Piskelapp - Making things easier

Piskelapp

http://www.piskelapp.com

Ryan: While creating the different enemies for our video I came across Piskelapp.  It allows you to create animated sprite gifs and export them out.  You can change the speed of each gif and add an unlimited amount of frames to your design.  We used this for the sprites as it would be easier to loop the animation on After Effects instead of adding in frame by frame.  Piskelapp is similar to Photoshop with the tools available to use.  It is easy to use and gives you full control of your work.  We imported our drawn up sprites on illustrator and animated them here.  Our sprites were drawn up 64x64 pixels.  Below is a screen shot of the Piskelapp interface.

Lavinia: When creating our enemies on illustrator, Ryan came across this site called Piskel For me and Ryan this was really handy to use because we didn't really know how to make our sprites into gifs, it allows you to adjust the speed and add as many frames as you want to use. It made things quicker for us and was a great tool to use. 

Created Sprite Brocolli

Below is one of the sprites I created.  This was drawn up on Illustrator and then imported. Here I could adjust the colours and shape if needed.  When adding the sprites to After Effects we will be be using a Linear Colour Key to remove the background of the gifs.  We couldn't leave them white as the eyes on our sprites would disappear and look weird.

When your gif has been created you can then preview it and go back and edit it if necessary.

With sprites drawn up you can save them in your gallery or download the files.  This was useful if something needed changed.

Using Piskelapp made things easier as Me and Lavinia don't have much experience with animation.  It really helped bring the project together. 

Looking at the screen shots, that Ryan took, shows step by step how the site works, you can easily share your work to the public on the site.