Avoiding Beginner’s Mistakes This section will quickly cover the most common mistakes or misconceptions that beginners run into that can cause unneeded confusion and waste your precious time. 1) Do not move or rename your image files once you’ve used them in your Spriter project! It’s very important to understand, Spriter files are simply text based files that store the relative positions, sizes, angles etc of the images you will use, the Spriter files do NOT store the actual images inside them..only a reference to their relative file location.  This means if you use an image in your Spriter animation, and then move that image to a new location on your computer, that Spriter file will no longer be able to find the image and your animations will include a “missing image” placeholder instead of your moved image.  If this happes, just put the images back where they were when you originally used them in the animation. 2) Stay organized.  You’ll save yourself a lot of time if you make your Spriter project’s folder and images neatly organized... A general good folder structure for a Spriter project such as for a player character is: The project folder _sub folder for head images _sub folder for torso images _sub folder leg images _sub folder for arm images _sub folder for weapon images _sub folder for hand images _sub folder for feet images _sub folder for all sound files if you’re adding sounds Then, if you will be using Character maps to swap out heads, weapons, etc etc, addional sub folders for the alternate versions each particular image set that is to be replaced.  For example, if you will have a character map that changes the weapon of the character, you might have something like this: The project folder _sub folder for head images _sub folder for torso images _sub folder leg images _sub folder for arm images _sub folder for weapon images _sub folder for the alternate weapon images _sub folder for hand images _sub folder for feet images _sub folder for all sound files if you’re adding sounds This sort of folder structure will make navigating the file palette in Spriter to find the specific images you need to use much faster and easier, and will make the creation of character maps a lot faster as well. 3) Make sure you use trimmed images! When exporting all your images for use in Spriter, please be certian that: a) You are working in a reasonable resolution for the needs of your final game...in other words, if your final game character needs to stand at roughly 128 pixels tall in the game itself, dont make just the head image for the character 1240 pixels tall.  (Although I do recommend you create your images and Spriter Animations initially at 2x or 4x their actual needed size for the game, (if you are not making a retro pixel art game), but then scale the Spriter project down before importing it into your game engine.. This allows you to draw faster and sloppier, as the reduction cleans the art up for you...also, this means you have extra large versions of all your art/animations to use for marketting art etc.) b) Each image is trimmed so that its not surrounded by a lot of Columns and rows of completely transparent pixels. This is incredibly wasteful of texture space, draw calls, memorry and drawing time in a game engine (as well as within Spriter) and will also make manipulating your images in Spriter much more cumbersome.

Quickstart

Sprites

Bones

Animating

Character Maps

Index

4) Take advantage of the helpful Spriter community and our support email. If you run into a problem, or a feature seems to not work like you need, or a feature that you’d like seems missing, please do be sure to join our official forums and let us and the community know. You’re likely to get helpful advice and tips quickly, and this will ensure that any of your desires for new features gets our attention.  It can also help us improve workflow or our doccumentation. Our forums can be found at: http://www.brashmonkey.com/forum Also, don’t hesitate to email us at: support@brashmonkey.com if you think you’ve found a bug or are having any other type of technical issue regarding Spriter or a Spriter implimentation.