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by kdheiwns
21 days ago
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Yeah, this line from the article: > Artists work in whatever canvas size makes sense for the motion they’re drawing. made me think "what?" Artists making concept art or drawing for fun, sure. Whatever resolution is comfortable is fine. But for animation or in-game art, a resolution is always defined. Even the most amateur artists learn about sprite sheets the first time they try 2D animation, and rule one of sprite sheets is using a uniform resolution for every frame. |
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Every animation tool will provide consistency across frames of single animation, but functionality for aligning and managing transitions between pairs of different animations is less common and more in the territory of game development tools instead of animation drawing.
That's still something the game programmer linking animations together should be familiar with. You could still have artist use single frame size for all animations, but that means having gigantic square many times the width/height of character since you can have some animations which are stretched horizontally and some which are very tall. And if your workflow doesn't include good sprite packing, such gigantic frames can easily become impractical in terms of texture size. Having the game programmer define single anchor point per animation (assuming aligned frames within each animation) doesn't take much time at all. You wouldn't want to realign individual frames within each animation (that's part of artistic intent and artist should do at least that much), but even that would take order of magnitude less time than the process of drawing those frames. There are still times the programmer might have to go through each frame defining anchor point/hitbox, when artist picked a wrong config during export producing packed sprite sheet and there is no time to reexport it, or when dealing with animations that mix animated and software driven movement like large jumps.