Have you 3D generated, or drawn, lots of single frame images? Are you wondering how the #$?%# you can create a nice sprite sheet with those images?
The only usefull (windows) tool I could find on the net is SpriteStrip Composer, a .NET application (download it here) developed by a member for the XNA framework. I does some good work but, when you want to specify the column count you want to set for your sprite sheet, you will be dissapointed.
So .. seeking an online tool ? Well … seek no further …
Makeyourflashgame.com just finished a tool that can merge a range of single frames into a single spritesheet. That spritesheet can be used in your games and with engines like for example the open source Push Button Flash game engine.
!IMPORTANT Workspace is still in BETA, so be sure to join the beta program.
You will find this tool in your makeyourflashgame.com workspace under ‘sprite sheets’ and it is called [create new sprite sheet].
After clicking the [create new sprite sheet] button, you can select multiple frame images for upload. In the example , I am creating a ‘multi-directional’ sprite sheet out of 120 frames. The frames were rendered using the open source 3D program Blender 2.5
After all files are uploaded to the makeyourflashgame.com website, you can input some sprite sheet data, like name, visibility and , very important, the number of columns your spritesheet should have. In my case 15, because I have a 15 frame animation with 8 directions ( 15 x 8 cells ).
Pressing the [Create] button will start the merging process.
After the merging is finished you have your sprite sheet all made up in your makeyourflashgame.com workspace.
Just set the animation type, click the [Edit animation] button and your directional animation is ready to take off. You can control the direction by using your mouse while the left mouse button is pressed.
And if you would be a PBE actionscript developer, you could even save some time and generate the PBE source code for this animation. You can see how that works in this post.
!IMPORTANT Workspace is still in BETA, so be sure to join the beta program.