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Please post feature suggestions here.


Mike at BrashMonkey

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lol actually i do run my own games with chars from stickman on my android phone, it runs in 60fps in 640x480 mode on my 1ghz galaxy s :D

I am using stickman all the time, you cant beat that deformation feature :D d5HVwPS.gifhe_man_bellystance_by_bwwd-d6su0qo.gif

LOL! You just cracked up everybody in my office here.

Link? Stickman brings up lots of results....

I must say, this looks awesome. Would love to see this feature too.

Spine is starting another Kickstarter to get this feature. I prefer Spriter, so I'd love to see a match for this.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eso ... e-features

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yeah i had little argument on spine forums cause i was suggesting deformation and they werent convinced but looks like they changed their mind and even created new kickstarter for it :D

Stickman is here http://www.cutoutpro.com/download.html

To create something similar to that he-man you would have to have very nice keyframe interpolation or ragdoll physics, besides deformation support.

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...a lot of animators will tell you taht without deformation anims looks too stiff...

actually, that is not entirely true. A lot of animators will tell you that animations without follow-through and stretch-and-squash will look stiff. A lot of animators will also tell you that simple cut-out animations are stiff. But that is not the same as saying that animations without deformations (let alone automated deformations with tweening) are stiff.

In its current state (Beta 5), it is very well possible to make dynamic animations in Spriter by combining tweened modular animations with a more classical frame-by-frame hand-painted approach. In the quick and dirty animation below, the fast movement of the cat and the follow-through animation in his hair can hardly be considered stiff (timing is a bit off though...I'm still getting used to a millisecond timeline rather than a classical 24 f/s timeline, and there is some opacity that of course doesn't translate to the GIF).

CatFromBin2b_small_zps5103cf8f.gif?t=1383670056

Some say that hand drawn phases are never that smooth and stand out too much. But I think the above animation shows that this is a misconception. Even more so, the follow-through as shown here is not achievable using deformations of the original png, and drawing them (digitally) only took a few minutes total which might actually make it faster than optimizing deformed frames.

Let me be clear, I'm not necessarily against deformations, they have their uses, and when applied carefully (especially for more generic (sub)-animations) they can be a very valuable addition to any animation-package; I even proposed an idea how they could be made compatible with engines that don't support them without having to cripple oneself by using pre-rendered full-frame PNGs. What I really don't like about deformations though, is, that it often results in rubber-band/elastic movements that look very unrealistic, automated, and - in my opinion - boring. Your He-Man animation is a good example of both the potential strengths and the huge weaknesses of this approach.

What I am wondering though is this. You have a piece of software that you really like (Stickman), it does exactly what you want as far as I understand. Why not stick with that? - Because you seem to want to move to either Spriter or Spine in the future (considering that you are very passionate about defending why both should implement this feature), but I don't really see why you'd want to make that move if what you have works for you.

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At this point, to me, bwwd is looking like a lonely guy because stickman doesn't have a forum. That or a desperate chump posting his work in every place he can in hopes of getting some work (you are on spriter forums, it makes no sense posting the stuff you made on another software over and over and over).

He seems to think that his animation style is the end be all of animation, and we should all either work like him or admit our inferiority.

He comes to a skeletal animation software forum to say that bones are limiting and the software is crippled because it doesn't accommodate his workflow.

He deems direct playback useless because he got 4 characters with a handful of animations and no variations each running on a cellphone.

In over half his posts he mentions stickman and how great it is.

I think we already know why they don't like him over the spine forum.

It's safe to assume that almost everyone with animation experience on this forum has worked with another software at some point, yet this guy is the only one who keeps talking about other programs, steering the conversation away from spriter over spriter's forums.

I have a license for Toon Boom Animate Pro, and I deem it the best animation software on the planet, and I would use it if I wanted png exports, yet you don't see me wailing over and over about how great TB is and that spriter should be like it or it will be just a crippled tool. I think it's safe to assume that most of us here are here because of what spriter can do, not because of what it can't do.

In almost all other software's forums I'm used to seeing a rule about not talking about other software, I always thought it was a dumb rule, until I saw bwwd and now I wish this forum had such a rule, if you are on spriter's forum talk about spriter or gtfo.

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I suggested deformation on forums i dont care if they like me or not, some of the posts were like yours, very negative because i want software to improve and force engines to support deformation, no amount of changeable graphics can replace smoothness of keyframe interpolation when deforming body parts.

My games run on mac.windows, linux ald all other imaginable platforms is it bad ? :D

I mention stickman because its great, obviously i wouldnt if it was bad :D whats so wrong about it, is it microsoft vs apple discussion for you haha, im sure it is, thats why i just ignore you or if you want it that way.... :D lol can i see your animations, thanks.

Toon boom software is very scary software you cant undo a lot of the stuff you do in it, it is standard in companies so i understand i wont win that one anyway kinda like protools in music business.

Id like to remind you it is feature suggestion thread :D and deformation is on its way, im happy, you can be sad.

I dont even know why you talking to me directly its cheapshot to make me some kind of troll when all i do is suggesting what to do with spriter to be above other animation cutout programs.

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Ok i looked up your anims and youre good animator so i have no clue why youre against spriter evolving, youre afraid of new features or something :D You use a lot of image switching and its like having to draw almost all frames by yourself yet is still isnt as smooth as could be also youre using workarounds to rotate sprites, it all takes more and more time.

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aaah i know now, your seriously mad cause i posted link to stickman :D i did it for that other guy who asked me what softawre im using, no need to act like this when im helping.

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I suggested deformation on forums i dont care if they like me or not, some of the posts were like yours, very negative because i want software to improve and force engines to support deformation, no amount of changeable graphics can replace smoothness of keyframe interpolation when deforming body parts.

My games run on mac.windows, linux ald all other imaginable platforms is it bad ? :D

I mention stickman because its great, obviously i wouldnt if it was bad :D whats so wrong about it, is it microsoft vs apple discussion for you haha, im sure it is, thats why i just ignore you or if you want it that way.... :D lol can i see your animations, thanks.

Toon boom software is very scary software you cant undo a lot of the stuff you do in it, it is standard in companies so i understand i wont win that one anyway kinda like protools in music business.

Id like to remind you it is feature suggestion thread :D and deformation is on its way, im happy, you can be sad.

I dont even know why you talking to me directly its cheapshot to make me some kind of troll when all i do is suggesting what to do with spriter to be above other animation cutout programs.

--

Ok i looked up your anims and youre good animator so i have no clue why youre against spriter evolving, youre afraid of new features or something :D You use a lot of image switching and its like having to draw almost all frames by yourself yet is still isnt as smooth as could be also youre using workarounds to rotate sprites, it all takes more and more time.

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aaah i know now, your seriously mad cause i posted link to stickman :D i did it for that other guy who asked me what softawre im using, no need to act like this when im helping.

I was curious. Didn't mean to upset anybody, or cause a flame war. I was genuinely curious. :oops:

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haah i think we made him angry or somethin, happens all the time on internet, anyway i wouldnt be here if i thought that spriter isnt good, i like the software and if i know that its being developed right now then its best time for suggesting features, hey they were reluctant to add deformation to spine but look what happened, theyre actually getting more $ from people to implement it, and im happy for them, doesnt matter if they like me or not . :D

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Hi everyone,

Just to clarify a few things about our position on things:

Indeed, this is a thread for feature requests/suggestions, so mentioning, directly comparing, and even being completely biased towards and/or mentioning other tools here are all completely fine as far as we are concerned. (not that I'm accusing anyone of being unfairly biased, just saying even that is fine, so long as there's no silly flame war starting language and personal insults going with it)

We definately do not have or support any kind of "you can't mention our competitors" type of policy... we feel products should stand on their own merrits in broad daylight, without the worry of direct comparisons etc.

We love and always planned on supporting all the cool bendy-warping stuff from the start, BUT its critical to keep in mind this stuff takes a considderable amount more processing power (especially when tweening etc) and many platforms/ game engines might not be able to support it, or, if people make every animation for every object on screen use it, they might contribute to unacceptibly low fps on some platforms. This is why we waited until all the non-warpy stuff was supported first...its universally useful.

Using full frame rendered PNG's for sprite/character animations will always have its place, but its a massive trade off: No tweening and a drastically greater usage of memory. You also can't easilly or efficiently do all the cool costume, weapon, armor swapping thing either...but it does require less processing power.

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Also, I'm seeing very strong tallent here discussing/debating the methods of diferent technology and work flow. You all do great work, but find diferent things more important. You all make good points from your point of view, and based on your individual priorities. The great thing is Spriter will soon allow each of you to comfortable and quickly work with your desired methods and even use the other methods you normally would not when those become preferable for the specific task and technical requirements at hand.

Spriter benefits from all of your input and fantastic example animations... as does the community by being inspired by your work and learning by your examples and discussions of technique... even debates are useful, just please don't make them personal or "guess" or "project" personal character atributes onto the people you have differing proirities from, and just stick to clean, logical points and counterpoints pertaining only to techniques, work-flow, use of technology and feature trade-offs etc.

And, in my opinion, even when it really rubs us the wrong way..when someone really seems to have the wrong aditude wen expressing their priorities and desires, its almost always best to not address that aspect at all...if you think they are wrong from a factual, technical, logistical standpoint, prove it politely, calmly and only with points or counterpoints...you'll come off smelling like roses, and will never have to backtrack or "eat crow" for having jumped the gun when a particularly stressful day makes your buttons all too easy to push. ;)

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

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The four things that I currently miss most in Spriter (that would make my workflow a lot more convenient) are

1. having an image-sequence or avi-file as a reference on the background. I plan out most of my animations the old-fashioned way (using DigiCel Flipbook), and I like to do a lot of frame-by-frame tweaking, so having such a reference would be a real timesaver.

2. convert the timeline from miliseconds to FPS and vise versa. I use the classical approach of animating on twos (or for fast animations on ones), and that means that I currently set the time-line to 24, set the playback speed to 2%, and stretch it back to 1000 when the animation is done. This works, of course, but it is a work-around.

3. I would love to see a small animation chart when I select an object so I can quickly evaluate the position of the extremes and relative positions of the inbetweens, similar to the way it would be in classical animation. This could already be partly achieved by showing the timeline of the current selected object(s) above the general timeline.

4. actually applying the property of extreme or inbetween to a frame would be useful to me, because I fist set the extremes and then tweak the inbetweens. Removing an inbetween will have much less impact on the animation than removing an extreme, so it would be useful for me to lock/unlock the extremes. Also having the inbetweens automatically adjust to changes in the extremes close to it (it would still require some manual tweaking) would speed up the process when I suddenly decide to change the position of an arm later on in the project.

For me animation-applications are not about automation but assistance. and I approach them from a classical handdrawn tradition; which - for me - has proven to provide the most lively characters.

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There are 3 things that would make Spriter invaluable to me and the work I do

1.non aliasing and aliasing using only current color palette

2.Dithering using color palette when using transparency.

3.mimicking animations so you can build 2 animations and have one that is almost the same on the other side. for parallax 3d stereo-scopy

Thanks

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Unless I'm missing something, the latest version of Spriter is still missing some very basic functionalities:

1. Ability to easily select a group of Keyframes

Say I have 10 keyframes I want to move, currently it's very laborious process of ctrl-clicking each one, one mis-click and the entire selection is lost. Would be great if I could just press shift, and click the first and last keyframes, to select all of the ones in between.

2. Ability to stretch/compress a group of keyframes

Once I have the 10 frames selected, I may want to stretch or compress them to make the animations shorter/longer. Currently there's no way to do this as far as I can tell. I'd like to be able to hold "Alt" and then click either end of the selected frames, to stretch all the intermediate frames.

Common use cases for this are:

1. To slowDown/speedUp specific parts of an animation

2. To quickly move a specific part of the animation along the timeline

3. To quickly delete a specific part of the animation

4. To quickly duplicate a specific part of the animation

This seems like such obvious functionality... am I just being dumb and not seeing how to do it?

I just wanted to follow up on my post earlier.

I'm seeing lots of advanced feature requests here, but I really think we should take care of basic functionality first.

The ability to quickly select, or stretch a group of keyframes, is absolutely core functionality that is missing right now. Would really like to see this prioritized, as it will make the tool much more of a joy to use for all users.

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Simple one, the ability to lock animations so they can't be changed. Much like the lock in photoshop.

At this point I'm working with spriter almost fulltime, I got both of my clients to implement it within their engines so I'm pumping animation like mad.

I usually copy and paste poses a lot to save time, sometimes my animations will get messed up and I don't know whether it's me changing them accidentally or if it's a bug or something. I have had to edit my .sclm files with notepad to fix messed up animations so much that it isn't even funny. I have noticed that animations tend to get messed up after a paste fails: copy from one animation, paste into another and the pieces will get pasted in wrong positions, with wrong scales and wrong rotations; the only pattern I have managed to find is that it usually only happens when I'm pasting to an animation whose first frame is pasted from another animation, and the first frame isn't the first frame of another animation (maybe not all necessary data is being copied to suffice being a first frame?).

Anyway, if I could lock animations at least I could know if it was actually me dragging stuff around of pasting frames where they shouldn't be.

I have come across a lot of once in a while bugs, which I don't report simply because they happen a few times and never more, and I have no clue as to what caused them. One of the set of characters I'm currently working on is rather complex, some reaching almost 30 pieces, for these using onion skins seem to trigger a lot of bugs which don't happen with simpler characters; bugs like: incomplete onion skins(not all parts are drawn), onion skins frozen on screen, all the character becoming the color of the onion skin, character gets stuck in position (when moving something it will jump back to it's starting position when the mouse is released), again, most of these have only happened to me a handful of times, and restarting spriter or reloading the file fixes them.

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Keep these great feature requests coming everyone. We're listening. Our goal after the official release of b6 is to start getting general work-flow and eas of use improved as throughly and quickly as possible.... when were ready for this phase we'll review these suggestion threads and let you all know what's being worked on.

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

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- I think must have is autosave current project in background so you could bring it back after crash, sometimes its crashing and you would want to have most recent version of your project, , it would save a lot of work cause spriter is crashing quite often.

- I thought non linear interpolation would solve this but it didnt, i wanted to get smoothed out motion so for example if you have object in topleft corner on 1st keyframe , then move it to topright on 2nd keyframe then to bottomright on 3rd keyframe and bottom left on 4th keyframe then it would travel to these locations in circular motion kind of like making a circle not square like it does right now, im not sure what has to be changed to do that.

- some easier way to select body parts when theyre small , because its near impossible to assign small bodypart to bone or at least add another option not just B keyboard shortcut, selecting from menu to assign should also be possible but it isnt.

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Hi bwwd... tweening (speed) curves effects the timing of things...easing in and out etc.

It sounds like what you want is to designate motion paths. This is definately possible in the future, but very likely wont be coming any time soon, as there are more critical features yet to be added. It's definatley a good suggestion though and one we're very likely to do something about in the future.

About Spriter crashing...Spriter never crashes on me and I used it extensively to finish the Art Packs, so it's really important for people to get crashes to try and figure out the fastest way to reproduce the crash and report it to Edgar so he can find the cause and fix it.

A bug we don't know about, or can't reproduce is unlikely to get fixed. :(

The ideal situation if you get a crah is to start screen-recording, restart Spriter and redo the exact thing that happened to see if it crashes again.. If it does crash again, that screen recording is like a gold brick of bug-fixing treasure. ;)

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

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Everytime its crashin im thinking- they know about this bug for sure and will fix this so im not even reporting anything, ill try to reproduce bugs and let you know.

First of all my Z order is totally biuggy, its switching order constantly without any reason so legs are behind body etc, i dont know is this normal or is there any way to lock z order.

Or this one when my skins become bones in hierarchy view

hscCVbW.png

Do i need some library to make it work better? This is one of the messages i got during crash:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ro0ju79mcen0if6/errror.txt

Stuff is disappearing, changing order, clones of body parts are created for no reason, i cant be the only one.

Had also this problem when adding white big points by dragging on white arrow:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7z3cnvfy8f31m ... .46.36.png

Also i had skin falling apart but i realized that i got that red circle near to it when i was creating big control points when setting skin up and from that moment this red circle was next to this skin, then it caused skin to lose vertices

http://i.imgur.com/yC68I7M.png

http://i.imgur.com/Kf7sTC9.png

I wasnt doing anything special just creating big points using that white arrow

Im getting some random dots when exporting png files of skin bodyparts animation(doesnt happen with sprites body parts animation)

Wi8PnRR.png

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heres the video to show you the problem with z order, sprites vs skins.Sprites work fine but skins zorder isnt working properly.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nllsw73zc7cmivl/zorddd.avi

I had most of my crashes when undoing or deleting stuff, especially when deleting first keyframe.

Also i cant assign bone to the skin if skin is already in setup mode with points, i can only do that before i setup the skin.

Id like to have ability to turn sprite into skin.

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First off, the latest version has some of the features I requested (not too long ago!) So thanks so much! You guys are blowing my mind.

I came across this:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fin ... for-2d-art

Wow. Very cool. Any chance we could get something like this for Spriter? Looks like an incredible amount of work (for individual animation). They mention support for Spine, but nothing on Spriter. Perhaps contacting him, and trying to work with him to support Spriter too?

Or, you could do this yourself. Now, normally, I'd say that would be too much for you, but given every update I've seen, I can't count that out. Would be amazing to see.

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I came across this:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fin ... for-2d-art

Wow. Very cool. Any chance we could get something like this for Spriter? Looks like an incredible amount of work (for individual animation). They mention support for Spine, but nothing on Spriter. Perhaps contacting him, and trying to work with him to support Spriter too?

Or, you could do this yourself. Now, normally, I'd say that would be too much for you, but given every update I've seen, I can't count that out. Would be amazing to see.

From what I saw on the video, you could use spriter combined with sprite lamp together to get those results, instead of having them add more features to spriter, which is more in need of optimization than new features.

Thanks for bringing that up to my attention, quite interesting and could easily be combined with spriter to get good results, too bad I'm too much of a crap programmer to even hope to be able to use normal maps.

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It doesnt look nice on sprites ingame, looks like bump mapped sprites, unless someone likes bump mapped sprites, its 4 additional lighting maps per one frame, thats totally not worth it imo.

Do you reply to every post or what? Half the posts I see here are yours. Just because you wouldn't want something like that doesn't mean others wouldn't . It depends on the game, artist, situation, etc.

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First off, the latest version has some of the features I requested (not too long ago!) So thanks so much! You guys are blowing my mind.

I came across this:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fin ... for-2d-art

Wow. Very cool. Any chance we could get something like this for Spriter? Looks like an incredible amount of work (for individual animation). They mention support for Spine, but nothing on Spriter. Perhaps contacting him, and trying to work with him to support Spriter too?

Or, you could do this yourself. Now, normally, I'd say that would be too much for you, but given every update I've seen, I can't count that out. Would be amazing to see.

This seems to be a thing that works engine-side, so I think it will work with spriter-animated stuff as long as the engine you use supports both that and Spriter.

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I do not know, if this was already mentioned, but if the skinning feature would provide more control over the bending curves between two bones, animations could be created much easier. The current fiddling is very suboptimal.

It doesnt look nice on sprites ingame, looks like bump mapped sprites, unless someone likes bump mapped sprites, its 4 additional lighting maps per one frame, thats totally not worth it imo.

w7e3.png

So you want to tell us, that the left, unshaded sprite looks better than the right one?

It is completely worth it and you do not need 4 maps. 2 are enough and with some extra programming effort you only need one additional texture for each sprite. Anyway, my example does not rely on any extra bump map, everything is calculated on the fly and it took me not much time to create this picture.

I also do not think, that Spriter has to cooperate with Sprite Lamp since dynamic lighting is only engine based and has nothing to do with the animations. Creating normal maps is a seperate task and very time consuming. But it would be useful if Spriter had the ability to switch between diffuse and normal maps (or any other corresponding information containing texture) while creating animations. Something similar to character maps?

Edit:

Here is an example how it would look like, if you would use dynamic lighting with Spriter:

-Trixt0r

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