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Cart #37036 | 2017-02-02 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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Animate tiny 8x8 people and things in Tiny Animator! (comes with Pico-8 sprites exporter)

(it should work ok here on the BBS but prefer downloading the cart and loading it in Pico-8, it'll work better)

With this tool you can create your own animations, using the base humanoid model or your own (instructions further below), put an imported skin on it and export the generated sprites, either to a png or to your clipboard as formatted sprites that you can directly paste into your Pico-8 sprite-sheet. And you can also save and load your animations using the clipboard!

EDIT: it seems, the use of the clipboard on the BBS is pretty buggy so if you wanna use the saving, importing and exporting features, please download the cart (right click on "cart" in bottom-left corner of the player and "save link as...").

The best way to understand the editor should be to use it but here are a few things you may want to know to use saves, skins and custom models:

After hitting the save button, you can ctrl+V in a text file and that's your save. To load it: select it, ctrl+C, go back onto Tiny Animator, ctrl+V and hit the load button!

You can import skins to apply to your animation. To do this, simply make a skin based on the shape your using (the humanoid one by default) in Pico-8. Then ctrl+C your 8x8 tile containing the skin, get back in Tiny Animator, ctrl+V and hit one of the free skin buttons.

You can also use a custom base! Be warned, doing so will reset the rest of the editor. Like for the skins, you want to draw your base in the sprite-sheet and then copy it to the animator and hit the base button. If you want to have your base all linked up like the default one, you simply gotta make sure each pair of pixels which should be connected have consecutive colors (e.g.: 4 and 5). Prefer to go from the color 1 and up with each link. The pixel of lowest color will serve as anchor point to move all connected points as one.

'fpf' is Frames Per animation Frames. It's the number of Pico-8 frames (running at 30 fps) between each animation frame. 3 or 4 are generally good values but you may want a 6 or higher for rougher animations. (you can also play your animations backward with negative numbers)

[End of instructions]

To read and write Pico-8-formatted sprites, Tiny Animator uses the Pico-8 & BBS feature that lets you copy sprite on the BBS and back again in Pico-8. So here are a few skins and bases you should be able to use in Tiny Animator! Press the '[8x8]' on the side of the sprites and hit ctrl+C, then get back into Tiny Animator, hit ctrl+V and hit one of the empty skin cases! Or hit the base case if you want to change the base!

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Alternative base:
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Alternative base #2:
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This was going to be a personal tool but it drew way more attention than I expected when I posted a first gif of it on Twitter, so I decided to make it better than I previously thought and then release it publicly. It ended up taking a week and I'm pretty happy with result!

Feel free to leave suggestions! I might not implement them but they are still interesting to me!

Also feel free to share animation saves! ;D (put them between '[hiden]' and '[/hidden]' though)

If you like Tiny Animator, please consider supporting me on Patreon, where your support will let me make more cool stuff like this! (there's also exclusive content! ;D)

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Amazing! Thanks for publishing.

Tihs is wonderful, and will be useful for projects years to come!



Question: Would it be possible to add "bones" that are larger than 1 pixel? I've got a sprite that has a 3x2 head with a couple little dangly ears, and it'd be nice to be able to treat the head as a single point for animation purposes.

Bones larger than one pixel are not possible in this version but try using a base like this:

[0x0]

With this you can move the head with the bone that is closest to the root bone. Although, this will make obvious a rotation bug that I thought I had fixed but apparently not. :X

Will you possibly add interpolation between frames?



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