Topic: 2d bone-based animation tools/plugins

[Eric]

Do either Spriter or Spine allow easy importing other image programs, or the exporting of frame-by-frame images? I like doing this sort of bone-based animation, but I prefer doing my drawing work in Illustrator and Photoshop. This has turned me off from using ToonBoom, to which I had some trouble importing eps or png files.

[Freidenker01]

Yep. Both programms have the option to export your animation as PNG frames 

[Slasher]

Spine

And at just $60 special offer it's got to be a steal 

[visionmind]

Thanks Freidenker01.  I've made the subject change.

Also thanks for posting about Spine too.

visionmind

[Freidenker01]

Man, this thread is somewhat old.

I wonder if anybody thought about a plugin since then?

Wich might be also interesting for those considering the use of these tools anyway:

Spine has also an option to export png frames from the animations - this combined with the option to have skins for your characters (or what ever you might want to create with this tools)can still save you some time in creating several characters. For example you might just add a skin without the need of creating all the animations you have already done for another character. (stuff like walk, use, etc.) As I have been using mainly spine I can just be sure about that tool. But I assume spriter also offers this opportunity.

[visionmind]

I apologize for being a bit late, but I thought I'd mention there's work in Blender to make a sprite animator, which is notable because it's free and open-source.

and

While this system wouldn't directly interface with AGS (which was the original dream), Blender could obviously export to PNG or something. The project isn't currently done yet (February of 2016) but I thought I'd mention it as a potential free alternative.

The game engine, Godot (which is also free and open-source), also has an exceptional sprite animator, but there is currently no way (that I know of) to export the animations out of the engine (like in PNG format). The same video creator, Andreas Esau, has a great Godot video tutorial series, which is how I learned about the Godot engine and sprite animator.

visionmind

[Cassiebsg]

Very cool!
If I had that when I first started, I probably would have gone with hand drawn characters for my projects.