Hey community,
I work with Animate currently on sprites for 2D games and run into a lot of problems if I want to work very exact. It is vital to import sprites from other files without them changing their pixel size on the canvas, but I must do something wrong since Animate always scales everything randomly.
I made a template out of the characters walkcycle, but when I insert it into a bigger canvas it blows up the character to an insane size way bigger than the background and the pixel size its original document had.
This is a big problem for our programmer because I can never tell him the relation between the a walkcycle and new stuff I animate in other ToonBoom scenes.
Also the brush sizes are so inconsistent. Sometimes size 25 seems to be a four pixel brush, sometimes a four pixel brush is something between 2 and 3. Is this all depending on the scene’s width?
How can I import something so that it maintains the pixel size it once had?
Is there a grid that is somehow related to the canvas pixel size? The animator fields are so useless in a game`s workflow.
I would be glad about any hints that help me to get everything a little more exact.
I think I would have to play around with this to try to see if I can replicate these issues, but first when you’re drawing, are you drawing with pencil lines or brush strokes?
When you draw with brush strokes, you’re laying down a contour line. Then if you select the line and scale it up or scale it down, the size is effectively becoming larger or smaller.
This isn’t the case with a pencil line. If you select some strokes that are drawn with pencil lines and scale them, they retain their original stroke width.
As for getting things to all be consistent, it’s unclear to me whether the scaling problem is occuring within Animate, or whether the problem is occurring when you are trying to import rendered images into a game engine.
Within Animate, since everything’s size independent, this can actually make things somewhat tricky. What most studios do when it comes to animation is when they are building sets, characters, etc. they have a master scene file that has the size reference in it. When they build other characters, they don’t build them using up the whole drawing grid for each character - they build them according to the relative size of one character to the next, if that makes sense.
I imagine that the same concept could come into play when making sprites for games. You’d want to have some preset resolution that you’re outputting your sprites to, then you should know how much of the camera view the sprite should take up to be the appropriate size. At least, this is how I imagine it.
~Lilly