Skew in Spriter

[bobo]

Hey there! i'm a Professional animator and i have been very impressed with spriter!

just pre-order it from the websites and wish to see it growing and growing!

Would love to share from my experience and help the community and the program grow with the animation needs.

one needed feature for cutout animation is skew, like in flash

was wondering if there is a hidden feature or you might be able to add this in the next built. it is a deal breaker in order to stretch the limitation of an cutout animation.

this could be awesome! also an ability to controll the ease in and out of an animation (could not find it right away if its exist)

if those features already exist would love if you could show me how to use them!

i got more things i think could help out the animation needs in spriter, but i need to explore it more so i could share my feedback! thanks a lot ! and keep on rocking :)

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

Hi bobo,

Skew is something we definately want to support in Spriter, but this feature will likely appear some time after the initial release of Spriter Pro 1.0.

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

[Pfaeff]

Will perspective transforms also be supported at some point?

[lucid]

hi Pfaeff, most likely in some form or another.

The idea would be to have a small suite of '2d modelling' tools. Skewing would simply be one tool of many, but the moment you go from simply stretching and angling, and start distorting the four corners in any way that doesn't preserve 90 degree angles for all four corners, you eliminate the ability of simple sprite display and move into requiring polygons for apis to support it. At this point, we will expand the format to accommodate varying degrees of polygon distortion, but the file format won't save 'skew factor' or something like this. It will save information to reconstruct the vertexes. To the animator it will be a skew or a perspective change, but to the engine loading the api, they will all be polygon based 2d models.

[monsterzerozero]

That's a shame. No skew is basically a deal breaker for professional animators.

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

@ monsterzerozero

I think you misunderstood. To rephrase, we have every intention of supporting skew and other forms of sprite distortion some time after Spriter 1.0 is released. It's just a matter of time.

As a side note, I'm sure there are more than a few authoring systems that can't support sprite-skewing, which is part of why we didn't consider this to be an absolute must for the first release of Spriter 1.0 (even though we love the feature and realize its usefulness)...we first wanted to add as many features as possible which all game engines will be able to support.

Lastly, As a professional animator and one who appreciates the gorgeous games by Vanillaware and many past 2d masterpieces which use modular animation with no sprite skewing in their character animations, I'd say many pro animators might disagree with your statement...but again, we know its a great and useful feature and have every intention of supporting it and more forms of sprite distortion after 1.0 is released...and this might be one of the first features to come with a warning that “some game engines or authoring systems might not be able to reproduce animations created with this feature.”

Cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey