I'm hoping to learn as much as possible about creating simple walking, combat, jumping animations for a platform game. How can I create animations with the correct file type needed for BB? Does it need to be a .mov file or .mp4? How many frames can the file be? What resolution size? Can someone point me to a tutorial if it exists? I'd assume the videos need to be rendered a very certain way to achieve maximum file space within the game. I'm using After Effects, PP, Vue combined with handart from ipad drawing software to create animations. Thanks for any help!
Buildbox does not take video formats, only .png images and .mp3 files. To import an image you have to convert the frames to png files. You can import as many frames as you want but note that it would increase your number of atlases which would increase your game load time.
@telerebor do you know what size the PNG needs to be? @villyreality is there a way to integrate Spriter into BB?
I don't know exactly is there an official tutorial or not but i found something in youtube. It doesn't explain everything but hope this will help you a little bit.
You just need to systematically align .png format photos and drag them to action animation field. (if someone knows better solution please write it.)
@telerebor[/USER] do you know what size the PNG needs to be?[/QUOTE] Hi, i don't think that there is an exact size. I prefer big size .png photos. Because if it will be too big , you can change its size by dragging from the corner of image, but if it will be small for the animation while making it bigger the quality of the image will be loosed. Thats why i think you should choose big sizes (not huge), then you can change it as you want. Hope this will be helpful.
@Nihat Muradzade Thanks man! Would a transparent image (PNG) be considered huge at 1920x1080? I guess I should be working in square shapes and doing 1000 x 1000?
No! Don't use big images! EVER! Use the smallest image you can. Best is to work with a 1:1 ratio. Search the forum. There is plenty of information regarding how to handle images. If you use big images and resize them in Buildbox your game will have problems running on all devices.
A Buildbox game loads all graphics from the current and the next scene into memory. The more and the bigger images you have the more memory and CPU is needed to process them. As simple as that. Add to this some light effects, portals, transforms, paths, a lot of small physics elements, etc and even your iPhone 6 Plus will explode while calculating all this stuff. Try to be good with the engine and save em the additional work which is not necessary.
Thanks man!! All search around and post what I find. Based on what you said, I would imagine there is probably one definitive ratio that is best quality. I'll see what I can dig up.
A lot more really good information on this thread: https://www.buildbox.com/forum/index.php?threads/character-and-object-sizes.260/#post-1424
Does anyone know if there is a general rule of thumb on how many frames to make an animation? Or better phrased, is there a number of frames to NOT exceed? I assume file size issues will arise if the animation has too many frames.
