Hi, I'm a game artist and lately, I've been getting lots of projects that require animation, the most intensive being a fighting game. I can animate things by hand but it generally isn't time effective and clients don't want to pay thousands of dollars for graphics for a game. Thus I sought out animation software. I settled on Toon Boom Studio which has an excellent bone setup for animating. It does seem limited in some areas however. Getting illustrator files into it properly have been a severe PITA. I've also experienced glitches with some animated illustrator art where randomly I lose color in an area on export. Speaking of exporting frames of animation as pngs, it takes forever, even on a >1 year old Core i5 Mac with 8 gigs of ram. So I can use the software, but I'm really starting to wonder if there's something better out there. What do you guys use. Any recommendations?
Have you considered Spine made by Esoteric Software > http://esotericsoftware.com/ ? It supports lots of runtimes which makes it easier to implement to different game engines.
Its funny you mentioned that, I just downloaded the trial for Spine this afternoon. It looks good but some people complained about it being horribly complicated to set up bones. It sounds even more complicated than the bone setup in ToonBoom. I may give it a whirl though and see how it is.
Spriter could be something for you, but i haven't used it myself. http://www.brashmonkey.com/spriter.htm
Its really not that bad, check out their video page, and watch the first video. After that you should have a good grasp of how to build a skeleton.
