Hey everyone. I am new to game creation and game art, so I am looking for someone to lend a hand.
Here is my issue.
I am a big fan of hand drawn animations. For example if anyone has played castle crashers, Skullgirls, or the quite recent norse mythology game “Jotun”, then you should understand what I mean by 2d hand drawn games. See, I consider myself pretty decent at art and the game I have in mind is fairly simple, however, I still want to implement my art. I will be creating the game in 3d, however the view is orthographic, so my art will be flat. My main questions are should I be using adobe flash, photoshop, or animate? Should I make a sprite sheet or do I just create framed animations where I just draw over the last image on a new frame? How can I import my art? Should I have a separate document for each animation?
Thanks, I spent a good couple of days trying to find an answer, but none to be found, so this was my last resort.
unity does sprite sheets or I believe you can import each separately but there’s no drawing frame by frame in unity
What iv’e did is draw my game enemy in this case because i can’t draw people in photoshop duplicated it changed somthing like say the feet and in the end made a 640x128 sprite sheet and told unity to divide it to 128 x 128 giving me 5 frames . At about 5 min in this video he shows one of the ways to do a sprite sheet in unity
If you’re going for vector/illustrative style art then animate (flash) or toon boom harmony are top picks. I believe harmony is what was used for Jotun. You’d have to export the animations as spritesheets and then create the necessary animations clips. All fairly trivial stuff really.
Photoshop is good for detailed bitmap drawing but the animation tools are quite limited. Would be a trade off between its powerful drawing tools vs the better animating tools in other software. There’s also spine and spriter for bone animations. Run through some tutorials and you’ll have a clearer idea of what works for you.
There about a dozen options for you to choose from. I picked up Spriter Pro from steam when it went on 75% off sale. Although I’m a 3D animator - I couldn’t pass up that great offer. Spine is popular but has some licensing weirdness - read entire eula and license before choosing. In addition to others mentioned above, After Effects recently added bone animation support (last year?) and within Unity @zombiegorilla detailed a workflow to create 2D animations within the editor. There are several 2D bone tools in the asset store, and an open source community 2D skeletal system called sprite & bones.
I have used spriter too. It is not bad, but it is little tricky to get sprite sheets with good pivot point (or I did something wrong ).
My biggest hope now is Anima2D.
If you double click on the image in the right palette window it’ll bring up the pivot. That’s for the animating though. Once exported as sprite sheet you’ll have to set the pivot within the unity sprite editor rather than spriter.
Anima2D is ok. I found it a bit too buggy and awkward to use. For simple animations it’s probably fine but I wouldn’t like to try and refine anything more involved like multiple character animations.
As far as I know, when last I read it about 2 years ago there is a 2 or 3 tier pricing structure. The cheapest version excludes releasing commercial products with content created using the cheap tier, although thats the one most commonly used.
Also - when using anything from the asset store created using spine, the second tier (not the cheapest) is required by purchasers in order to use assets created using spine, to stay legal within spines eula.
It is very similar to how daz and morph3d licenses are aligned, and without reading through the license and eula thoroughly - indies risk licensing mistakes. Its kind of mysterious why this information is buried in the license/eula and not entirely understood/known by all spine users.
I think that must have changed then. The two options available now are essentials or pro and both allow use of the runtimes. The only commercial limitation is needing an enterprise license if your revenues exceed $500k.
As for asset store animations I found this from a year ago. Basically animations made in spine that don’t need the runtimes to work, such as sprite sheets or baked to unity, won’t require a license by the purchaser. Anything that does require the runtimes will need a license though. As long as no pro features are used they’d only need to buy spine essentials. Spritesheets or baking to unity’s system makes the most sense for the asset store I guess.
in photoshop duplicated it changed somthing like say the feet and in the end made a 640x128 sprite sheet and told unity to divide it to 128 x 128 giving me 5 frames . At about 5 min in this video he shows one of the ways to do a sprite sheet in unity
).