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  • 32x32 Pixel Art Animation

    anglais
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First of all, hey! I'm new to this forum and have been using Spine for all of 1hr now so excuse me if this has been tackled/discussed before but I did a quick search and didn't return any relevant results.

So I'm working on a 2d pixel art aesthetic for a game I'm trying to make, and figured after watching some videos I could streamline the process using Spine, which seems like a pretty sweet piece of software and looks very intuitive. That said, Spine has no pixel grid (as far as I'm aware) and an imported 32x32 sprite can be moved via increments of a single pixel. I can use the absolute world translate tool and input integers to position them initially, but during animation it's possible for the "pixels" to be in non-absolute decimal positions. The same applies for rotation - it is possible for my "pixels to NOT be square, as they can rotate freely.

Now I get that this makes the animation far smoother, but I'm not looking for smooth, I'm looking for blocky. Does Spine have a tool that allows rotation/translation to operate in the same way it might in Photoshop or Paint (i.e. to approximate the position to the nearest actual pixel coordinate for each frame)?

The best way you can get that effect is by having your actual game at low res (320x240 for example) an having all the skeltons at 1:1 proportion. If you disable antialiasing you will be able to achieve the effect you want, but only in game, you won't be able to see it in Spine.
Also keep in mind that you can use stepped interpolation curves for translations, that way you can make nice raster animations.
Right now I'm working on a projet that use this way of animating, we are still thinking about using true low resolution, or hi-res with resized sprites (ala- starbound, Broforce, and a lot of modern pixel art games), but Spine is really speeding up a lot of the animating proess even though it is not a piece of software originally designed for this.
In some time I may post some of my workflow to see if some of you guys can get ideas on how to improve it, and i'm pretty sure Spine will keep growing and making things even easier with stuff like turning attachments into skin-attachments and suh.

As soon as you have rotation or scaling, your images aren't on the pixel grid. As mentioned, you can use stepped in Spine and at runtime which may give an effect closer to what you want. Otherwise you'll need to use a shader or post processing effect.