I searched for this and couldn't really find what I needed so... What do you use for animations? I'm working on a project and have been using Photoshop to work on graphics and tried doing animations in it but can't figure out how to do this... I need to take a character and animate it to run. For example, I need to make his leg go from one stance to another and possibly multiple other ones to make it look like its running. Is there a way to do this in Photoshop? If so can you link me to a tutorial? And if not, what can I use to do something like this??? (the cheaper the program the better, free being the best. )
Anime Studio 5 Pro works awesome for me. There's also a less-featured version of it that went free since Anime Studio 6 just got released. You can find it virtually anywhere. Just google Anime Studio 5 free. If you're really serious, I'd recommend Anime Studio 6 Pro. There's a bone structure feature to that oughta REALLY help you out.
I did all my animations for Dead Panic in DAZ studio and Blender, then combined the separate frames into a sprite sheet using photoshop. A little bit of sharpen / equalize / levels gives renders a high-contrast look that makes them pop from the background. "Pixen" is also supposed to have some animation tools for hand-drawn animation, but I haven't used it: http://opensword.org/Pixen/ I blogged a little about my art pipleline in "How to make a game for under $1k"
I used program called "Paint Shop Pro" for the animations in our first game Ata. On our next game I used Photoshop. 2d animation is very time consuming process especially if the characters are big. 3 frames is generally the minimum amount of animation frames that looks like it's animated and not a slide show. 5 frames can look very smooth for majority of moves. In Minigore I used 3ds Max for animation and I love it because it's so much faster to do than 2d animation, but 3d programs aren't exactly cheap and they can be a bit difficult to learn. Another solution I've seen people use is drawing each body part on separate layer and then rotating the layers in either Photoshop or 3d package to create animation. Zombieville USA uses the latter technique as demonstrated here: http://www.thecareergamer.com/?p=513 This site has awesome reference for animation, there's hundreds of sprite sheets from big name games: http://sdb.drshnaps.com/display.php?object=5437 Hope this helps! -Timo
