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Please post feature suggestions here.


Mike at BrashMonkey

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Also, maybe disable the layer mouseover highlighting feature during playback? I find it useful when selecting, but distracting while previewing my animation.

Some improvements to speed up Z-order sorting - moving multiple sprites simultaneously, keyboard shortcuts to move up/down one layer or move to top/bottom (like ctrl+] and ctrl+[ in photoshop), and definitely something along the lines of copy&paste just z-order to all frames.

Filtering both z-order and animation layers by name could be extremely useful as well - the project I'm working on has 52 sprites for the main character and it's sometimes cumbersome to look for the appropriate one.

Lastly, not sure if already mentioned elsewhere but it would be nice if the timeline could automatically delete "empty" keyframe markers at the top when there are no keyframes remaining on any individual layers at that point in time.

Sorry for spamming your forum with a bunch of suggestions, my wife and I have really been enjoying using Spriter so far and it's opened up a lot of possibilities for the C2 project we've started!

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As it stands now, I'd be frustrated if Spriter did NOT create a key when I altered something at a specific spot in the timeline and instead altered either the previous keyframe or all keyframes. Are one of these the bahavior you are suggesting or is there another option I've not considdered?

I'm not sure I can explain it more succinctly than I already have, but I will try.

The way I would prefer it to work (which could be completely optional so that people who do not want that doesn't have to use it) would be to allow the user to work out the pose for part of an animation, place the keys after it's worked out and iterate the animation that way. (think this: A pose to B pose cycle. A>B, A>a1>B>b1, etc.) When the user is happy with a pose clicking either key all or key selected will put keys at that spot in the timeline. Then the user can start going into detail and trying out variations of the animation without creating a whole mess of new keyframes in the process. When the program is constantly putting down keys I feel like I'm working against the program more than I am with it.

Let's use another program I use to compare. GraphicsGale. GraphicsGale is a pixelart program with animation functionality. There's no tweening, nor anything else than the frames I decide to put in any one animation. Flash is similar, though it has tweening features and the like, in that it also does not do anything unless you place down the key first. And that's really the key point here. Sure, the program placing a key whenever you do anything works for you, but for me, it completely screws with my head.

It doesn't really help that you use milliseconds either. I get that it's probably easier to work with in regards to C2 (and a lot of other engines to, probably) since C2 actually uses milliseconds internally. But, for an animator, it's overkill. I know that people have suggested stuff regarding this before, so I don't see a need to go into further detail about it.

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there are two things id really love to see happen in this software is :

a 50%transparent grid view

Sofar I have not noticed this to be available in current version.

when I tried to do a walking animation, it gets rather frustrating to calculate the position and right distance for the motion from A to B. The onion-skin feature is simply not good enough in my opinion, especialy when I start a new animation, sofar the only way to begin with the right position of the object to match the previous animation is to duplicate the previous animation.

Copying first frames from previous animation into new one happens to crash the software by me

Another feature id love to see is improvement in working on the timeline. A button that allows showing in timeline only the current selected objects and hide the rest that could help for example or putting them into group folders that also can be animated by move, scale and rotate. In toonboom harmony its a type of master peg that works really well in managing the work in timeline with multiple objects.

Getting to animate a part of the body and then select it to move it around in the timeline can become really confusing because theres too many objects shown in the timeline that need to be selected individualy. Imagine animating spiders legs. that's where I came to the point of realization that without these sudgested features, I cant do any complex animation movements unless I starts sketching over my Wacom cintiq screen...

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^^^ I second the IK controllers. Was disappointed I did not find any in Spriter.

-snapping art pieces to a grid.

-nearest-neighbor resampling while zooming (one of the projects our company is attempting to utilize Spriter for is pixel art... difficult to work with when your pixels are all blurry!)

-transparency mask/alpha mask support. Would be great to be able to load up a black/white image to obscure other layers during animation.

-undo/redo functions could use a descriptor for what specific action it is undoing or redoing.

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@UberLou

-> framerate based workflow is already on spriter's roadmap if I'm not mistaken.

Just saw this response, my problem isn't frame based. It's that selecting one object shows me key frames for all the other objects. For example my bug character has about 30 key frame on the wings, but the body only has 5. If I want to animate the body, I have to constantly find the key frames for the body.

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::Updated image files do not update unless you ReOpen your file::

When u already have a file in your folder and Spriter is using it in your current/open file. If you update your file and save it (say in photoshop). Spriter doesnt recognize the update/change until you ReOpen your file, then the image you updated is updated in Spriter.

It would be nice if there was a Refresh/Update button in your File Palette, or able to right click a img in there and click Update or something

I could be wrong and there is a way to do this already but I havnt seen it yet. If not, its kind of painfull to reopen your file each time you do an adjustment to one of your images your currently using in the file

Thanks

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Sorry, but I haven't read through the whole thread.

I got a problem in my test case: Got four animations, wanted a shadow(simple sprite under object) to them all, I added it to one animation, then tried to just copy paste it to the others, I get the object in the timeline, but it doesn'a appear in the hiearchy.

Is there a work around? Otherwise this would be really nice to get added!

Thanks

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You need to paste the shadow to all frames per animation. Theres a feature called paste to all frames in the menu.

With Spriter, each keyframe can have totally independant objects, more, less, totally different....if you paste in one frame, its not automatically in all.

However after all critical features are added to Spriter, we'll likely add features to make such tasks easier...especially regarding z-order when pasting to multiple frames etc.

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

Sorry, but I haven't read through the whole thread.

I got a problem in my test case: Got four animations, wanted a shadow(simple sprite under object) to them all, I added it to one animation, then tried to just copy paste it to the others, I get the object in the timeline, but it doesn'a appear in the hiearchy.

Is there a work around? Otherwise this would be really nice to get added!

Thanks

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Primarily with how I normally work with animation (someone who does alot of After Effects stuff) it would be great if Spriter had a Hue function where I could shift color hues using keyframes. If this would get implemented I would be very satisfied with the already awesome Spriter that is Spriter :)

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I have an idea for a simple feature which would save time for animators. Currently the default transformation point for any imported sprite is the top left corner. Wouldn't it make more sense to make the default dead center in the image?

*edit* Sorry my mistake, Spriters deformation tools work awesome and already do this! *edit*

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  • 2 weeks later...

IMPORT SVG or PDF (inkscape compatibility)

So imagine I make a character in inkscape and use Object grouping - GROUPS or layers to split the body parts. It would be cool is Spriter can look at the SVG file and look at the hierarchy (smilar to how flash does it when importing) then make bitmap bodyparts based on that hierarchy. Not only that, but also keep the path to that svg file and let you update all these body parts when you update it.

This would add a dependency on a svg reading library of course though.

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  • 2 weeks later...
IMPORT SVG or PDF (inkscape compatibility)

So imagine I make a character in inkscape and use Object grouping - GROUPS or layers to split the body parts. It would be cool is Spriter can look at the SVG file and look at the hierarchy (smilar to how flash does it when importing) then make bitmap bodyparts based on that hierarchy. Not only that, but also keep the path to that svg file and let you update all these body parts when you update it.

This would add a dependency on a svg reading library of course though.

That would be an awesome feature. Spriter would also need to be able to render those vectors graphics into pngs for further use.

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Being able to flag keyframes.

I commented on this before so let me expand on it a little.

Look at this animation:

imp7bgmWVnMik.gif

This is what the timeline for that animation looks like:

i5SuAbwUPtiqw.png

Most of those keyframes only have information for her antennae, and it slowed me down a lot having to go look at what keyframes had what when making adjustments.

This is the idea I have that I think could make things a lot clearer for people like me who use lots of keys:

iJ8i1gJxEo0IM.png

By being able to flag keys I could quickly know where to go to make adjustments to certain elements of the animations. It doesn't have to be colors, it could be different key shapes, for example a circle, a star, a square, etc...

And further than that, there could be an option so I can tell spriter between which symbols to cycle to when using the 1 and 2 keys. For example: when I was animating and polishing the antennae, it would have been pretty useful to be able to cycle between only the keys that had any information for the antennae.

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I think this is a great suggestion tombmonkey, and these are exactly the kinds of features we'll be focussing on once all major features are implimented.

We are very dedicated to making Spriter as easy, fast, and enjoyable to use as possible, and look forweard to when we can shift gears towards this aspect of improving Spriter.

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

PS, as always, beuatiful art/animation.

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