A cross-platform Qt tool for making pixel-art animations for games
Groups are a new feature of the timeline. They allow you to give a span of frames a name. For example, you could have a walk animation and a run animation in a "walk" group and a "run" group. Groups are essentially another dimension to the timeline. Previously, if you wanted to give names to walk and run, you would have to use layers (but layers are for layering so you lose that functionality) or you would have to use a separate file (but it's nice to see related animations in the same file).
Adding groups means that the file format has changed. A file that was saved with the previous version cannot be opened with the current version. There's no way to convert the old file to a new one (except exporting each cel and then importing them back but that's a little tedious). This is pre-release software. Expect this sort of thing to happen.
The exporter was completely rewritten. Rather than passing options on the command line, you instead write a JSON configuration file. A big list of options on the command line can be unwieldy and the JSON file is much easier to read. See the --long-help for more information.
The exporter now supports generating texture atlases. A texture atlas is a single texture containing every sprite and an atlas that stores the location of every sprite on the texture. As well as texture atlases, it's still possible to export to a bunch of individual png files.
Exporting to a C++ file is possible too. That is, C++ code is generated that you can compile into your project. This means that the texture atlas is embedded in the executable. When I first came up with this I thought it was the holy grail of sprite exporting. There's a reason I've never seen this before! It has a few benefits but the cons outweigh the pros. I haven't decided if I want to try to make it better or leave it alone or remove it.
Just this one time, you'll have to manually uninstall v0.1.0 before installing v0.2.0. In future this will be automatic.
This is the very first release of Animera!
Animera has been in development from around March 2019. That's well over a year and I finally have something to show for it. There's an exe for Windows and a dmg for macOS. The Windows build has been tested on Windows 10 and the macOS build has been tested on macOS Mojave. The macOS build will probably work on Catalina but I haven't tested.
In its current state, I wouldn't recommend using it for anything more than playing around. This is a pre-release after all. The file format is probably going to change in the next release so you'll lose any files you have. The feature set is also very limited at the moment. I've been dedicating most of my time to getting the Windows build up and running for the past three months! During that time, I had loads of ideas for really useful features.
Now I have a big mess of notes, and the Windows build is working, so I can finally focus on features.