Spriter enables the “modular” method of animating where, instead of each frame being a single complete image, it is constructed from many small, re-useable images (such as body parts). Each of these images that are used to construct the full frame can be scaled and rotated to further increase the “mileage” an artist can get from them.This modular method of animating offers many benefits for several aspects of a game’s development and the final finished product.
Main Features:
- Time! Because an artist will be reusing a handful of modular images to create all of the frames for a character or effect, there will be much less time spent tweaking and polishing.
- Iteration! Let’s say it becomes necessary to change an otherwise finished character’s head design. Instead of the huge task of redrawing or editing the head in every single frame of full frame animations, the artist would only need to change the handful of the head images that are used across all frames, turning a huge task into a quick and painless one.
- Tweaking... Because the modular images (body parts) can be freely nudged around or rotated, it becomes much easier for a non-artist to make tweaks that might be necessary for gameplay, and very easy for the artist to go and re-address whatever tweaks the designer needed to make.
- Character variations! Not only does this method allow for super fast and painless creation of alternate characters based on the data of another character, it also allows for an extremely time and memory efficient way of creating all the variations of a character which can change throughout a game (such as collecting powerups and new equipment). (coming soon)
- Huge savings of file and heap space. Instead of each frame of animation being a large complete image, it’s simply a tiny amount of data storing the position, rotation etc of each small and re-used “body part” image. The larger and more robustly animated your characters and effects, the greater the savings will be.
OS - Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8
http://brashmonkey.com/spriter.htm
Download File Size:12.06 MB
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