Ripping Sprite Sheets and fitting them to work as surfaces

[SupersonicXX9 216]

Hi there everyone, I'd like to teach you a bit about ripping sprites for Mine-imator use, and how to make every sprite have the same general position on the image, so that you can use image swapping with surfaces MUCH easier with sprite sheets that use variable Width and Height. If you can find a way to do the Photoshop portion of it in programs such as GIMP and Paint.net, PM me and I'll add it to the post, okay?

Step 1: Going the easy route.

Okay, so. Ripping sprites manually would take quite a while, and would be a painstaking process, so I'll introduce a program (that is free and open source) that allows you to rip the sprites and export them into a folder. Introducing, Alferd Spritesheet Unpacker. http://www.alferdspritesheetunpacker.forkandbeard.co.uk/ This is the program we'll be using to rip sprites from the sprite sheet of your choosing. It'll speed up the process by a lot, trust me. I'm gonna use the worst case scenario for this tutorial, so that you know how to dig yourself out of this situation. It'll be an easy fix, usually. You could even do this part with MS Paint if you wanted to.

Step 2: Choosing a Sprite Sheet.

Alright, here's the easy part. You just need to find a sprite sheet, I'll give you a couple links. First, there's Sprites INC, which is a site dedicated to Megaman, of course I don't see many people using this, but it might still be useful to some so I might as well link it. http://www.sprites-inc.co.uk/ And then, my personal favorite site, The Spriters Resource! You can find a vast amount of game sprite rips here, very useful indeed. http://www.spriters-resource.com/ I'm gonna go with a sprite sheet I practiced the process on, which is a shovel knight sheet I found on Spriter's Resource. This sheet is what I meant by worst case scenario. It has two background colors, one for the animation's boundary and one for empty space. We don't want that, but it's an easy fix. If you want something hard to fix, have fun with a JPEG. You'll hate it. http://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/shovelknight/sheet/67117/

Step 2.5: Fixing the Background.

I'm telling you now, this is an easy fix. And I mean EASY. You grab the lime green (in this situation) color and fill the darker background green with it. On photoshop, you need, and I mean NEED to turn off Anti Alias on your bucket tool. Figured that out the hard way. Save the image as a new PNG (or overwrite the old one if that's what you want to do.) That's that part done, now let's use Alferd!

Step 3: Ripping the Sprites with ASU

Alright, so now that you've got those first 2.5 steps done, you can move on to using ASU (Alferd Spritesheet Unpacker). This is possibly the easiest part, besides choosing a sprite sheet. You start up ASU, and you will be greeted with this.

The next step would be to drag the selected sprite sheet (with the solid background) into Alferd. In my example, the next thing you see is it saying Unpacking.. and then you're greeted with this.

At this point, you're not ready to export. Because if you scroll down...

you'll probably find frames that aren't properly mapped, so they end up being one large frame instead of 3 frames in this situation. If this happens to you, go into Options and turn the distance between frames down. You'll find that it separates, but sometimes it can lead to another problem, which is a sprite splitting from the rest of itself. This example doesn't have that, and in this example you have to turn down distance between frames to 1. Fiddle with it on your sprite sheet to get the right option. If you need to combine pieces that split, you can left click on two (or more) pieces and click combine selected. Next thing after you've got the sprites separated correctly is press Select All, and then press Export Selected. You select a folder and then BAM. You've got your sprites. They're not squares though, most likely, and they're likely not aligned properly either. I'll show you how to deal with that, without it being a thorn in your side.

Step 4: Resizing in Bulk.

Oh boy, here's where photoshop comes in. First thing you'll want to press, if using CS6, is Alt+F9. This brings up the action menu, which has two familiar buttons in it, which would be seen in normally in the layers section. Add Folder, and Add Action (which would be add layer on the layers section.)

First thing you might want to do here is hit the folder button if you want it to be organized, but if you want to make a new action without making a folder feel free. After you hit the New Action button, and name it whatever, resize, canvas size, whatever. Next thing you'll want to do is open one of the sprites, and once you open it, hit that record button. After that, you go move your little cursor over to image, and select canvas size. Make sure it aligns to the middle, and up the canvas size quite a bit (Make it a binary number. I use 256 now. I figured this out the hard way). This will keep the sprite centered. You still might have to fiddle in the animation, but that's fine.

After you change the canvas size, hit the stop button. The actions menu will save all of the settings on the action, and you're ready to move on to the next part of this step. You'll want to go to File>Automate>Batch.

(this is a shared computer so it's not gonna have my name :I ) You'll want to change the action to what you named the canvas size action, and then you'll have to make sure the source and destination are set to folder, Source being the folder of images you want to apply the actions to, which should be where you exported your sprites from ASU, Destination being where you want the new files to be located. You'll hit Choose.. to set the folder on both of them, and then you hit OK.

My settings for it look like this. Photoshop, after you press OK, you'll see it start loading the images from the folder you exported your sprites to, and it'll start making progress automatically. Once it stops loading images and changing them, then closing them, you'll see in the folder that all of the sprites are ready. You can start using them in Mine-imator now.

Hope this helps anyone that wants to animate with sprites in Mine-Imator. Have fun!

Edited July 20, 2015 by SupersonicXX9
Making sure people don't have a screwup. Like me.