NES Sprite Animator

I haven't been able to find any utilities that allow you to see your .chr sprites animate.
I am in the middle of developing the sprites for my main character. I have an idea of what
it will look like, but I think that development would be more rapid if I could "see" it in motion.

Of course, I could write a demo that alternates between frames on a timed interval, but I don't
want to re-invent the wheel if I don't have to.

What methods do you use? Are there any applications that do this?

Thanks

I have an idea to add meta sprite editor functionality into NES Screen Tool - one that would allow to align sprites arbitrary with arbitrary palettes. Animation could also be considered. Not sure how it going to look, though, certainly a separate window.

One way to achieve this is to not edit the CHR data directly, but instead use some other tool like GraphicsGale, ASEPRITE, etc to do the animation, and then convert the results to CHR using some automated tool (like Tilificator), or manually.

That said, a metasprite editor like what Shiru is talking about would certainly be welcome.

If you paste graphics onto multiple layers into GIMP, you can do Filters > Animation > Playback.

a bit offtopic perhaps, but how do you even create a single-pixel brush in GIMP nowadays? I struggled with this a few days ago without any success, and Google results didn't give much help.

As for sprite animation, I've succesfully used Pro Motion for creating animations and Tilificator for making them into tiles.

Ctrl+Shift+B then click Circle (1). Make sure you use the pencil tool and not the brush tool.

Tried that, but no Circle brush exist to be selected. And trying to create a 1-pixel one myself fails miserably as it always ends up affecting more than one pixel no matter which settings I choose. Feels really silly not being able to do something as fundamental as changing individual pixels in a paint program...

Using GIMP 2.8.2 on Xubuntu.

I'm on GIMP 2.6.12 on Xubuntu 12.04 LTS. I've never tried GIMP 2.8.

I have had it on the list for NESICIDE for over a year. Concept is complete...just need to find the time to implement. Unfortunately the graphic that depicted the concept has been lost...unless hyarion has it somewhere.

Basically the concept was a pattern editor at the top with a "roll of film" below it that you could drag patterns onto and watch them animate. Shouldn't be terribly hard to do, I just haven't done it [yet]. I've already done the tile editor...so it's partly done already.

I've been focused [recently] on porting FamiTracker to Qt.

Yes, I know there's a partially complete port of FamiTracker to Qt already...I'm "rolling my own".

To get a 1 pixel brush in Gimp 2.8, I click pencil, then I click on the brush shape (big square in the "tool options" pane), for me the second brush was a little dot, it's called "1. Pixel". Finally there is a "size" field just below, change that to 1.00, and you should be able to draw hard pixels.

I also recomend going to preferences > tool options, and telling it to save the tool options on exit so you don't have to do this every time.

For other tools like the eraser, some of them have individual options for anti-aliasing or hard edges. Eraser has a "hard edge" option you want to turn on, for example.

Problem is there isn't any "size" field AFAICT, only a "spacing" field which doesn't seem to be the same. Choosing to edit the brush brings up lots of different parameters to play with, but none of them seem to achieve the goal of only changing a single pixel. And yeah, I'm using the Pencil tool.

Moveo ut of t he brush editor and move it to 1 size. If that doesn't work, you screwed your settings somehow as that should work by default.

There isn't any "size" setting to be found anywhere AFAICT.

This is how it looks on mine:

Every tool has a tool options pane (different from the brush editor pane). The pencil tool has a size option. If you click on the picture of the brush, it opens a brush selector (the second image), and that picture should show where to find the pixel brush.

Thanks rainwarrior! I know learned the power of the tool options dialog, and can finally draw single pixels. Sorry for not reading your first reply carefully enough

Aseprite is a decent pixel art editor that has some crude animation capabilities, if you want to see them animated before you have made your graphics into 2bpp tiles.

In my experience, NES-specific editors will never be as good as more generic drawing programs. IMO, the best option is to use whatever bitmap editing software you like and only convert the graphics to NES format as the last step.

Are there generic programs to create metasprites?

Meanwhile I added the promised functionality into NES Screen Tool.

Cool! I almost want to convert my old metasprites to your format now just to see how they look in the editor.

C data clipboard copying has a bug when H/V flip is used:

(I probably should have posted this in the NES Screen Tool thread...)

Yes, it is better to post bug reports there. Anyway, I'll fix it ASAP (within an hour) without changing the version number, so check it out later.