what program to use for animations

[jtp]

I'm starting to use multimedia fusion 2 and I would like to have a animated person walking and standing in my game. I have both adobe photoshop and illustrator cs5. Which program is best for creating animation and then putting it in multimedia fusion 2.

thank you

[Popcorn]

Hi, and welcome to the forums!

I say, there is no 100% correct answer for that. It depends on what kind of graphics you want, and which programs you prefer.

If you would like to use vector graphics, both Flash and Anime Animation Stuido are good choices.

For 3D or pixelated graphics, there are other choices. Someone else would need to recommend some.

Most graphics programs can export animations as a series of .png files, which is then easy for MMF2 to import. As long as the files are named somename0001.png, somename0002.png etc, and you tell MMF2 to import as animation, MMF2 will recognize the series of files as an animation and import the files in the correct order.

Remember that MMF2 also has a quite good bitmap animation editor that even supports alpha-channels and onion skinning.

[BrashMonkey]

for pixel art, the best is pro-motion by cosmigo or graphics gale (which is free) http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/

there's too many options which are drastically diferent for 3d to really make a valid recommendation.

for high res, alpha blended sequential images animation creation, something like flash or Anime studio are very good to use...EVEN if you want to move pre-painted parts (like Odin-Sphere) I'd suggest creating the body parts in photoshop, then putting them together and animating them in a program like flash.

You can also check out the animating program I've made called Spriter at www.brashmonkey.com I'm about to release an update with major optimization and bug fixes.

[Atherton]

I've also heard Graphics Gale & Cosmigo Pro Motion recommended, however I haven't used them all that much myself & I tend to just use Paint or MMF2's own editor.

Remember that MMF2 also has a quite good bitmap animation editor that even supports alpha-channels and onion skinning

Really? I didn't think MMF2 had onion skinning?

[Popcorn]

I have also heard Graphics Gale & Cosmigo Pro Motion recommended over at the Pixellation forum, however I haven't used them all that much myself & I tend to just use Paint or MMF2's own editor.

and onion skinning

Really? I didn't think MMF2 had onion skinning?

Really. Check the slider at the right of the + / - buttons, just above the direction arrows in the animation editor

[Atherton]

you learn something new everyday
I think I'm going to find that slider mighty handy

[arfa]

Anime Studio and Toon Boom are the two main 2D animators. Both not free.

I used to do quite a bit of animation but basically am not that good at drawing. With games the focus is more on the action so simple animation goes a long way. I tend to build my characters in a vector-based program (Xara) Inkscape is free - which give really good control over a few frames. It is then just a matter of exporting as png and setting up in MMF. Building lots of frames without tweening gets you a serious headache.