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What good free and widely used tools are there for editing 2D skeletal animations? Preferably, one that allows me to write custom animation exporters.

One pretty good indie tool that I know of Demina, but it's not ideal. It doesn't allow you to export the data as you want (although, it is open source, so you can change that) and I find it clunky in how you edit individual joints.

What other tools would you recommend?

Tetrad
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Paul Manta
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  • Spine from EsotericSoftware looks pretty good: http://esotericsoftware.com – mcintyre321 Jun 12 '13 at 12:36
  • Blender is supposed to be very good at this as well. I'm in the process of researching this option for my own games. http://mmm.albinal.com/2d-in-blender-2-6-tutorial-part-1/ – user31796 Jun 12 '13 at 14:21

1 Answers1

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Personally I would just use a 3D tool and ignore one of the dimensions. Something like Maya is likely going to be a lot more robust than some custom tool just to do 2D animations.

There are a handful of games that I've worked on and that I know about that have used this approach. As an example, here's an article that talks about Zombieville USA (iOS game) and how they do it. http://www.thecareergamer.com/braaaains-zombieville-usa-tech-review/ Scroll down to the first picture to see what they're doing.

Tetrad
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