Animation

Imagery has powerful and flexible support for animation using either frames or puppets. Optionally, use reference rigs as aids when animating characters.

Bank and canvas size

By default a new document will be 16 x 16 pixels. This is defined by the bank, which is a sprite bank.

Go to the banks tab at the bottom and you will see a bank called Sprites. You can rename it, duplicate and create more banks. But for now, lets resize it.

Either go to the Banks menu or right click this bank, and choose Canvas Size...

Change the canvas width and height to both be 32 pixels. All frames in this bank will inherit this size, although we only have one frame right now.

Click Frames to return to the now larger first frame.

You may need to zoom out a little to see the whole canvas, we'll be drawing a simple stick figure on our new canvas.

With the pencil tool selected, pick a colour from the swatches to draw with.

Just as a side note, the Layers panel shows we're going to be drawing on the Background layer.

Draw your sitck figure on the canvas.

Is it as amazing as mine?

We're going to make our awesome figure wave at us. To do this we'll need to add more frames.

Click the + button in the frames panel to create a new blank frame.

We could have copied the first frame, but we're going to use the onion skin feature to trace it on to the new frame instead.

The onion skin button can be found on the toolbar of the frames panel to the right in between two numbers.

Click the button to enable it.

This will show a ghost of the previous frame in a transparent colour.

Trace over the ghost but draw one arm raised, something like this:

We now have two frames of animation. Use the frame controls to step backward and forward, or the short cut keys are:

1 = Jump to first frame
2 = Previous frame
3 = Next frame
4 = Jump to last frame.

Go back to the second frame, and this time we'll duplicate it. The duplication button is next to the new frame button.

With the Eraser tool, remove some of the pixels for the arm in the duplicated frame and redraw them raised further.

You'll see the previous frame showing through to remind you where the arm was.

Use the duplicate button again, and continue to draw the arm in a new position. Use the frame controls to check back on previous frames if you need to.

I've created a total of six frames.

We're now ready to test how the animation plays back.

Click the play button or press the F5 key to start the animation.

I've copied frame 4 and 5 several times to the end with Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V to make the wave complete.

Note: I used File -> Export -> Animated GIF... to get my waving character above. You can also export to spritesheets, individual file sets and atlas sheets with additional information in json or csv side-car files.

You're now a master animator!

Well it's a good start, there's more you can do with animation in Imagery. Check out puppets for another way to create animations.

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