v.2.0 Tutorial

Ok, so.... it's pretty much a puppet tool from After Effects, but a bit more 'RAW' and made for pixel sprites, so don't expect to do anything bigger than 128x128... tbh I use it for 64x64 and it is pretty nice, I do 16 frames mostly.

To get a sprite, I actually use my other tool: GAC - 'Game Assets Creator' https://2b1r.itch.io/gac : I upload an image, clear it up and download it as 64x64 sprite and straight to animating with this puppet tool)

So there are a few techniques to use puppet pins, but generally you do 'outside mesh' and 'inside points of interest'. And a lot of times: less is more.

You have 2 options: work with master keyframes or work with individual pins; Master creates keyframes for EVERY pin, while individual pins only for themselves; I would suggest to work with Master ones, because it's simpler and idk how many people have much experience with puppet tool in AE, so this might be hard to understand even with Master;

You have option to upload Key Images: those you can change on a specific frame, if you want to change the original image back, just upload the original image once more into Key Images and set the frame to be 'after' (larger number). Key Images are also a way to replace the image, while keeping all pins and animation (if you have jumping animation, you just upload new Key Image so now a different sprite has jumping animation applied, but I usually found myself designing every animation from scratch, because well... pin locations do matter);

You can also scale the image and rotate it by cleverly manipulating pins: to scale up, you will have to zoom out and then move pins out the box.

Be mindful of the toggle with 'chains' on the top: 'Toggle Keep Mesh', when it toggled: the way your sprite is attached to mesh will be saved and will not be changed, when untoggled, it will try it best to keep optimal triangles;

Overall you can do pretty much anything... because it is morphing type tool and you pick what to morph and pixels will be 'stretched' in a nice way to fill the gap;

After that you can bake the animation, play with different FPS to see how it looks: I would recommend using sprite sheets, because they are more flexible than GIF files, but if you want a simple export, gif is the way.

Pixel editor if you want to clean up some of the stuff and hand draw additional animations, I would recommend to just clean up outer alpha and export, and then create a 'new sprite' of the size you've been working with and upload new 'background' by pressing 'up arrow', upload the sprite sheet you just exported, set frames to your amount (16 by default) and it will make the previous sprite sheet as your background animation, so you can start drawing on top and not mess up your initial animation... (I know a weird way to setup layers, but then I was thinking, how do I create exports? for every layer, how many layers and how convoluted UI will become)

There might be a problem that you now cannot export a GIF with transparent background when you are using BG layer... but you just export PNG sprite with background, reimport it and render it as GIF (having sprite sheets is really good and very customizable, trust... it's just a png image after all)

[I would need to look more into how GIF is generated, the one I have is a 'renderer' I found on github from 9 years ago, it seems to be not perfect in a lot of cases...]

So with Morphing + ability to hand draw your pixels.. I think there is nothing you can't do.. if you want more concrete editing of sprites, probably Aseprite is still your bet, but I like simplicity of this one: I work with animations for over 15 years now, so.... it seems useful to and fun to use to me, I did those small animations on this page in like... 15-30 minutes so I'm not complaining)

I think that's it... cheers...