump's ability to jump in a timely fashion, as running into him is clearly a painful proposition. I also think he serves as a demonstration of how a little squetch (squash and stretch) can counteract the 'paper cut-out' feel of a Spriter animation.
Speaking of squetch, here's the goomba equivalent of Jump's world: a sea-slug named Lug.

 

You set the anchor point of your sprite per animation, not per entire character... otherwise you waste huge amounts of texture space and drawing on images padded with large amounts of transparency for no good reason.

The other option is to set the custom trimming for ALL animations to something big enough to fit all animations including attacks, BUT this is incredibly wasteful as mentioned above.

Great job sshukul,
Thanks for sharing!
 
cheers.
-Mike at BrashMonkey

Good Idea. I'll see what I can do, but it might take a couple weeks to get the chance to make a decent video.
 
cheers.
-Mike at BrashMonkey

Looks like a poo-flinging good time.
Best of luck with the project.

Hi,
You want Character Maps, not that "skin"
 
https://brashmonkey.com/spriter_manual/what%20are%20character%20maps.htm

Cheers,
Mike at BrashMonkey
 

The easiest way I can think of to get the effect you're after is by switching the animations off of loop mode in Spriter, and create a clone of each one with a blink in it, and add events in C2 which randomize whether or not it plays the blinking version or the non blinking version.
I know its a little tricky, but the best way to ensure you don't have the issues you've been running into by using other methods.

The Spriter plug-in for C2 does now allow for intercepting and overriding specific things, but I've not used those features yet.. its possible you could do something that way as well.

cheers,
Mike at BrashMonkey

It's not possible to just try and force the sprite of the head or eye to animate via standard c2 events (because the Spriter object has full control of what frame its displaying based on the actual animation data at every screen update), HOWEVER you might be able to do so with the new overriding actions that Edgar recently added. I'm afraid I'm never used them and am too buried in other obligations atm to learn them.

cheers.
-Mike at BrashMonkey

No, Spriter 2 which will be a free upgrade for Spriter owners will have features like deforming from the first release. I suggest you look for threads by community member bwwd if you want to use the skin feature and avoid the bugs as much as possible. He uses it consistently to create great animations and knows the best ways to avoid its shortcomings.

This update post explains why: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/539087245/spriter/posts/1386631

cheers.
-Mike at BrashMonkey

Hi Everyone,
Since originally making this post the forum system has become easier and just pasting the url to your video should embed the video.
Report here if it's not working for you.
cheers.
-Mike at BrashMonkey