Spine vs Blender?

[clofresh]

Hey folks,

I was evaluating which animation tool I should use for my game and I was deciding between Spine and Blender. There's also Photoshop frame by frame animation, but seems like a lot of work for doing a complicated set of animations.

Blender is mainly for 3d so it's super complex, but I think you can do 2d animations with it. Liege sprite animations are made with Blender for example. There's a lot of tutorials for it since it's so popular. I'm not sure what the export format would be or how much work it would be to get an animation into Love.

Spine is newly kickstarted, but looks like it's pretty usable since it's designed for 2d animations. I also like that Love is an officially supported export target.

What do you guys think? Have you have experience with either one?

[Plu]

Spine looks pretty cool. Thanks for sharing that. No experience with either unfortunately, as I cannot draw. But I know some people who might like to give Spine a go. I'll let you know if they have any feedback, but it might be a while

[riidom]

As for blender, you would render an animation from frame x to y and maybe repeat that with different camera positions, in case of isometric graphics.
It exports you a bunch of .png's; afterwards you can use imagemagick or some other tool to melt these into a spritesheet.

One of many tuts covering this (this one is for static stuff only): http://flarerpg.org/tutorials/isometric_tiles/

There are also scripts that automate things like the rotation of camera. For scripts it is important to know for which blender version they are done; 2.49b scripts are not compatible to newer blender versions, as most noticeable pitfall.

[retrotails]

I always use Blender for animations, I'm awful at hand drawn ones and Blender makes it pretty easy. Here's an example of mine.
download/file.php?id=5742
Everything about that is a test, the code isn't set up to work well with multiple levels etc plus its quite old. But it's a decent example. His sprite is loaded like any other sprite, I used ImageMagick to combine multiple renders.
Also, I used Cycles with its motion blur which looks decent in motion but it can make your character harder to see.

[raidho36]

I just realized that I'm doing about the same thing as Spine right now, only targeted specifically at löve2d and with automated animation handling.

[clofresh]

I always use Blender for animations, I'm awful at hand drawn ones and Blender makes it pretty easy. Here's an example of mine.
download/file.php?id=5742
Everything about that is a test, the code isn't set up to work well with multiple levels etc plus its quite old. But it's a decent example. His sprite is loaded like any other sprite, I used ImageMagick to combine multiple renders.
Also, I used Cycles with its motion blur which looks decent in motion but it can make your character harder to see.

Wow, that's pretty polished for just a test. Looking forward to a playable game. How did you get to the point where you felt comfortable enough in Blender to do that kind of animation?

[retrotails]

Wow, that's pretty polished for just a test. Looking forward to a playable game. How did you get to the point where you felt comfortable enough in Blender to do that kind of animation?

Thanks!
You'd be surprised, I only animated once before that so the animation is awful, but when scaled down to like 32x32 it looks fine. Modeling and animating are easy, texturing and rigging are a pain. For his model, I rigged it the old fashioned way with all manual weight paints and it took forever, but he's not even textured, he just has some procedural materials.
To answer your question, I did that animation after about 3 years of experience, but I learned the most my first day where I memorized nearly all the keyboard shortcuts (made easier now by pressing space and typing what you want, it even tells you the shortcut) and spent around 12 hours figuring everything out. After a bit of experience like I had when I made that animation, each animation takes me about 10 minutes tops.