2D Animation - Domain of artist, programmer, or both?

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1

Hello everyone,

I’m starting to learn the basics of 2D animation using Unity and Sprite Manager 2 and I have a question regarding 2D animation. Let’s say I want to create a computer children’s storybook, and I’m working on one of the pages which contains a background of a pond with several lily-pads and one frog on it, all from a birds eye perspective. Let’s say that all the images are static except for the frog, which we will make leap from the current lily-pad he’s on to one that we select. Now I want to outsource the animation of the frog jumping forwards, but I’m not sure what my role as a programmer should be since I am new to this type of animation. In my mind, I envision two ways of approaching this. Let’s assume that the frog is 10 pixels wide and the distance for the frog to jump is 100 pixels…

  1. Have the artist create a 10x10 library of animated frames of the frog while I (as the programmer) flip through them like a flip-book and adjust the x or y position according to each frame. If this is the case, the job becomes much harder, especially if I have to take realistic physics and timing into account.

  2. Have the artist create a 100x10 library of animated frames of the frog while I flip through them like a flip-book. This puts the burden on the artist/animator (which I believe is where it should be) and all I have to do is flip through the sprites. The problem with this is that we have a lot of wasted space and performance will be terrible if you have several animations going on at once.

Now I can’t imagine that either of the above is correct; there must be some way of having the artist/animator create a 10x10 library of frames and specify the relative x/y offset of each frame from the base.

Cheers!

Anthony

p.s. If anyone has any book recommendations on digital animation from a programmer’s perspective (I’m big on teaching yourself) please let me know!

2

Does it matter which array the frames are in? 10x10 or 100x10?

By this I mean, the animated sprites in a long LINE -----------------------------
Or the animated sprites in several shorter lines

Because can’t the artist give you BOTH and each frame individually?

By this I mean… he creates each frame file separately, and then uses a spritesheet packing tool to combine them in any way you need.

There are several free sprite packing tools which not only combine multiple files, but also creates a .txt file giving the exact coordinates of every frame.

http://spritesheetpacker.codeplex.com/

So really, the artist needs only give you all of the animated frames as individual files. That is the most important thing, right?

Maybe I misunderstood.