tools to help with sprite collection

[Mark]

Pardon me if this is old news for you people, but I've noticed that with the large demand of sprite collection happening on this board, I figure it might be prudent to share a couple of program that I have used for a while that I found really helpful in sprite collection along with the VBA emulator.

First is a program is called AnimGet. Basically once activated it will repeatedly take screenshots of the focused window and save them as a string of files with progressing number order. Combined with the Background out tongling with the VBA emulator, sprite animation collection becomes practically automated =D Be forwarned that the program can eat up HD space quickly if not used properly, with the rapid screenshot collection. Don't worry about repeat copies of the same frame one after the other, as the program actually checks the preceeding screenshot for changes. If there is no change, then it won't save that screenshot. =)

The second program is Animagic GIF. Yes, it's a simple gif animation program, but what makes this program useful is that it can uniformally crop a large series of images to the desired retangle. Basically I point this program out because it will allow you to in one shot, cut out the window frames out of all those screenshots that were just collected with Animget.

So in recap:
Play your game,
wait until the you are about to prompt a battle animation.
Tongle out the BG on the VBA emulator
Activate AnimGet
Let animation run it's course.
Stop AnimGet and save all screenshots
Toss them into Animagic GIF
Crop off window frames, set animation speed.
Save

and you have a nifty animation without the wear of hitting save screenshot some 50+ times and hope you didn't miss a frame and cutting out the frames one by one =)

[SwordsAreShiney]

wow..............that really makes it easier to get the individual frames.............heres 2 sprites i made using is:

[superbus]

With so many people asking about tools and how-tos on making sprites, I decided to go and dig this up.

I'm making this stick, and deleting all the useless posts.

Anyone that wants to add to it, may.

[aPeXFUBAR]

Thanks superbus

[Canas]

I use Animator Nine
I find it very useful.. and the downloads quick.. espcially if you have dsl!
You can get it on www.download.com

[CO Raptor]

Well, UnFREEz is an easy to use and free GIF animator, which most people probably already know about. I just thought I'd post the link: www.whitsoftdev.com/unfreez/
I recommend Animagic GIF Animator over UnFREEz though, as it has more options. You just have to get around the 30-day limit if you want to use it.

Two other programs I found useful for dealing with animating are IrfanView (www.irfanview.com) and Giffy (http://mysoft.s5.com/giffy/ for example).
IrfanView is a good free image viewer with a nice amount of options. It's good if you want to do palette edits, and it's usefull for converting lots of files into a new format. Converting BMPs to GIFs does have some quality loss though.
For converting BMPs to GIFs I recommend Giffy over IrfanView. It has no quality loss as far as I've been able to tell, exept it turns the colors slightly darker, which isn't really noticable unless you directly compare the BMP to the GIF. Files converted with Giffy can be significantly smaller than files converted with IrfanView too. Giffy is free as well.

Hope this added something to the topic ;D

[ZephyrShakuraus]

CO said:

You just have to get around the 30-day limit if you want to use it.

You mention this, yet you never mention how...

[superbus]

That's because we're a Fire Emblem site, not a Warez site.

Do some research, and it's really not that hard.

[CO Raptor]

You mention this, yet you never mention how...

One google search should be sufficient, just don't hold me responsible for any negative effects, the result might have, 'kay?