Hi, I’m trying to decide what animation software to use with cocos2d-x? Most of the artwork of my games is made with Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop, so Flash would be easy to use to animate those sprites, but it can only export in spritesheets(that are not good in some situations) or use another tool for conversion. I haven’t tried Spine yet, but it looks promising(and not very expensive) and it is also integrated with cocos as far as I know.So:
Performance wise: wich one of these two works better(higher framerate).
Does Spine also work with the JS version, for exporting to web?
Are there other similar tools that work with both the mobile c++ and html5 js version?
Spine works very well. We also use TexturePacker spritesheets to organize the output from Illustrator and Photoshop for performance and loading / unloading logic.
If your animations are already done in photoshop frame by frame, you can assemble them in TexturePacker and use an animated sprite with frames to render them. Spine gives you a great skeleton based tool to generate the animations from smaller pieces of artwork.
We have one animator who works in Flash, so we use DragonBones to convert those to Armatures; the downfall being that the bones don’t really transfer properly. We’ve recently started using CocosStudio 1.6.0 (on Windows through VMWare) to use the Animation editor, it’s not as intuitive or feature rich as Spine, but it’s free and fully integrated in Cocos2dx. My issue with Spine is the perpetual enterprise license that needs be maintained as long as the app is for sale, which makes using it for client work a bit tricky. I guess that’s a “mo’ money, mo’ problems” issue.
Thanks for the answers guys. hawkwood, I was also taking into account CocosStudio, and i think the features that it has until now would be enough for me. I don’t really understand why you need the enterprise license for spine, why would a PRO license be insufficient?
My understanding is that the “enterprise” license is required based on your company (or the publishing company’s) gross revenue (income), and extends to requiring said license to be active (it’s an annual subscription) as long as the app using the Spine runtime is being distributed, even if you aren’t activity using the Spine editing software anymore; Unity doesn’t even require that.
Didn’t know anything about Super Animation, but it looks good, and it has the advantage that I can easily port my old flash games’ animations using this tool. I’ll sure give it a try, thanks for the hint
