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Please post feature suggestions here.


Mike at BrashMonkey

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@SLotman

Spriter will eventually have Texture Packer integration to make it even easier to use spritesheets like you're saying, but any plugin or api that loads Spriter can do this now even before we add it. In fact many of the Spriter runtimes do this already. Since the runtime will load the files, the developer just points it to images on a sprite sheet instead of individual image files.

As far as the Spriter editor itself, the upcoming version can handle ridiculous amounts of sprites on screen, so it won't be a problem within the editor itself, and again the Texture Packer integration will eventually allow Spriter to retrieve images from a sprite sheet within the editor as well.

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EDITED: I missed something actually quite important (to me)

I haven't gone back through the posts in this thread either. My apologies if I'm posting duplicates.

My project isn't quite ready to jump fully into art, and I've held off on using Spriter until the features are more aligned with my needs. Here are the things that would make Spriter a go-to tool for me:

1) Output Controls: The ability to specify a view around the art that crops to particular areas on output. Defining multiple views and output resolutions would enable artists to generate content more easily. RPG's for example may need a portrait and full-body views of a character, but if the character is assembled in Spriter, it's an extra set of work to frame up and crop later.

2) Gradient Color Remapping: Remapping the color values of a sprite part's texture to a gradient strip (ideally created within the app and saved to a "palette" for reuse. This is a very powerful tool for building visual variation easily and is getting used more frequently in game development.

3) Deformer Bones: Special bones that can deform the sprite part they're linked to in a more granular way than squash and stretch can. This would allow less model segmentation and cool effects like bulging and bending.

4) Depth Mask Output: Generate a depth mask per frame; a greyscale image that renders each part as a flat color based on their sorting. The top piece would be white, the bottom piece black - with shades of grey between. Artists working on 2d games with dynamic lighting, can take this in combination with other textures and create ambient occlusion maps and various other effects. They can basically build all the other maps outside Spriter, but the depth info isn't available until they've combined everything in Spriter (and sorting can be changed per frame).

5) Morphing: Cross-fading sprite textures as part layers, with registration points to enable feature alignment (the texture/UV coords are basically being deformed to accomplish this alignment). This would enable really subtle animations to be built, and possibly with fewer discrete sprites.

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  • 2 weeks later...
when you wanna replace an opened hand by a closed one, you need to have a perfectly sized hand (i mean both must have the same size)

you could add a feature in the option of each body part to choose the center of each part

There are check boxes in the image properties for the default handle, but they are always disabled.

I assume this is coming along with the collision stuff, but things like being able to get the xSize/ySize of the whole character to roll our own basic collisions would suffice for now if the collision stuff you have planned is a while away.

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i didn't understand lol

also, i don't know if it's possible with bones but a feature like being able to "distord" images could be very interesting, i don't know how to explain, i mean if you pull the upper left corner of the image and it strech(es) but without changing the downer right corner (hope it's clear lol)

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I'm playing around with Spriter in more depth now and some of what I wanted can already be done (albeit with varying difficulty):

1) Exporting to png enables me to crop to a specific view of the image, but I don't think I can zoom? A workaround would be to output at much higher resolution than I need and downscale in a batch process.

2) Bones can scale sprites, and with creative use of sprites, alpha, and photoshop puppet warp I can probably get many of the effects I'm thinking of.

3) A depth mask can be done by batching through all my sprites and making a new set that in different solid shades of gray and then swapping all my sprite parts at the appropriate time as a companion file to the main animation.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hey, thank you for developing this awesome tool :D I bought a copy and can't wait for the pro version.

Feature suggestions?

+ One thing that I have always found tedious with editing files is having to navigate to them with my file manager. When having millions of body parts all in one folder, it can get bothersome finding the one I want to edit or iterate.

A small, but very useful feature would be the ability to set an external image editor in the options and the ability to open body parts with it from within sprite's object list.Then all one has to do to edit a body part is to double click it on the list or left click-edit externally.

+a little filter search box above the list would compliment that nicely.

+ Just middle click to pan, instead of having to hold spacebar. Blender, inkscape and gimp do that design and it's beautiful.

+Ability to import an image sequence for reference. For example say I made an animation pencil test in some app that gives me the ability to go with the traditional way of doing it- with a pencil brush. I am personally interested in doing my animations in http://www.pencil-animation.org/ and turning them to polished character sprites in spriter. If spriter had something like a grease pencil layer to write notes and make pencil tests that would completely remove the need to use pencil.All I use in pencil2d really is the pencil brush and the eraser,combined with the layers. It's time line is not as advanced as spriter as it lacks basic features and is no good for storing multiple animation clips.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I really need a feature to import an animation from other scml files.

Currently I am exporting the photoshop layers as one scml file, because there are many parts in my PSD file and I just can't imagine myself dragging them all to the right positions one by one in Spriter. But that makes me unable to have one project, because I can't merge the scml files.

By the way, it is still impossible to set key frames for seperate parts. I suspect it would be too much to ask, but why don't you do it the Adobe After Effects style, so the parts of the body don't have to move alltogether?

This is a core feature that would make the working process less tedious.

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As a professional animator I have 4 requests (in order of my suggested importance) that would make this the ultimate gaming engine. I truly believe that adding these features would blow the competition out of the water.

1) Deformation - I saw in your videos that your guys are considering adding a deformation type tool. It doesn't need to be that complicated during the beginning of your project. To get the ball rolling I suggest adding the ability to manipulate only the 4 corners of every limb image. Having the ability to manipulate the images to the extent shown in your videos is great, but I think you will be very happy with what animators can do with just manipulating the four corners. (might be easier to implement aswell)

2) Easing - Easing in your tweens helps tremendously when attempting to make your animations look more believable. A simple -100 to 100 option(similar to flash) is sufficient. -100 being ease in and +100 being ease out. Maybe an option to have both ease in and out in a single tween would be helpful too.(just a thought)

3) Dynamically adding sprites - This one is obviously harder to implement, but maybe consider it for a future tool. The simplest way i can think of it is a single color that you can draw and erase to dynamically add limbs/sprites/whatever. It doesn't need to have all the whistles of a painting program, just something that allows you to quickly add elements that you can later take to a separate painting program to make pretty. (Great for prototyping animations).

4) Offsetting Limbs - (This might already be possible, not sure) When animating characters without a skeletal structure (a lot of flash animation is done this way) it would be nice to offset the animation of separate limbs via shifting the keys over a few frames. This can help speed animation workflow. (Common in many animation programs)

Thanks for hearing me out!

Definitely these two. Squash and stretch is better than nothing, but skew changes everything. It's seriously the difference between making rigid XY axis animations and making animations that appear to cross the Z axis. As for placeholders, that would be amazing to be able to draw a placeholder, take it back into Photoshop, and know the exact size and shape to work on.

Beyond that, stability is big for me. I mentioned it in another thread, but Spriter is pretty much unusable for me right now. I'm patiently waiting for a build that works, then I'm waiting for a way to get it to play nice with Unity without having to spend even more money.

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  • 2 weeks later...

This is probably not a widely requested feature, but what is the option of exporting to other file formats?

My particular situation is that Shiva does not support dynamically loading .png files, they need to be .jpg (no transparency :( ) or .tga. So, a .tga would be a solution to my current problem.

Long term though, when Atlas's are introduced, and I change the Shiva workflow, other options may be better anyway.

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My particular situation is that Shiva does not support dynamically loading .png files, they need to be .jpg (no transparency :( ) or .tga. So, a .tga would be a solution to my current problem.

You could try a batch converting program, such as XnConvert.

Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, there are many ways to get to formats I can use, but as I am trying to write a plugin for 3rd party users, to go straight from spriters output to shiva's input, asking everyone to do format conversions is not a nice workflow.

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For importing.

Export to png is fine as it is, as oddly enough, shiva can do a manual import of .png files, which would be how an animated spritesheet would be used, but importing at runtime via scml, it doesn't handle .pngs properly.

Treat this as lower priority if you have other more important changes though, as in the end, as I said, I may need to go the atlas route anyway.

Thanks for the feedback.

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I haven't checked this whole thread, but...

What about sub-animations? What I mean by this, is animations that occur without interrupting a 'main' animation, such as swinging a sword while in the middle of a walk cycle. The walk cycle continues as normal, but the upper body performs an attack sub-animation. The Mega Man Zero series does this with Zero's walking sword slash.

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Hi All,

I've only just picked up Spriter and i'm still getting to grips with it. So far it seems to offer me exactly the kind of features i'm after without the bloat that you get in other packages.

One thing I was wondering about is whether you had any plans to support vector graphics in future? That way I could scale the components of my character without losing image quality. I currently create base images in Inkscape. Then, to use in Spriter, I export as png. Finally I export the animation frames as png from Spriter. Perhaps not the best workflow but i'm pretty new to all of this.

Just to be clear, i'm not suggesting you include the drawing tools in spriter to create the images. I actually quite like the split between tools.

Anyway I haven't bought in yet, most likely will soon, keep up the good work.

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Hi,

I've read the boards and ther shortcut but I'm quite new to Spriter, so I'm sorry if I missed a feature which is already there.

Simply put, I would like a 'add keyframe' shortcut/button which adds a keyframe in the current frame which freezes the exact position of the objects at that point in time.

It would often be easier than copy and paste, and it would also speed up other manipulations (beside tiny adjustments, another fancy use could be to add some keyframes at irregular intervals in the middle of an interpolated animation and then set them all to linear as to simulate stop motion).

As an advanced feature it could also be interesting to have a tool which generates a keyframe in the entire timeline at every decided interval (i.e. every 100ms).

Cheers,

ele

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1). Ease in \ Ease Out + Graph editor

2). IK\FK switch for the whole character (holding shift does only "half" IK for example a human leg does not move the top part of it only the two lower)

3). MS\FPS indicator (since most animators works on fps systems)

4). Smooth zooming and panning (could be nice)

5). maybe a skew ? (like in flash)

6). good onion skin

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  • 2 weeks later...

Gotta say, B2 release is looking real good. Though, there're two things I'd like to ask about.

First one isn't a new feature, but rather a feature that was promised in the original version of Spriter. Hitboxes.

It was that feature which I really was interested in and wanted when I bought my license.

Is it still a planned feature, or has it been dropped?

The second thing is an optional mode for putting down keyframes. I really don't like that the program puts down a keyframe

whenever I do anything. If I could have the program only put down a keyframe when I press a button in the GUI or key on the keyboard

that would be great.

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The things I would like are

Tooltips, ease of use things, clear labels : I had to watch the video to figure out how to do things. Messaging to communicate how to do things would be very helpful.

True IK that adjusts all bones necessary, not just one bone back

On that note, the ability to set acceptable angles for bones to bend, so shoulders automatically don't pop out of sockets

Skew/stretch, just a really important animation thing. Check out #1 on this list for details. http://art-eater.com/2010/07/test-1-darkstalkers/

Good product so far, needs a bit more to be great though!

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