The best way to prepare vector art for spritesheet animation

Question

So right now the way i make my spritesheet animation for my game is by drawing my character first in illustrator and then open it in photoshop scale it down and save it as .psd (since unity can read that format , not only png)

my problem is when i start to making different movement for my character like maybe making his arm up i get different pixel size when i opening in photoshop and when i put them all together and perform spritesheet animation i get like my character body size is getting big and small and then i need to reopen my photoshop and scale each my animation picture again in photoshop so it will match each other and only showing moving arm animation not the whole body getting big and small.

Well it works but very tiring process and not error free because when i making like 20 frame animation then sometimes i can't match them all..

so maybe anyone in here know the best way or maybe a software (free) that are more better then my way....

Answer 1

You need to understand that your spritesheet must be divided into many same sized(in pixels) sections, for example 32x32's or 64x64's for example, so now all the sprites you will use will not have any pixel errors. And each of your characters animations must follow each other smoothly by the laws of basic cartoon making, for example if your character is supposed to wave his arms in 5 frames, then you should draw the arms waving smoothly frame after frame accordingly - supposedly make the last frame smoothly follow the first frame, but at the same time keep his feet on the ground at exactly the same place.

And reading that you are drawing your animations on some program, and then scaling all the different frames by hand sounds so wrong. What I would really suggest is that if you know your way around photoshop, then what you would need to do is create 6 layers, each the same size, 1:1(32x32;64x64...) or 2:1(64x32;128x64...) and then draw a simple stickman in the mid process of running in the first frame. Then on the next frame, add some transparency so that you can see the previous frame and draw the next animation smoothly after the next.

Maybe dig something up on youtube on making basic spritesheet or 2d animations, and it doesn't have to do anything with Unity too, I would go for the Macromedia Flash animation tutorials, since it focuses mostly on 2d animations and has for years. I hope this wasn't too long and it helped.

Answer 2

Answer by shininguri · Nov 20, 2015 at 06:20 PM

look up gaf editor . It'll make this much easier

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The best way to prepare vector art for spritesheet animation

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