Moho Forum

Hi all.
I am brand new to Anime Studio and animation. So these are possibly highly novice type questions.

Firstly, I am aiming at an Android game, with pretty simple 2D graphics. Is Anime Studio the way to go, and export as images into a sprite sheet?

Secondly, I have created a character. And I have created an animation where he walks onto the screen. The next stage is once he arrives on the scene, he must then stand, but maybe, tap his foot while he waits for another event. So I created an animation in my file of him arriving. But then, I need to create a separate animation of him tapping his foot. I would create one loop, and just repeat that on the device.

Do I need to create 2 Anime Studio Files to have two separate animations with the same character? Or, how do I have multiple 'scenes' with the same character in the same file? And he always needs to return to the same position and 'state' (Arms down, standing straight...) at the end of each scene.

How best would I accomplish this? Surely I can do it with one file?

Hope someone can guide me.
Thanks,
Craig

There's no reason you couldn't put all the animations in one file (in the Debut version, you are limited to 3000 frames) and export what you need by adjusting the timeline markers.

One good reason to do it this way is if you want your animation to return to some idle position, where the pose has to match between animations, you can copy and paste keyframes as needed. You can't do this with separate files, unless you use a script like Rudiger's Import Animation script:
Import Animation Script (Content Paradise product)

The following works with Anime Studio Pro.

I get so frustrated when an animation is in some other file and I want to use it in a different file, or maybe I want a segment from one part to put in another. Also, it can get to be a chore if you have like 10 different files of the same character with different animations.

I have started just doing as much as possible in one file BUT instead of putting everything in the timeline, I "store" a bunch of animations in Actions. Even really long complex sequences. The key I found is to set up everything in the actions as if they were the main time line and make sure all of the required animation for all layers is included. Put EVERYTHING in one top level group if possible so an action could include all layers. This can work very well since actions sort of "cascade" through the layers. If you had an entire sequence including background and foreground layers separate from the character but still in the same action, you use the action of layers individually. You could almost keep the main time line empty and just insert actions as needed.

This could work well for your situation by having a default "transition pose" or sequence that could be inserted in the timeline after any new action. If you create a new sequence for a character in an action, you insert into the main time line and then just insert the transition pose a few frames after it, and it matches everything else. Or you could just insert the transitional poses in each action.

The other benefit of this for your game sprites is that all of the animations are stored in one single file. If you change the character in any way, color, clothes, props all of your animation actions are in the same file and it's WAY easier to update them.

Of course you DO need AS Pro for this.

-vern

Thanks for that.

You mentioned spirits, and made a great point. If need to update a lot of files, for a change. Is there currently a way to export a spirits sheet? At the moment, I enter the value of the start and end frame, export then to png, and then I wrote my own .Net application to merge then all into a single picture file to use. Is that right, or is there a inbuilt way to create a spirits sheet?

I am not sure what Actions are. I will Google that. At the moment, my character walks into the screen. That is one spirits sheet. He then stands by bobs up and down. So that is another sprite sheet, which I will repeat in the app. He then throws a punch. Another sprite sheet, returning to his default position.

An I going about it the right way?

AS does not natively support output to sprite sheets. If you can write your own .NET app, that's great.

You can also use ImageMagick to combine the pngs into a sprite sheets. It's a command line tool, so you would enter something like:

montage *.png -tile 4x4 -geometry 200x200+0+0 image.png

This will take 200px-by-200px images and create a 4-by-4 sprite sheet named "image.png".

Ah, OK.
I should maybe make my tool available somehow, if there's anyway I can give back. It simply takes a list of images, and creates one Loooooong image, as opposed to a few rows and columns. (I'm not sure if there's reasons people have multiple rows - but maybe each action should be on it's own row?) And then I have a sprite sheet per action. I can of course change this to have a row per action? I'm brand new to this animation game ... so not sure of best practise. But if I could make a tool that suites peoples needs, I'd be happy to give something like that out.

I'm still looking for actions. Is an action like 'take a step', or, 'bow'?