Rig vs Frame-by-Frame Animation | Smack Studio Tutorial

let's talk animation options in smack studio so you really have two main options you have the animation rig and then you have animation kind of frame by frame through Sprites and I'll talk about the advantages of each why you might use one over the other and how they can actually work together as well so of course something that makes Mac Studio different from other pixel art based fighting games or Sprite bass fighting games or really any kind of game is this option to rotate in 3D space it's not really 3D it's not actually a 3D model but of course you can rotate it as if it is and that's very helpful for making quick animations and quick adjustments to animations as well so that's really found a fantastic option and then you also have the kind of sprite import option which we'll just talk about in a second but let's talk about the advantages first of the rig right so once you have an animation like this you know this idle one for example you can make changes like have them Lean Forward more let's move him down a little bit like that and already that's that has changed you know seven frames of Animation instantly by making that one adjustment and you can you know rotate it any way you'd like and it will just automatically change to fit that new adjustment that you made so it's very convenient the other advantage of rigs are if you go in let's say you go into your Sprite and you say you know what I want this character not to have red eyebrows but I want this guy to have blue eyelashes or eyebrows I guess so I'll select the blue color and I'll go in and I'll change his eyebrow color foreign blue eyebrows so we'll hit accept and lo and behold in every animation that he has he has blue eyebrows so if I go to his Dash animation he has blue eyebrows if I go to the walk animation he's got blue eyebrows fantastic otherwise I would have had to go through and frame by frame change every single you know single animation and that would have taken forever but this way it was instant so I'm going to actually undo that so now we're back to the way that he was so those are the advantages of the rig but that it doesn't actually stop there but we'll talk about that at the very end on the advantages of using a rig let's go now to the frame by frame animation an advantage with frame by frame animation let's use this side a for example so here's a side uh side attack right where he's kicking like this if you have an existing Sprite sheet that that will be very helpful to for smack Studio because you can actually import those Sprites and you can see here one disadvantage of the rig is sometimes it leaves these kind of stray pixels you can see here the the two pixels here that seem kind of out of place so what you can do is you can actually import a custom Sprite sheet that you made so like here's one that has this kick animation and for the purposes of this video I've already imported those so let's turn on the fire and also the Sprite so now you can see a much more polished looking example uh from compared to the rig so the rig's great for a quick and dirty solution and sometimes it looks good enough to just use on its own but sometimes you really want to get the right amount of Polish and a lot of pixel artists will relate to this where you want something looking just right whether it's this you know it's a smear or it's just you know something that really accentuate something in a very clean way that is an advantage that you can do there but that is not it there's another example I want to show you let's use this as side strong as an example what you can actually do is you can use do The Best of Both Worlds you can start with a rig like this and or I should say a rig like this so here's the original animation right that we did from the rig and then what you can do is you can click bake and that's going to create a brand new layer actually let's let's redo that let's select all the animation that we want to bake and then let's select the bake option and once you click that it's going to generate all of the all the animations as a Sprite layer and what you can do here is you can export this and do a Sprite sheet then you can go in and make individual edits and adjustments and really polish it up so you can take something from looking like this to looking like this so here we have some smears as an example you can see that he's blinking and check it out now it looks a lot cleaner and you have that flexibility so whether you're creating a brand new pixel art character from scratch or you have an assortment of existing Sprite sheets to use really leveraging both the rig and the frame by frame options are a good idea

Channel: Smack Studio

Views: 9,896

Keywords: smack studio, platform fighter, fighting game, indie game, pixel art, pixel art generator, creat characters games, create a character, stage editor, stage creator, 2.5 d unrela engine, 2.5 games, 2.5 animation software, pixel art game, competitive platform fighter, create character online, pixel art rotation, rotating pixel art, 3D Pixel Art

Id: aJV2dKXpi8Q

Length: 4min 42sec (282 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2023