Creating a spritesheet

Following on from having created a character within Magica Voxal.

 

I can then animate it by saving it as an obj file and opening it within mixamo and choose the animations that I would like to use.

As you can see I get a lot of option to alter the animation to how I see fit,

I can alter the length and speed that the animation is played, then there is the option to alter the arm length of the character to better fit the animation and finally the chance to reduce the amount of frames.

 

Once I have settled on these settings I can download the character animation at which point I will be given more options.

The file type is as I would need it to be and I would like the animation with the skin, the fps is set to a stable rate and I don’t want to reduce any of the frames, after I have selected the setting I want I can the proceed with downloading.

Once I have all three of the animations that I need (Idle, run and jump) I can then export them into Maya.

Once it is in maya I can then go into the file drop down menu and set a new project, this will create a new save space for what I am about to do.

After the save space is set up I then need to change maya into rendering mode which is a drop box below the file options. Once I have selected rendering a new render drop down menu will appear across the top of the window, I can go into here and select render settings

Once in the render settings menu there are a few things that need to be altered such as the render software, frame rate, file format and camera position, this image shows exactly what will need to be changed.

Once all of these settings have been altered I then need to click onto render along the top of the window and then onto batch render

Once this is done the animation will be rendered into indivdual images, an image per frame and save in the specified location that was set up when I first entered Maya via the project settings.

This is the finished render of my Idle animation. now that I have these I can create a sprite sheet that can be used within my 2D platformer.

 

This is done by using Photoshop and creating a new plane which is 4096X4096 pixels and then another plane which is 256X256 pixels.

I can then add all of my render frames onto the 256X256 or add them individually ( i done individual at first but found it easier and less tedious to add them all at once).

As you can see the only layers that I have available to view is the background and the starting frame of my animation.

Now that the frame is on the 256X256 plane I need to resize it this can be done by pressing CTRL+T to show a bow around the frame which will help center it with the middle cross section.

I then need to drag it to the top and it will snap into place.

Once that is done and it has snapped into place I then need to hold shift and drag the corner to align with the side lines

Then holding shift again, move the image to the center (it should snap)

Once this is done I can then drag the image from the layers at the side onto the 4090X4096 sheet

Make sure that the frame is exactly center otherwise they will need to be altered later.

Repeat this for every frame and then crop the spreadsheet then remove the background to ensure they can be used without being surrounded by a white box at all times.

A finished sprite sheet should look similar to the above, trying to keep all of them allign and as square as possible for the final result.