Easy way of Creating Image Strips by hand?

Bronco

Hey all,

my mate and myself have got ourselves an issue which I hope you fine people can help us out with.

Basically im looking into the possibility of creating image strips by hand (if he can't get a tool or figure out away of doing it programatically in XNA/C#), the problem is I don't really know the best way of going about it.

Basically I have around 1000 images of around 50 animation sets all with alpha channals (meaning I can't just set the canvas with the relavent grid size to snap them all directly into place.)

The current work flow would be to open each image set,create a canvas in photoshop and set the grid to relevant settings, flood fill each image in the animation set with an exstravagant colour (taking away the alpha problem) and copy and paste each image onto the canvas, move/snap into position and then when all images in the set are on the cnavas, merge visable then magic wand the exstravagent colour and clear it and crop as nessary leaving me with my perfect animimation strip.

This feels awefully long winded and the room for error is minimal due to the number of images involved, surily there is a better way?

Ive tried photoshop actions to speed up the flood fill,selection and paste to canvas but it kept getting its knickers in a twist.

As I said hopefully it won't come down to it but im just looking into it incase it does. *cries a little at the thought*

Regards,

John

UNCCheezy

I'm not quite sure what your problem is...Are you trying to make a large character sprite sheet from a bunch of individual pictures?

Bronco

hey UNCCheezy, thanks for the quick reply.

Yes that is correct.

Our actural problem we're looking to solve is loading time on the Xbox, theres several ways we can reduce loading which we havent implimented yet, however currently first time load on the XB is around 3 minutes...and we have around 1/3 of our overall content from the project in....this is oviously a major major problem for us, so we are looking at using animation strips to speed up the process, rather than having the box load in 1000+ images have it load only 50 bigger images....but the next problem is whats the best way of creating said strips.

thats what im investigating with this post.

Regards,

CheeseOnToast

I've got a freeware animstrip bulder at work. I'll pass it on to you tomorrow as I can't remember the name of it right now.

renderhjs

glueit supports alpha 8 bit channels and creates sprite sheets:
http://sysimage.250free.com/
Other tools that can create sprite sheets but that don't support 8bit alpha channels are xnView, Acdsee and there are also some photoshop scripts out there to do that kind of stuff.

Bronco

Many thanks guys.

Ill try that tool Renderhjs hopefully it will do what we need it to do.

COT ill PM you my email addy, can't have enough tools to help us in our work now can we .

Many thanks.

John

cw

If you're stil looking, I usually use

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html

The atlas tools

I use it to pack frames for animated textures for particle effects. We've used it for other atlasing for batch reasons as well. Works fine. Good luck.

Mark Dygert

renderhjs wrote: »

glueit supports alpha 8 bit channels and creates sprite sheets:
http://sysimage.250free.com/
Other tools that can create sprite sheets but that don't support 8bit alpha channels are xnView, Acdsee and there are also some photoshop scripts out there to do that kind of stuff.

Yep, I've used both and I prefer XnView (Shift+A) strip maker. It has some good features like: Horiz/Vert alignment, spacing, number of images per row, background color and ordering of images. Mix these features with its file re-naming tools and you've got a lot of great tools for this kind of stuff.

CheeseOnToast

Mailed you that animstrip builder. However, I just tried out the function in XnView that Vig posted above, and it's far superior. Handles a lot more file formats too.