Create Armature to easily Animate

Aseprite needs armature, is what we use in blender to animate stuff armature features are be able to move the armature that’ll move the sprite its connected to and to create an armature basically click Sprite >> Create Armature ez pz and to connect an Armature go to the layers tab select the Armature and the Sprite right click and you’ll see a button called Connect Bones hover over it and click Selected, that’ll connect the armature to your sprite now you can animate faster and not having to draw out the animation simply move a bone and it’ll move the area where that bone is but I suggest shaping out the bone before animating it so that’s it that’s my idea hope it gets implemented! :grin:

Welcome @Arstar! At the moment there are no plans to include some kind of armature for animation, maybe in a far future (for v1.4 in case that we add tweening and more users ask for a feature like this).

I’m not a big fan of this kind of 2D animation, but I know that it might be useful in some cases, so the idea is open.

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Aseprite is a pixel art program, and skeletal animation almost always requires rotation and/or scaling, two things pixel art is terrible with, even when using better algorithms like RotSprite. Skeletal animation is also best when combined with timeline editors rather than frame-based editors like Aseprite.

I think it would be more useful if Aseprite could instead import animations from skeletal animation software (e.g. Spriter, Spine), converting them to frame animations at the user’s desired framerate. This way users could leverage the extra care those programs’ developers can afford to put into those features (since that’s their focus) while still being able to easily import their work into Aseprite for manual clean-up.

And, in those cases that one wants to use the skeletal animations directly instead of converting them into spritesheets and cleaning them up, there’s already file support for some of those programs’ formats in game engines, and Aseprite doesn’t need to add another one to the pile xP And Aseprite can already export the pieces those programs can use fairly easily.

And again. Instead of armatures a simple vector points-&-lines layers could be used to help create fluid sprites animations of bodies and for trajectory guides. Fluidness requires a lot of small movements of vertex points and connecting lines to find best spots for them across many frames before final rasterization accepted. Without vertexes and lines it’s nearly impossible to easily create fluid and stable animations in Aseprite. It’s a big flaw. And NO vector filling styles/etc. needed for these layers! (but eventually will be implemented anyway, I know)

Also points-&-lines could be used as source of collision information for scripted exporting. And will be even better with points names (displayed) and points/lines colors. And user data. Yes, it’s quite a lot, I understand. But it will be very valuable.

And as a formalization points could be upgraded to rotatable rects/ellipses with lines connecting their centers AND edges to create skeletal approximations.

Anyway I may program this functionality for myself and then present it freely to support these kinds of layers in Aseprite (layer data class with support of frames + editor operations class with support of undos + working test application to test this functionality). And test application may then become real free application even without integration to Aseprite.

There are plans for vector/path layers for v1.4 in a far future: Aseprite - Roadmap

Mainly for Another World/Flashback-like animations, or just to create reference layers as helpers. Also commented here: Poligons editor in aseprite? another world editor - #3 by dacap

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