Howdy, Right now I'm mostly a developer who's about 1\2 way decent with making graphics.. most of the games I work on are 2D/3D Hybrid (Super Paper Mario-ish) I constantly hit stumbling blocks with animation.. while my eye for creating charecters and objects is ok for characters/objects and the like.. when it comes to animating them I totally suck.. so about a month ago I learned that I could use shape tween's in Flash (I've never really touched flash much in the past so this seemed rather new to me) and export png's I could then scale/place into some sprite sheets.. while this works it seems like there may be a better tool/process/documents I can refer to? I noticed Pencil2D yesterday. .http://www.pencil-animation.org/ which seems like a really fantastic chunk of software, but it really isn't a large help to me when it comes to animating my sprites! Thanks, Anthony

Also, if there's a lack of solutions I've been considering just writing up a sort of Opensource shape tweening application.. is this something that anyone else around here would be interested in?

Hey Anthony.

Not having seen your work I can't make any concrete determinations, but how well grounded are you in the theory and practice of animation as an artform? If you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, you'll probably make a mess, especially with complex organic figures - and no amount of shape tweening will help there. Assuming that you're primarily concerned about character animation - humans, robots, attack dogs, dragons, etc - the most important advice I can give you is to consider weight, gravity and line of action. If you get those three things right, your animation will look pretty decent.

Incidentally I'm a contributor to Pencil. If you've visited the forums, I'm that Oluseyi as well (it's my real name, and I just use it everywhere). In fact, I'm committing changes to SVN in my Terminal window right now in between posts on GDNet. [smile] Pencil is a great piece of software, but it's got a long way to go before it can really meet the needs of animators, and it's also opinionated and tuned for a traditional process. If you're not a traditional animator, it can be a little bit confusing. Glad to know you like it, though.

If you can show successive frames from a sequence you're unhappy with, I can probably give you some useful feedback.

Good luck animating!