Smooth out sprite animations - Interprite

Discussion in 'Utilities' started by MarkeyJester, Nov 28, 2019.

  1. MarkeyJester

    MarkeyJester ♡ ! Member

    Joined:
    Jun 27, 2009
    Messages:
    2,867
    Today I am releasing a new tool I have been working on for the past two months, I call it "Interprite", the name is a combination of "Interpolate" and "Sprite" which is what the tool does.

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    The above is the original, the below is after interpolation using the tool...
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    Here are a few more examples (I have put them in a spoiler tag as I don't want to flood the whole post with them too hastily):

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    For many years I have done manual sprite interpolation, manually creating the individual frames necessary to smooth out the resulting animation, I have always wanted a quicker/easier way of doing it, even if it were to reduce the amount of effort would've been nice. Now, I'm most certain this tool isn't the first to be able to interpolate frames of animation, but many that do will disregard the palette and will use certain inbetween or specific colours to help the morphing process, my tool is built specifically NOT to do that, and instead will only ever use the colours/pixels you import into it, thus making the results suitable for whatever project/console you have restrictions for.

    Is the tool specifically for Sonic? Mmmno, not really, you can use it on any sprites you want really so long as you have the frames in individual image files for importing and exporting afterwards.

    Download

    I was going to make a tutorial site and PDF file, but I realised there are potential problems with doing those. So instead, have a video tutorial instead.

    To be frankly honest, the tool was never meant to be this complex, originally it was going to be a simple console program, you'd give it two or more images, and it'd do the work. ...that ended up producing some surprising results, the interpolation was working pretty well, but the distribution of pixels worked worse than initially anticipated, so it was both better and worse than expected, and it encouraged me to make a small GUI tool for helping the program specify which body parts are which. After showing it to a few people, they made a few suggestions and very quickly the tool ended up getting bigger and bigger, and supporting more and more features, it sort of got out of hand in a way.

    I'm quite fed up of working on it now as I should be doing other things, and I'm not doing them like I should be so I need to get back to them. I hope the tool is useful to you and serves your needs even just a tiny bit, and I would like to thank the following people for their suggestions, feedback, and overall help with the project; Natsumi, VAdaPEGA, Dragon Wolf Leo and the guys who joined the live stream I did show casing an older version of the tool, and who offered a few ideas here and there.
     
    PsychoSk8r, Aier, Pacca and 20 others like this.
  2. drmelon

    drmelon Newcomer Member

    Joined:
    Dec 9, 2019
    Messages:
    11
    Hi there! I saw your work via Twitter, and watched your video tutorial on this tool. It's absolutely fantastic! I think a lot of people will get a lot of use out of this, both in the romhacking community and indie game development with any kind of fixed-resolution spritework - especially due to its palette-safe nature. Thanks for building this, it is genuinely impressive.