Sprites reinvented

[Wingnut]

Have a look at these new ideas in the field of 2d graphics!

Pixel Art Animation. Reinvented - Astortion Devlog #26

In this indie game devlog™, we're taking a look at a simple feature that allows us to easily change the appearance of our characters - without the need to re...

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[SLotman]

Urg. Why complicate things like this? You can just load the image, manually change the pixels and that's it. Or you can use something like "spriter", "spine" or "dragon bones" and just recolor the parts needed.

I did this a few years back with spriter and monkey-x: the big zombie and all others are just a single spriter animation, changing "props" for each one. One of those props is the white t-shirt (body and sleeves separated), so I recolor them as I want (see how the smaller zombie on the left has blue shirt, while its black on the next and red on the next)

You can do the same with pixel art - just chop the images and animate them. Spriter/Spine/Dragonbones doesn't care if its pixel art or not, and then you can just recolor the parts in your code as needed.

 

[MikeHart]

Still an interesting concept. Not new to me. The creator of Sokol used a similar technic to store Animation of bones for 3d models inside a texture. Very efficient.

 

[MikeHart]

@SLotman did you created the animation in Spriter and exported as Spriteframes?

 

[SLotman]

@SLotman did you created the animation in Spriter and exported as Spriteframes?

I don't export them, I use the .scml files directly - there was an old 'spriter' module for Monkey-X that I use (without bones support, just moving/rotating/scaling the images) and have customized to be able to show/hide/color parts of the graphics.

 

[MikeHart]

There was one? Do you have any link to it?

 

[Wingnut]

Urg. Why complicate things like this? You can just load the image, manually change the pixels and that's it. Or you can use something like "spriter", "spine" or "dragon bones" and just recolor the parts needed.

I did this a few years back with spriter and monkey-x: the big zombie and all others are just a single spriter animation, changing "props" for each one. One of those props is the white t-shirt (body and sleeves separated), so I recolor them as I want (see how the smaller zombie on the left has blue shirt, while its black on the next and red on the next)

You can do the same with pixel art - just chop the images and animate them. Spriter/Spine/Dragonbones doesn't care if its pixel art or not, and then you can just recolor the parts in your code as needed.

View attachment 1489

Nice graphics! Well I guess it's nor for everyone but I found the idea very fresh. I'm sure his an old 3d modeller that
got used to this way of thinking and had this idea to apply it to pixelart as well. I agree it's a bit mindboggling and why even do it you know. But, I tend to like this kind of weird spinoffs, I'm not sure what to call the but Pixelling is an artform that is so old and it has not changed too much for the last 30 years so I kind of welcome this, maybe it will give people more ideas.

 

[SLotman]

There was one? Do you have any link to it?

Took me a while to find it, but here it is: https://code.google.com/archive/p/monkey-spriter-importer/source/default/source