Animated GIF as a guide animation for Bones

[ignotus]

I am new to Spriter, so I apologize if this question has a simple answer. So any advice would be much appreciated, and I may be going about this the wrong way.

Basically, I have an animated gif that I would like to use as a sort of "guide animation" to help me create my animation project in Spriter. By Guide animation, I am wanting to create and place bones over top of the gif animation, using it as a sort of reference rather than animating the bones on my own. The gif would be a background image/place holder that I would delete later on once I get the bones and other images added to the project. The animated gif is a short video clip, so the goal would be to transfer the movements into a cartoon style animation from the video source. 

I was able to get the GIF images to animate properly, separating the gif animation into separate files in the timeline, using the right click "replace selected sprite image" to swap to the next gif image in the animation sequence. The gif animation plays fine as expected once I have added all the frames to the timeline. The problem I am having is, when I create and add bones to a  keyframe in the animation, the bones do not continue across the entire timeline. What I would like to do, is have bones that I can animate accross the entire timeline while still keeping the gif images in the background. Is this possible in spriter (or accomplished a different way) or is this a software limitation?

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

These two videos should give you the info you need to achieve the best workflow.

Basically, first drag in all the guide frames as a single image like in the first video, then set up your character and bones at the very first key-frame, then copy and paste the character/bones across all frames... then animate your actual character bones.

cheers.

[ignotus]

Thanks that did the trick.