Hello everybody,

I am thinking of building a 2D side scrolling shooter and I have a question w.r.t. the creation of sprite animations. Since I am a programmer, I have got the technical part covered, but I haven't yet figured out how to create sprite animations in an efficient manner. That is, the way I see it now is that it's just going to be a lot of gruntwork: create all the frames for each animation manually by drawing in photoshop and put them together in one single image so that they can be played back ingame. The thing is that this could easily become a very very big job if the number of animations goes up: just the main character alone would be a lot of work (i.e. walk cycle, different animation for each weapon...).

Now I was wondering if there is some kind of way to cheat this process or to speed it up by applying some kind of workflow. Being only experienced at programming, I was thus wondering if the game artists out there could provide me with some tips on this.

Thanks in advance!

I used to create my sprites this way too. Than I started using GIMP and there is a script out there that makes each layer a frame in your animation sequence....made my sprite development literally 20x faster if not more. If you are a experienced modeler you can write a program that creates a sprite from your 3D models animations, I have seen this done as well.

Hope this helps.

Animation is one of those things which is way more efficient to do by copying than by starting from scratch. So personally, if I needed to create an animation fast the first thing I would do is go looking for an existing animation or some video footage that showed the motion I wanted in the style I wanted. Most animation studios have a room where one animator can act out a movement while another films, or an animal can be brought in and filmed in motion, so they can easily produce reference footage. Anyway having an example, if necessary cull frames until it is the desired number. Then go from there to a pencil test of a generic humanoid or animal figure to remove the details and any possible copyright problems, and test the animation to be sure it still looks good. Then work over top of that to create original detailed line art (ideally you already have a character reference sheet for whatever you are animating). Test the line art, fix as needed until it animates nicely. Then color, repeat testing, you're done.

Thanks for the fast replies!

I have had a course in basic animation (line drawings) some time ago. We only did line testing back then on paper, but if I understand you correctly, sunandshadow, this would be the best starting point for the actual creation of the animations? So basically a workflow like this:

1. Create a line test on paper or in photoshop
2. Test animation
3. Clean animation
4. Test animation again
5. Color animation

W.r.t. this workflow I do have an additional question: what is the easiest way to clean and color the animation? I will probably downscale the images afterwards to a size of 64x64 or something like that, so that they look pixelated. Would it give a nice effect to just clean with the path tracer stuff from Illustrator and then (in illustrator) add some basic shades as fill colors? Or would I need a more detailed coloring in photoshop?

Thanks in advance!

The 2D RPG I work on, Hero of Allacrost, used to have very large character sprites for battle (64x128 pixels), which we were having enormous difficulty animating. At the time, I had suggested that we try finding 3D artists who could create simple models for the characters and animate those models. The 3D artist would then take "snapshots" of the animation in progress and hand them to the 2D artist, who would then clean the models up and apply the appropriate details, turning it to authentic pixel art.


I never got a chance to learn whether or not such a technique was a good approach as despite our best efforts, we failed to get any 3D artists interested in doing this sort of work for us (we are a free project). Eventually we abandoned having separate battle sprites entirely and instead used our map sprites (which are 32x64 pixels) and created the animations for those, then scaled them up to 64x128 pixels. This turned out to be the best choice anyway, as it drastically reduced the sprite artwork requirements for our game.


I don't know if any of that information will help you, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to share.

I do what roots has described. I create the model in max and animate. I then simply render the animation in any view I want as transparent pngs.

The model creation and especially the rigging is the big time suck.

If done well you can use this same model with different clothes, etc for new characters.

Max is expensive so something like Blender or Milkshape can do the same.

For my recent game I relied mostly on ragdolls and their natural motion so no need to animate.

If you can learn to animate a ragdoll you can acheive nearly the same result.

Hope that helps!