SPUM -- Animated Sprite Character Creator

hello ladies gentlemen it's mike here at game from scratch and today we are looking at spum s-p-u-m it stands for something i don't really know what but what it is is a sprite character creator used in unity and this one is actually kind of cool i gotta admit and it's part of the unity mega bundle that is on right now now if you're regular this channel i covered this back on the fifth so two days ago uh it's running for a week's time and the funny thing is this one apparently is only available in asia pacific at least it's only being advertised in asia pacific well except for here okay from scratch so this one uh isn't really meant for us but it works you can buy it so you want to check it out it's a great chance to get a number of unity assets for like a pretty low price basically if there's one asset in here you really like the look of it pays for the entire bundle mega bundles are a pretty solid deal so that is what we're looking at the hand-picked deals mega bundle uh five hours 25 almost six hours left in this one and you're gonna see what we're looking at is here in the middle tier and we are looking at spum so here is spum we'll come back and take a look at some of the details of it uh after the demonstration also going to come back and show you uh an open source alternative to spum also there is a free version of spum available so we'll get to all that in just a second but i want to start with a hands-on demonstration of what spum is all about so here we are in the um unity editor in my project a pain in the spum and what i'm going to do now is show you how to use it i've already imported it to import it fairly straightforward process once again go into your package manager go to your built-in packages sorry your assets some reason i'm not signed in because of course i'm not search for spum add it and import it into your project once it's done you will find uh a new folder here called spum and then what you want to do is go inside of spum and open up scene spum scene and here you go this is a spum in action and all you do basically is run this guy now what i'm going to be using is a full screen tool uh this was available in one of the previous mega bundles or um humble bottles you can run it right here in this little window but i've got this guy running right here so i'm going to go ahead and open that guy up all right so here we've got spum and this is pretty straightforward on the whole you can use this basically a number of different characters you're creating them by composition and the actual final character fully animated is a compound character which is actually quite nice so let's go ahead and take a look at this we can make this guy a little bit bigger that's as big as we can go and you got a number of different bodies base body styles to work from so those are the ones there by the way you can add your own if you wish it's not really well documented so you're a little bit on your own but i'll show you some of the process in a bit so pick your base character actually you know what i'm going to make a dark elf so let's go there i think that is the base dark elf and then you basically just start going through and picking pieces for it so for example we could do the eyes pick a different set of eyes here we've got the hair so let's do uh goku style hair there's always a goku style hair yeah there it is all right goku of course is blonde so hit the c the c is color will make the hair blonde there you go so we've got our naked goku going on you can do facial hair here as well what you'll notice here so we've got color random and delete and then also we've got a lock so if you're doing things like randomizing all of the things you can lock in that particular piece so if you want to make sure that all your characters have goku hair you can lock that in and then if we randomize things it will not be uh taken away so that's what all the controls are so we can randomly go through the various different facial hair we decided okay we don't want facial hair we can get rid of it that way i've got a number of different helmets available here as well now obviously i like my goku hair so i'm not going to add a helmet uh shirts or upper parts there's two parts to this there's also like a shoulders aspect so let's do like a i don't know yeah that's kind of gokuy and then pants like so and then you got again shoulders so let's pick something sort of like the super saiyan thing as close as we get all right there we go so there is our character we can add a cape because of course you're gonna have a cape uh so let's do that one probably don't want it to be purple even though i'm perfectly fine with purple uh oh color doesn't seem to change on capes okay and now if you want you can add weapons main hand and off hand so here we go uh main hand here let's go ahead and give him so you got a number of different weapons available uh let's give him a an axe and then in the off hand let's give him a shield all right there we go so there is knight goku with a sword and a shield and by the way if we really want uh i'll do that in a second so here we go this guy is fully rigged what we're seeing right now is the idle animation we could do a run animation the death animation and then depending on if it's a melee or a bow or a magic character you've got special attacks available there and the skill is kind of a more of a jumping chop thing there so you've got rigged characters available and by the way yes you can put them oops wrong one right here you can put them on a horse so there is our character on a horse so you want to have a running knight mounted horse you can do so that as well so that is spum when you are done with your character you like the sprites that you have created you just hit save unit and you will see it saved this one is saved as unit.002 you can set that down here by the way so if we want to get rid of the horse we could just delete the horse and we could save that unit now we have zero zero three created and that is the spum process i'm going to come out of that uh we're going to stop running it and we're going to go from there so in order to run that guy it's all under spum manager and by the way you can see here all of these scripts are available so if you want to modify spum to be reformed differently you can do so you've also got the ability to bring in your own sprite sheets and they also have their own add-ons for sale i'll show you those when we get back to the other part in just a second uh but you can see here using the manager you can um pretty much add new pieces in or you could go into one of these sprite sheets a variety of different sprite sheets and uh edit them yourself so if you want to add new weapons new hairstyles new whatever should be a fairly straightforward process for you you've got a lot of decent nice final control over what's going on there and then now that we are done we're gonna basically go back here into the spum folder you're going to find it no resources it puts them in resources so we go to your assets resources spum and then you're going to find spum units and there are our characters so let's go over the the knight that we made the first time so we go here there is our character showing up right there let's these are prefabs by the way so the nice thing is you can actually just take these characters out like grab this guy drop it in your project of choice and you now have an animated ready to go sprite so open this one up and there you can see uh the entire sprite hierarchy and everything here is composed of various different bits so uh the animations that are all hierarchical characters so it basically created a dynamic character for you if you go to the root of the character you're going to find there is an animator or an animation controller there this one is for the horse animations and we'll open that one up and let's open up the run animation so there is the run animation all of the various different pieces are uh shown by the way you can edit the sprites if you do edit the sprite uh you've got the ability to go up to the root and you can resync so if you make changes you can resync the sprite and have the changes come in so we got again let's go to our animator our animation our run animation let's drop our horse in there so we can see it in action and there you go so this is how easy it is to create prefab sprite characters using spum and again you can add your own stuff there as well now if some reason you're actually not using unity as your final result or you want to work with a sprite sheet well they've got you covered there as well if you go back to the spum folder here you're going to find sprite sheet exporter beta and what you do is open this guy up go to the scene open up the sprite sheet manager it's like so uh you basically bring in the sprite you want to work with so once again those are under resources spums bum units and let's do the the non-horse one so boom bring him in and we'll do that as a swordsman like so go ahead and play that there is our character you see it right there now i find the default sprite to be really really tiny so what i'm going to do is jack that up to uh one all right there you go so we definitely got a lot bigger for our character and then when you're happy with that you basically just do a make sprite sheets now what i did find is when i first did this there is a folder missing it looks for in your assets a screenshots folder so here you can see i've done one of these in the past i had to create this directory so i got an error the first time i ran this again it is flagged as experimental so do be aware of that but once you've got it basically go ahead say make the sprite sheets and what it'll do is run through all of the different frames of animation render the sprites for you see if it's just not updating one second i might have to be in run mode one second for this yeah that was my bad i had to be in run mode for it and you'll see this message no cameras rendering and at the bottom it's doing its whole thing it's going to go through the different frames that it's so it's generating the death frames and so on by the way you can set the frame rate that you want the animations to play at in the sprite sheet right here so it's going to do 8 frames per second by default and it should be here oh is it overwriting them it is okay so that's the challenge it only creates one set of sprites so it automatically overwrites whatever was there before so do be aware of that i think i can actually set the name here so it was making it all along i was just being stupid so we can also go with this bum exporter manager set there are advanced settings here as well so you can control over exactly how it is rendered how the animations play what animations you actually want to render out so if you added your own or wanted to create your own you could do so as well and then once you've got your sprites rendered what they are basically is a set of sprite sheets with all of the frames of animation available so now what you can do is basically take these out and use them in whatever uh engine you want now one of the downsides i see here and you might have to play around a bit is you're seeing they're uh they're clipping so example this guy in his jump attack is moving out of his own frame so that's going to be a little problematic otherwise all the animation seems to work fine other than the special attack where he jumps out of frame and that might be something that you can fix by playing around with uh these particular settings here but again this uh sprite sheet renderer is considered an experimental thing and i don't think many people are going to use it because it's really only relevant if you're using spum but you're not exporting or you're not using in unity whereas in unity you're getting prefabs with all the animation support built in so you're going to work that way instead like your end result is generally going to be um these guys right here these prefabs we've created so um once you once you've got oops i'm still running uh once you've got your character created it's generally this that you will work with this is what you'll drop in your project of choice these prefabs here and again fully rigged fully animated and everything else and you can update them re-sync the sprites out and so on so that there is spum uh again it is part of the what is this actually called the hand pick deals mega bundle by the way if you buy this using my link below i get a small commission so thank you if you do so um it's a great deal as long as there's at least one asset in here you're interested in uh pick it up uh and by the way if there's anything else here you really want to see me cover uh if you're wondering or you're on the fence about picking it up let me know pretty straightforward and like i said in the uh mega bundle video i did like a couple days ago we've had a lot of unity covers coverage lately so i don't want to overdo it but if there's anything here you really want to see uh do let me know i know some people are showing interest in puppet face for example um master audio uh and a couple of others or emerald ai i think those ones that most people expressed interest in in the last video in addition to spum uh so if there's something you really want to see i may be able to cover one or two more before the bundle ends in about six days uh so again this is a bundle aimed at the asia pacific market but it's kind of sweet that it's still going on and by the way speaking of still going on uh the humble bundle uh the fps humble bundle for unity is actually still running for a couple more days as well i'll throw that in the link down below if you didn't pick that one up so as i mentioned earlier on the creator here soon they have character packs so if you're wanting more spum generators or content and you're not going to create your own uh you can get retro heroes undead monsters orcs and pixel units basic pack they're about five to six bucks a piece so if you want to get some add-ons for spum they have these add-on packs available so you can extend the type of characters and or the type of equipment available in spum itself as i mentioned earlier on there's also a free version of pixelmaker if you want to play with it free i i think the license basically just limits you from redistribution but i have no idea to be honest it actually says um one is under the the unity license the other one is under uh the commercial license but there's there's no details there but you can see here uh you can't redistribute for commercial use after reprocessing if you want the tool after reprocessing please contact the manufacturer so one of those things to be aware of and you can only use them oh no create it through so okay i'm not 100 certain what the limitations of the free version of spum are um you can see here yeah so here's the details i've got please note spum can only be legally downloaded from these two sources github under the free license but i can't find the free license i have no idea what the limitations of this free version are also looks like it hasn't been updated in a little while but there is a free version if you want to go ahead and check that out it is ultimately a unity package so it works the same way uh also if you're not all about the unity but you like the concept of what we just looked at or you are looking for additional character sheets that you could use in spum check out the universal sprite sheet creator i did a video on this in the past it's running really slow right now so i'm not going to show it to you but it's built on the liberated pixel cup assets which by the way are available here and these there are a ton of base characters and so on um and actually there's a ton here actually more than just characters but you could bring these in and use them in spam as well so if you want to extend spum uh see a number of uh clothing options and so on the liberated pixel cup has a ton of things in it so if you're interested in uh extending it definitely check out the liberated pixel cup and if you are looking for a tool but you do not want to use this one try that character generator i was talking about the universal sprite character creator same kind of concept but it's uh it's web-based as opposed to built inside of unity so that is it that is the unity mega bundle that is on now and what we looked at today was spum now the funny thing before i go because i am an immature person spum sounded kind of uh rude to me and the funny thing is so i searched for spum earlier and i searched for unity you know to get the asset page quickly and when you search for spumunity you get did you mean sperm and the funniest thing is it wasn't actually sperm i was thinking of when i thought spum sounded kind of pervy it was actually similar but not the word i was thinking of so that ladies and gentlemen is spum for unity let me know what you think comments down below also let me know what you think of the mega bundle again this wasn't meant for north american distribution but hey it works so if you want to check that one out a great deal from uni developers and that's it i will talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 6,592

Rating: 4.8217268 out of 5

Keywords: Animated, Bundle, Character, Game Development, Game Engine, GameDev, LPC, Liberated Pixel, MegaBundle, Review, SPUM, SPrite, Sprites, Spritesheet, UNITY, Unity 2D, Universal Character Creator

Id: qDxdJPTYR8c

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021