[color=#333333]What good free and widely used tools are there for editing 2D skeletal animations? Preferably, one that allows me to write custom animation exporters.

[color=#333333]One pretty good indie tool that I know of Demina, but it's not ideal. It doesn't allow you to export the data as you want (although, it is open source, so you can change that) and I find it clunky in how you edit individual joints.

[color=#333333]Blender also seems like a good option, especially since it's a well-known tools that allows you to write custom exporters, but I was unable to find any good tutorials on how to use it for 2D animation. Do you know of any?

[color=#333333]What other tools would you recommend?

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Blender also seems like a good option, especially since it's a well-known tools that allows you to write custom exporters, but I was unable to find any good tutorials on how to use it for 2D animation. Do you know of any?[/quote]

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The process is exactly the same for 2d as for 3d. Just do your character setup in the side or front orthographic view (you might want to spend some time locking the attributes for the 3rd dimension so you don't accidentally mess things up - see

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). FYI, you might actually find the 3rd dimension comes in very handy (i.e. to overlay parts of the characters in the correct order - useful for transparency....).

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