2D Sprite page setup... Help

#1 TGB requires that each cell within a "sprite page" is the same size. It's up to you to position your animation within whatever size your animation takes place.

Generally, it's more efficient if you make the size of the cells the exact size in which your entire animation takes place.

Example: lets say your animating a 16 frame walk cycle. So make all 16 images separate images, image them as if they were in a book and you were flipping through the pages to see the animation. Lets say each image is 64px X 64px. After you have each image lined up correctly within each separate image, it's easy. You just make a single large image, (in this case 256 by 256, because 16 64x64 images equals 256x256)

Now you just place each image exactly next to each other, so that TGB cuts up the sprite page into 16 separate "even"(64x64) cells.

The key is to keep the animation consistent within your chosen designated cell size. I mostly use photoshop or a flash application to create and set up the sprite page... It takes time to get used to the way TGB cuts up the animation, im used to in house sprite tools that are completely different... If you need to, practice with simple animations first...

#2 Don't forget about fragMOTION from Fragmosoft. It can create sprite images from 3d content. May be a quick way to create sprite images for a sprite sheet.

#3 Thank you both very much, I don't think that I will be using any 3d animations just yet but thank you for the program reference;) I guess I will just have to practice with what I got and figure out how best to make it fit into TGB's cell animation setup.

#4 Use ImageMagick if your art is already 2D. Use SpriteWorks if you are starting with 3D models.

The ImageMagick way lets you clean the sprites in a few steps, without too much typing. Assuming you start with individual cells, it's easy.

Method 1: Autocrop the cells (all with names ending in numbers so you can use a wildcard) to only include the important data, removing unnecessary surrounding background. This could be done with "convert". See the manual at the ImageMagick site.

Now you have a new set of images, possibly smaller. Tile them together with "montage", specifying how many tiles wide (and/or tall) you like the sheet, how much surrounding area to add to each, gravity (up, down, left or right as baseline), "-background none -depth 8" options. Clean the image with pngout or other optimiser if you like.

ImageMagick is tricky to use, so it's best setting up some scripts for tasks you do a lot. The "-background none -depth 8" are necessary because it adds a background otherwise, removing transparency, and it also defaults to 16 bits per plane (making it 48-bit RGB or 64-bit RGBA).