Graphics Software for animating Pixel Art cutscenes?

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Sezze

Guest
I'd like to know if there's some program that allows you to animate cutscenes with pixel art. I know of Aseprite but that's more so for animating single sprites not for a scene with lip syncing, multiple characters, moving cameras etc. Does anything like that exist of will I have to make my own tools to achieve that? If that program only exports in video files that's fine.
 

RangerX

Member
There are tools to do this in 3D. I am not aware of any for 2D. Besides, they also didn't have some candy software like that back then when making NES and SNES games you know. ;)
 
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Sezze

Guest
There are tools to do this in 3D. I am not aware of any for 2D. Besides, they also didn't have some candy software like that back then when making NES and SNES games you know. ;)
That's true, well guess I'll have to find some other way of doing it.
 
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FloppyDisk

Guest
You could always have cutscenes in-engine. Here's an example:
You could have a camera object and have a variable assigned to it to tell the camera what to look at. A timeline could be used to tell the characters when to animate, move, and any special event triggers that may be necessary, such as falling rocks, for instance. The timeline could also be used to tell the camera when to look at something.
Besides, using video files in-game (.mp4s, .wmvs, etc.) take up a lot of memory unless they're short or compressed (although if it were compressed it wouldn't look as good).
I think that would be your best bet, and you can always look up tutorials for that sort of thing. Hope this helps :)
 
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Sezze

Guest
You could always have cutscenes in-engine. Here's an example:
You could have a camera object and have a variable assigned to it to tell the camera what to look at. A timeline could be used to tell the characters when to animate, move, and any special event triggers that may be necessary, such as falling rocks, for instance. The timeline could also be used to tell the camera when to look at something.
Besides, using video files in-game (.mp4s, .wmvs, etc.) take up a lot of memory unless they're short or compressed (although if it were compressed it wouldn't look as good).
I think that would be your best bet, and you can always look up tutorials for that sort of thing. Hope this helps :)
I am aware of these methods and the flaws of video files in games. The thing is as weird as it may sound this wasn't actually for a game, I just wanted asked about it here as I so regularly visit the GameMaker community for game questions and this was still relevant. That's why I didn't mind if it was in video files. But if I don't find anything I will do what you said anyways and then make my "game" export it into a png sequence, this would take quite a lot of time I'd rather not spend though.
 
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FloppyDisk

Guest
Oh, I get it now. Sorry, I just assumed that you wanted a gamemaker tutorial since this is the GM forums, after all.
I haven't used it, but Adobe Flash is incredibly popular for that sort of thing, that might be a good idea.
But you could also use a program such as FRAPS or Bandicam to record the cutscene and then you can use the video file it produces.
The only problem with that is that the free versions come with limitations and most importantly, the watermark.
 

Micah_DS

Member
For what it's worth, my brother and I made a couple "cartoons" with music and sound/dialogue using GameMaker 8 (or maybe it was an older version; I don't remember). But we just ran the executable to show it to people. If you want a video of a GameMaker program running though, OBS is free and it works very nicely. So you could create it in GameMaker, run it, and record it. More recently, I also made an animation thing in GameMaker Studio which did various things and had lights flashing to the beat of a remix I made, and I just used OBS to record it and all the timing was maintained just fine.

So that's one way to do it, though an actual animation program would obviously be better. It's just fun to do weird unorthodox things in GameMaker sometimes... or maybe it's just me.
 
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Sezze

Guest
For what it's worth, my brother and I made a couple "cartoons" with music and sound/dialogue using GameMaker 8 (or maybe it was an older version; I don't remember). But we just ran the executable to show it to people. If you want a video of a GameMaker program running though, OBS is free and it works very nicely. So you could create it in GameMaker, run it, and record it. More recently, I also made an animation thing in GameMaker Studio which did various things and had lights flashing to the beat of a remix I made, and I just used OBS to record it and all the timing was maintained just fine.

So that's one way to do it, though an actual animation program would obviously be better. It's just fun to do weird unorthodox things in GameMaker sometimes... or maybe it's just me.
I do agree it's fun to create things like that in GameMaker, the problem is the animation itself will be anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour long (it's for a series for a bigger YouTube channel) and that alone will take forever to animate so I'd rather not make my own program for it. I may do that but I may also be able to do it in Flash or After Effects, they are a bit clumsy though from what I've experimented with.
 
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Sezze

Guest
Regarding tools: If you don't shy away from rotoscoping (= manually tracing from a live-action template), then Paint of Persia might be something to look into.
That looks really cool, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for as I don't have the ability to get real footage and you still have to draw frame by frame which takes a really long time.
 
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Robert

Guest
Pixel art or not isn't really the issue here as at that point it's just an art asset. Even though I haven't tried it yet I would highly suggest Google's Web Designer, it's currently free and is basically a modern flash tool for HTML5 canvas support (yay)

https://www.google.com/webdesigner

There are a lot of tools for making animations really, you just have to do some research. You could also do it in GameMaker, there is a Timeline system that I have never used before, but I know it exists lol. You could also use Photoshop if you wanted though making a long animation would be troubling and a slow process.
 
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ConsolCWBY

Guest
I'm afraid to say this but: All animation, if non-interactive, like cutscenes, is actually film/television. So, here's a link to a tutorial using Adobe Aftereffects for animation. The recommendation of using in engine is approps, imho. Another tutorial.
 
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Sezze

Guest
I'm afraid to say this but: All animation, if non-interactive, like cutscenes, is actually film/television. So, here's a link to a tutorial using Adobe Aftereffects for animation. The recommendation of using in engine is approps, imho. Another tutorial.
Sadly I can't in any way figure out how to do PIXEL ART animations in After Effects, why? Because for some weird reason it image I import ends up looking like this: http://i.imgur.com/eLYtZIr.png
I see what's happening it's pretty much at half the resolution, but no it's scaled up to be around 500 pixels tall so why does it then end up first downscaling it then upscaling it? I have followed the one and only tutorial on how to do pixel art animations in After Effects but I think some different versions of the software is messing it up for me.
 
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ConsolCWBY

Guest
Sadly I can't in any way figure out how to do PIXEL ART animations in After Effects
I'm sorry to hear that. I have never tried AE, and what I have tried wasn't for Pixel Art. It appears the interpolation between keyframes stinks. This is good to know. I think what most people do is hand animate using layers to create a scene, and that sucks if the scene is too complex. Looking just now in my old bookmarks is this reddit thread. In which case, I would stick with creating the sprites and building the scene in GML. Sorry if I couldn't be of more help. Perhaps someone has a better way??
 
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Sezze

Guest
I'm sorry to hear that. I have never tried AE, and what I have tried wasn't for Pixel Art. It appears the interpolation between keyframes stinks. This is good to know. I think what most people do is hand animate using layers to create a scene, and that sucks if the scene is too complex. Looking just now in my old bookmarks is this reddit thread. In which case, I would stick with creating the sprites and building the scene in GML. Sorry if I couldn't be of more help. Perhaps someone has a better way??
No problem still thanks for the help. I'll probably either do it in GM or I'll just upscale every sprite to some massive size as then it works in After Effects, but that takes quite a bit of extra time since every single image would have to be changed. Although I guess I could make a Gamemaker tool which resizes every image in a folder for me, that may actually be a good idea :)
 
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