Design Tips on spriting techniques + Spine(is it worth it?)

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The Shatner

Guest
Hey everyone!
I am moving on to my next project, which will require a lot of character animation (throwing stuff, lifting objects, walking, running, jumping, etc).
To those of you who make your own sprites: how do you start? Do you sketch on paper first or do you just make the final thing directly on Photoshop/Gimp/whatever?
Also, for those who use Spine: how well does it blend with GM? Is it worth the investment?
 
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CoderJoe

Guest
Not sure about spine but if you want a free skeletal animator check out Spriter. It exports animations as sprite sheets but can make animations pretty fast. As for starting I would write out all the animations you need (walking, running, jumping, shooting, etc) then make some kind of template to work with.
 
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The Green Dev

Guest
spine isn't that great for game animations in general, it makes it feel too robotic, you need to make the animations yourself by hand.
 
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GhostlyFeline

Guest
Not sure about spine but if you want a free skeletal animator check out Spriter. It exports animations as sprite sheets but can make animations pretty fast. As for starting I would write out all the animations you need (walking, running, jumping, shooting, etc) then make some kind of template to work with.
I also use Spriter, and I can confirm that it's pretty fast once you get the hang of it. I'd say it depends on what you need for your game, and what you can do. Skeletal animation is useful because it's easy to get animations going very quickly, and you can add to or change your pieces without having to re-do every animation. The downside is that the animations generally won't look as good as ones done by hand.
 
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Aggropop

Guest
Always make a template for everything. Just all the time. The only exception is: You already have a template for that. Mine goes a little something like this: I start with a basic animation like walking, standing, depends on the character. Then I make some sketches, until I like the flow, then I adapt to details (outfit, weapon, etc.)
I draw my own skeletons, because those are fast to alter/adjust, but basically there is a rig behind the move. this is also something you can do: drop a human armature in blender, animate it, paste it into your tiles. or copy cool animations from pixar or whatever you like. for lifelike movement the best approach is either years of learning anatomy or rip movie frames/sports/animal videos, whatever you need. Don't draw too much frames, think in key poses. Especially for attacks, you don't want 30 frames for your strike animation, you want it to hit instantly.
For complex animations, use different objects for hands/legs/weapon/etc. This way you can combine running/shooting or running/throwing...yadayada.
Now i need to check out spriter, maybe that is useful.
 
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mariospants

Guest
If you're adept with it, you can animate it in 3D and use your renders as the basis for the pixel art. That's how Slain was done, I believe.
 
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