One of the major problems I had was trying to find a solution to create Sprite Sheets without painfully hand drawing my actors. So I have documented what I am using for you so that you dont have to waste as much time as I had to to figure this out.
Applications:
Inkscape ( Vector based graphics app for Linux / Mac / Windows )
SynFig ( An amazing and free vector based animator for Linux / Windows )
Pixen ( Sprite editor and animator, export to sprite sheet support )
Gimp ( Cross platform OpenSource image powerstudio )
Since I am creating mostly very simple sprite based animations for my Platform game at the moment, I am using SynFig under Ubuntu to create my model and animate him. This consists of drawing a model, seting up keyframes and animating walk cycles and so forth.
I am then exporting the model to a bunch of PNG files and combining them with imagemagick under linux into a sprite sheet with the following command:
montage -background "transparent" -depth 24 -type TrueColorMatte *.png -geometry 256x256 -matte -transparent "transparent" -type TrueColorMatte -depth 24 spriteSheet1.png
The resulting sprite sheet works perfectly with Torque Game Builder.
If you are using Pixen to create your animation and exporting that to a sprite sheet, You will probably need to tweak it in Gimp before it will work with Torque Game Builder correctly. I found that I also needed to add a extra blank frame to the end of the animation before I export it otherwise the frame alignment goes out.
I cant seem to get Pixen to export sprite sheets with a transparent background either so I normally add a coloured background to a layer behind my sprite ( pick one that does appear in your sprite ) and then crop it out with Gimp afterwards and export to PNG with transparency.
Gimp ( Cross platform OpenSource image powerstudio )
Since I am creating mostly very simple sprite based animations for my Platform game at the moment, I am using SynFig under Ubuntu to create my model and animate him. This consists of drawing a model, seting up keyframes and animating walk cycles and so forth.
I am then exporting the model to a bunch of PNG files and combining them with imagemagick under linux into a sprite sheet with the following command:
montage -background "transparent" -depth 24 -type TrueColorMatte *.png -geometry 256x256 -matte -transparent "transparent" -type TrueColorMatte -depth 24 spriteSheet1.png
The resulting sprite sheet works perfectly with Torque Game Builder.
If you are using Pixen to create your animation and exporting that to a sprite sheet, You will probably need to tweak it in Gimp before it will work with Torque Game Builder correctly. I found that I also needed to add a extra blank frame to the end of the animation before I export it otherwise the frame alignment goes out.
I cant seem to get Pixen to export sprite sheets with a transparent background either so I normally add a coloured background to a layer behind my sprite ( pick one that does appear in your sprite ) and then crop it out with Gimp afterwards and export to PNG with transparency.
