Sprite animation software

[nuno]

Hello all!

I've been researching a bit regarding sprite modular animation using skeletons and found two different pieces of software that can export and be used withing Löve

* Spine - http://esotericsoftware.com/
* Spriter - http://www.brashmonkey.com/index.htm

I was wondering if anyone already used any of this before, I'd like to get a bit more info regarding the integration with love before buying the apps.

thanks!

[Fenrir]

Hi,

I tried Spine, it's really simple to use and powerful, but the licence fee is too high for me (so I never tried their LOVE exporter, can't say how it works). I had a quick look to Spriter too but I didn't liked it, after testing Spine it's a bit rude I guess... So finally I'm using Blender for my skeleton animations, I had to write my own exporter but it was really simple as the python API is well documented and quite powerful (my exporter is only 35 lines of codes and it fits all my needs).

Cheers,

[shatterblast]

I was wondering if anyone already used any of this before, I'd like to get a bit more info regarding the integration with love before buying the apps.

I was fortunate enough to buy the Pro version of Spine when it was only $75. It's easy to animate using the software. IK pinning, called Constraints in the software, is a new feature to Spine. It can basically help keep a character's feet in place while animating the skeleton. It is still a new feature though, and I suggest learning from the Trial before buying. You can expect the price of Spine to slowly increase. However, the developers have promised free updates for the life of the product.

Perhaps the biggest feature of Spine for LOVE, it can allow animations to be exported as JSON files. This can help surpass the creation of huge spritesheets. The exporter allows for three types. For "data," it does JSON or "binary." For the creation of individual frames for a spritesheet maker like Image Klebor for Windows, it will do GIF, JPG, and PNG. For movie files, it allows AVI and Quicktime. You can create an "atlas" if you want, and also, it permits how many frames per second to produce.

I hope that's enough info.

[kikito]

I have purchased spriter, but have made nothing with it yet.

I have seen at least two different implementations of Spriter reader libs in the lib forum - once was announced months ago, the other is older. Make a search and see what it gives you.

[hardcrawler]

I wrote a Love2D library for rendering Spriter animations:

http://www.love2d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... it=spriter

I made heavy use of it in my LoveJam2 entry:

http://hardcrawler.itch.io/undead-fusion

The UI can be a tad twitchy, but overall I am pretty happy with Spriter. It is fairly straightforward to use, and I am happy with the resulting animations.

[nuno]

thanks all for the replies and info.

one further question, do you know if it is possible from the API of either spine or sprite, to control one aspect of the skeleton without using animations?
for instance, I want the head of the character to keep looking at the mouse cursor, so I just need to rotate one bone continuously.

is this possible?

[Fenrir]

one further question, do you know if it is possible from the API of either spine or sprite, to control one aspect of the skeleton without using animations?
for instance, I want the head of the character to keep looking at the mouse cursor, so I just need to rotate one bone continuously.

That's exaclty what I'm doing on my current project, I'm animating the body but rotating the head depending on the cursor position, but as I said I'm using a custom exporter with Blender and also wrote a custom importer and handler on the LOVE side. It's probably a bit more work but it's working exactly the way I want. Now for Spine, the LOVE importer is on Github:
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spi ... spine-love
Don't hesitate to directly have a look to the code to see how it works.

Cheers,

[nuno]

one further question, do you know if it is possible from the API of either spine or sprite, to control one aspect of the skeleton without using animations?
for instance, I want the head of the character to keep looking at the mouse cursor, so I just need to rotate one bone continuously.

That's exaclty what I'm doing on my current project, I'm animating the body but rotating the head depending on the cursor position, but as I said I'm using a custom exporter with Blender and also wrote a custom importer and handler on the LOVE side. It's probably a bit more work but it's working exactly the way I want. Now for Spine, the LOVE importer is on Github:
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spi ... spine-love
Don't hesitate to directly have a look to the code to see how it works.

Cheers,

so are you releasing your exporter or what?

[Fenrir]

so are you releasing your exporter or what?

Hehe too busy working on my game currently to make a proper release of the animation part but I'll try to do it if I find some free time, but don't expect it before a couple of month at least...

[shatterblast]

one further question, do you know if it is possible from the API of either spine or sprite, to control one aspect of the skeleton without using animations?

I don't think so, but that sounds more like a question for the Spine message forums honestly.

It's unrelated, but I know you can mark parts of the skeleton in Spine to release particles in your software or to hold things.