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Please post feature suggestions here.


Mike at BrashMonkey

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 5 weeks later...

Hi TorQ,

All of that sort of stuff related to "tweening" is planned for a sister version of Spriter that will be built from Spriter once this first version has all of its planned features in and is well debugged. It's at least a full month away before spriter 1.0 is close to feature complete, then there will be at least a few months of optimizing and debugging, and then yet more time after that before I start on this "tween based Spriter".

At the absolute least for the "tweening version" there will be a timeline with keyframes, anchor/pivot points per sprite set by the user and of course automatic tweaning. It's a big question mark if I'll bother getting into the more sophisticated aspects like constraints... definately possible, but by no means gauranteed.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 3 weeks later...

I've some feature suggestions for you:

-Onion Skinning-

for much easier & intuitive animation.

-Pixel Mask-

for making part of an image 'invisible', this would be for when certain parts obstruct

something else that would normally be visible.

Other then that the two major things you already mentioned:

-Free Rotation-

This is self explanatory.

-Exporting the animation as bitmaps-

(Animated GIF, PNG, whatever) although right now the old print-screen works fine for this.

...Would also be pretty handy. Nice software so far!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Thanks for the suggestions everyone,

@ Goldfish on rye,

Soon Spriter will be able tio export finished animations as full frame sequential PNG's (with alpha)...

Onion Skinning is a great suggestion that I might try to work into the pro version of Spriter once the critical features are all in.

Pixel masking is also cool, but it's just too complicated and too much trouble as compared to just propper z-ordering and when absolutely necessary, creating a little "bandaid" image to overlay the problem area. This is too rare an issue for me to put in the huge time and effort to make a complicated feature that most people wouldn't bother learning or see the need for.

By free rotation, I assume you mean with the mouse as opposed to by pressing the J and L keys to rotate a part?

thanks for the great feedback and suggestions.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yeah more intuitive control would be great (like with the mouse) but as it functions now definitely suffices. I see your point about Pixel Masking especially since this program isn't geared toward the art side of things but more about economizing resources and easing production. Thank you for considering my requests and good luck with your program... I'll be looking forward to the new functionality!

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  • 5 months later...

Hey :) I read the previous stuff from several months ago :p how are those features coming along ?

as the pivot point things has already been mention, I won't rewrite about it :p

So how about adding

- Collision with Circles, should be easy to implement, just a center + radius.

With the other export format:

- JSON would be nice as well. :) ;) I can't wait for proper data export.

Tweening is definetely a must !

(also noticed 2 tiny bugs

- with registration panel: i've to enter my serial everytime I start the program

- I have a sprite folder containing a lot of small png's (roughly 600) for a character (it's actually a rip from Tales of Destiny remade on ps2)) : well ... if i try to load that folder, the soft take a while, and when i got the focus back, no pngs at all are available to choose)

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Hi trebor777 and welcome,

sorry about the serial re-entering issue..you're the third customer to have this issue , but I've yet to solve this..I'm stil lworking on it.

I have to admit, I never tried to load a folder with that many png's in Spriter, I'll give that a go and see if I can fix it.

As far as features go, the highest priority is some basic tweening support, but this is definately not goin g to happen for at least several months. (I've got a day job that will take almost all of my time for the next two months...gotta pay the bills :( )

Right now what little availible time I have is going to optimizations and bug fixes for the teatures that already exist... I'm hoping to release a much more optimized Spriter with several bug fixes within a week or so.

Stay tuned here,on Spriter's Facebook page and BrashMonkey's Youtube page for updates.

thanks

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...

Hi, I just tried to download the Spriter alpha r1a from here

https://workflowy.com/shared/57f7fc6e-2 ... fac0a8c43/

and predictably when I did my antivirus software nabbed it and put in quarantine. This is a common thing it does with newer untested files. So I took it out of quarantine in order to run it. However... when I did my antivirus software once again stopped it cold. It said that it did '2 threatening actions', which it didn't go any further in explaining. So I've no idea what it deems threatening enough to stop it but I'm weary enough not to push it further.

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  • 3 months later...

I apologize for the long delay in the reply, please see my introduction post at the top of this forum for an update. The new beta version releasing very shortly is a vast improvement over the alpha, and hopefully won't set off any virus warnings :)

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At last a reply! Well better late then never right? As a matter of fact I was finally able to run the aforementioned alpha sometime later. Whatever it was my virus software didn't like, waiting for it to be updated did the trick. Of course I wasn't able to use it for very long, but what I saw looked good.

I just want to say that I look forward to the new release and irregardless if this fits my specific needs and whether I decide to continue using it, I wish you both success. I believe that what you have here fits a niche that needs filling and that your program as it is now is competitive. Other programs exist like this, with different or lesser features. Most of the 'other' software don't have all these features in one place and one of these programs is very expensive. While most others are freeware they aren't as useful.

One last thing. In order for this to be useful for more people I suggest you allow it to be just open enough to be used as an animation tool alone. I don't mean with paintbrushes or anything, but just to keep it in mind when adding features. The reason I mention it is that their isn't much in the way of free or easy tools for animation out there. I don't think there's any reason you shouldn't be able to use it for any number of relateable tasks. I understand programing is time consuming and adding features can be arduous, so I leave it as a suggestion.

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thanks for the suggestion Goldfish on Rye. We're determined to make it the easiest and most powerful way to animate 2d characters period. There are already a number of features in the pipeline that we hope to add such as freeform deformation of individual images, skinning images to wrap around bone joints, and procedural animation. Perhaps after all this has been accomplished in the realtime arena, we can revisit the idea of adding extra exporting options, or things such as roto-scopable background images and movies that will help with both realtime and "baked" animations as well.

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Hi Brashmonkeys, really excited to see someone working on a tool like this! I'll be putting in my funding moneys in a minute. Some feature requests I have in mind:

Graph Editor & Dope Sheet

For greater control over easings, and cleaner keyframe management, since having everything keyed in a single track can get cluttered pretty fast.

Frame-based sequences in the skeleton

To allow frame-by-frame sequences on skeletal animations, i.e. lip sync, hand gestures, a flame animation exported from Combustion, etc. I'm about to take the beta for a spin, so I'm not sure if this is already possible in some way. Apologies if it is.

Inverse Kinematics

I know this was brought up and addressed, but I'm seconding this request since it's an integral part of my animation workflow and many other game artists I'm sure.

Pack all the image assets into a single atlas

Just a further optimization that might be appreciated for projects running on certain platforms.

Image atlas packing based on UV hulls instead of bounding boxes

Another optimization related to the previous one for even more space savings.

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thanks for the suggestions snowfly

Graph Editor & Dope Sheet

For greater control over easings, and cleaner keyframe management, since having everything keyed in a single track can get cluttered pretty fast.

Currently tweening is yet a fully supported feature in the editor. The getting started guide explains how to enable it, however. We'll revisit the graph editor and dope sheet suggestions when everything's a little further along, but we definitely want editing speed curves to be very simple and streamlined.

Frame-based sequences in the skeleton

To allow frame-by-frame sequences on skeletal animations, i.e. lip sync, hand gestures, a flame animation exported from Combustion, etc. I'm about to take the beta for a spin, so I'm not sure if this is already possible in some way. Apologies if it is.

currently there is only frame by frame animation. We definitely want skeletal animation, with multiple images per bone, as well as the ability to have frame by frame animations tied to a bone. More details on this, and we'll be taking input as we get further in development, and the beta's 'groups' evolve into true skeletal animation
Inverse Kinematics

I know this was brought up and addressed, but I'm seconding this request since it's an integral part of my animation workflow and many other game artists I'm sure.

yes, definitely. that's how I like to work, as well
Pack all the image assets into a single atlas

Just a further optimization that might be appreciated for projects running on certain platforms.

Image atlas packing based on UV hulls instead of bounding boxes

Another optimization related to the previous one for even more space savings.

atlus images have been requested several times in the past few days, and we'll definitely be looking into it, after the kickstarter

thanks for all the suggestions!

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Very excited about this program guys!! Posting these as suggestions, but maybe there's already a way to do this...

Ability to cancel mid-operation (position,rotation,scale)

For example, I've selected a set of parts and in the middle of rotating I realize I started rotating the wrong parts, or maybe I'm just playing around and want to preview how the rotation would look. If I hit 'Esc' while I'm rotating these parts, it could cancel out of the operation without needing to undo.

Simplistic paint

I'd like to hack some really simple shapes together, or sketch out some ideas without having to jump to my workhorse image editor (Photoshop). These would basically be placeholder art that I'd reskin later.

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Ability to cancel operation sounds like a good idea, and should be simple to add.

The simplistic paint starts to venture into adding a whole new set of functionality, and would probably take too long to do correctly before 1.0. I do see how it could be useful though. Maybe at some future point.

Thanks for the suggestions, darktoad

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Simplistic paint

I'd like to hack some really simple shapes together, or sketch out some ideas without having to jump to my workhorse image editor (Photoshop). These would basically be placeholder art that I'd reskin later.

well i would suggest just making your dummy prefab set yourself.. once made you can reuse tons of basic shapes for different ideas and exchange the assets later one..

i rather have brashmonkey completely nail the animation part instead of implementing a basic painting application into spriter.. i like focussed apps that do what they do at 110% rather than a big app that does everything but nothing really proper..

just my 2 cents.. cheers guys.

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For the Pro version

Collision areas

In the old version documentation it mentions collision rectangles which seem to be aligned with the x & y axes. However in the API notes it suggests that a Spriter object could be rotated in its display. This implies that collision rectangles may end up rotated relative to the x & y axes.

So my first feature request is

Rotated collision rectangles can be put in the frame.

Next up is a productivity improvement

Allow a collision area to be attached to an image in an animation, e.g. a sword, then make that collision area appear in the same position relative to that image in every frame in the animation that the image appears in. This then means that as the sword image is moved frame by frame the collision area moves with it (shift, rotate and if image changes size, scale) saving a lot of work in putting the collision area over the sword in every frame.

We probably also need a frame level override where the collision area is made local instead and can be edited or even deleted.

Other collision shapes

Triangle (Useful for pointy things. These can be combined to make general polygons if the designer is keen)

Circle (If we feel bold with our collision algorithms)

Thanks,

Tim

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@Lucid: Thanks for the reply!

@Mr.Ugly: Yeah, true... it's is fairly trivial to create a set of proxy parts. I retract my suggestion.

I do wonder about the per frame data though. How will it be exposed to the user? Let's say I want to re-balance all the values in there, will there be a quick way to do this, like editing a text file or tweaking a dopesheet / spreadsheet?

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