Hi Everyone, this is Callan here. Most of you know me as frozenMeatpopsicle from the MSPA forums or pesterchum. I'm gonna go through the process for how I make and prepare the character sprites. This is so when thing finally get cracking and I need people to help me, it means I can pass off art to be inbetweened and/or colored and it can hopefully be a smooth transition between artists.
Alrighty. Before I get into it I should let you know what programs I'm using. For animating I'm currently using Adobe Flash CS3. I haven't had a need to upgrade to any newer version yet(no essential new features, new versions are less stable), but I have feeling I might have to upgrade as I imagine more of you are using new versions and they can only save 1 version back.
For coloring and final exporting I'm using an excellent little app called GraphicsGale. Since it's built from the ground up for spriting, it has a whole bunch of features sprite animators should love. Fortunately most are irrelevant to us since I'm only putting a guide on how to color and export together. The most important one to note is the excellent native support for indexed sprites and palettes.
You can download a shareware version of GraphicsGale here. The only relevant restriction of the shareware version is that you can't save out to .GIF's. A way around this is to simply use the native .GAL files(which are kinda like animated .PSD's) and pass them around. If we need GIF's we can simply have someone who has the registered version export it out.
Anyway, onto the tutorials. I've split it into 2 sections. The animation section will cover a small crash course for animation which is split into entirely optional sub-sections. The most important part of the tutorial is exporting out from Flash so you can smoothly open stuff up in GraphicsGale or other programs to ink and color everything.
The coloring section will also be split into multiple sections. In this case, 3. One will cover importing stuff straight from the animation section into GraphicsGale, another will cover methods for coloring that can work for multiple programs. For those that want to use GraphicsGale, the last will cover the process for importing colored animations that were made in other programs and prepare finished animations for exporting.