Animation program

dupka1999

New Member
Jun 2, 2020
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At the start, I want to point out that English is not my default language so I apologize for the mistakes :)

I would like to know what kind of 2D animation program you recommend. From what I've learned I'm mainly talking about animations on bones to make it smooth or something like that.
Thanks.
 

Droid Productions

[Love of Magic]
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These are two of the more common 2D animation packages used for games:
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They're structured for slightly different workflows; Spine is a very generic usage, live2D is more specially set up for character portraits.

Spine:

Live2D:

If you're planning to use it for RenPy it's also worth while noting that Renpy (7.4) has a native implementation of Live2D's runtime. There's no equivalent Spine support for Renpy yet. Unity has runtimes for both.
 
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Domiek

In a Scent
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If you're not ready to toss $300 at Spine, there's also the free option of Blender Grease Pencil.

 
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Droid Productions

[Love of Magic]
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Game Developer
Dec 30, 2017
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If you're not ready to toss $300 at Spine, there's also the free option of Blender Grease Pencil.

For most games, the big one is usually the playback runtime. Spine's very much optimized for that, and has tons of runtimes; it's also easy enough to use their existing libraries for various languages to bootstrap your own.

Of course, if you're only focused on making animations/videos, that doesn't matter much. But the nice thing about something like Spine is that it's really good for in-game playback, in terms of memory usage, CPU usage, cross-blending, framerate and runtime retargeting.
 
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