Spriter Pro Reviews

Doesn't work on Linux. Crashes to desktop immediately after opening. I reported the issue years ago in the forums but the devs haven't fixed the problem. Tried again in Sept 2020. The problem persists.

If I'm being honest, I feel as though I've wasted my money on this program. I'd hoped that the bugs and where it lacks would be fixed by buying the pro version, but that wasn't the case. In reality, I encounter bugs anywhere and everywhere in this program, rendering its functionality sort of on the low side. The one advantage I find is its smooth tweening, and that's about it.

Animating used to be tedious, Now it's still tedious but at least i only have to draw 15 images and pose a character instead of re-drawing the character for 100 poses. 10/10 would be lazy again.

I am by no means a professional artist/designer/anything in particular, and in the past have only used design software as a hobby. I have no real technical knowledge, and have only dubiously poked at animation software/sprite design in the past. For this reason I can only review this as a casual user, and can't speak for anyone representing large game projects. Despite being a newbie in regards to this, it must be said that this software is excellent - it is fairly intuitive to use (granted, I still have a lot to learn), and there are countless tutorials available that are relatively simple to follow. It's been great to have the freedom to import sprite puppets from external software (in my case, opencanvas), and thus far it's been quite enjoyable to bring concept characters to life. This software is fun, I heartily recommend it for anyone wanting to dabble in it as a hobby, too.

Very nice program! I can make many sprites in no time, especially for in game store items that need same animation. I'm not an animator and newbie graphic artist, but this program make all things easy. And the price is reasonable for an good program. Looking for new feature that developer mention in youtube now.

READ BEFORE BUYING AFTER MY POSITIVE REVIEW!!! Okay, lets start by telling that Spriter Pro is a nice program that allows you to make your animations that you can import into various engines (including Unity3D, which is why I bought it myself). It takes a bit to get used to Spriter Pro, and before you know what bugs and glitches are there and how to work around them. But the result are smoot animations for your game engine. Bugs/glitches I have found: [list] [*][strike]The program is full of shortkeys you can use (CTRL-C / CTRL-V to copy/paste just to name one), but they do not work. Instead you have to use the program's pulldown menu.[/strike] [b]*SOLVED*[/b] after an update [*][strike]Duplicating bones is not possible. This means you have to create each and every bone before you place them to the right position. This means that for a spider you have to make 16 bones instead of 2 and duplicate them 8 times.[/strike] [b]*SOLVED*[/b] [*][strike]Speaking of bones, the moment you have linked a sprite to a bone, you can not remove this link to correct the bone position. Whatever you do with the bone (resizing, moving or rotating) happens to the sprite. Oddly enough, you can move the sprite without influencing the bone. The work around I have found for this is move the sprite to an other bone and then modify the bone as I wish.[/strike] [b]*SOLVED*[/b] [*][strike]So far I haven't found an option to 'lock' a part of my animation in place while the rest of the animation flows. You have to set that same animation again on the spot where you want to add other animation options. As mentioned above, copy/pase is not working here, so it's manual labour.[/strike] [b]*SOLVED*[/b] [*]From time to time when you're working on your bones, sprites and bones just glitch away from the hierarchy. You have to click around on random parts to get them back. [b]According to author I'm the only one with this problem[/b] [/list] As said, I like the program, and knowing these bugs/glitches it can be a very good tool. Honestly, I don't think it's worth the full price asked on Steam right now and I'm glad I bought it during the Steam winter sale.

I don't usually make reviews, besides for joking around, but this is a really bad program, and you're better off spending your $60 on any other program. What it never listed was that none of the runtime packages were included on base install, forcing me to go to the discussion to download the correct package to even get the software running, and upon using the program for making animations in my game, it would crash upon the most simple of tasks, or generally run slow, taking all of my computer resources to even get 4 sprites to move, I don't have a potato PC either, as I can often run AAA games on decently high settings with no major losses in framerate. Alongside this, the animation tools are extremely trash, not only is the timeline extremely frustrating to use, unable to even move the scrubber half the time, but I would have windows I didn't click on pop up, with Audio for syncing animations just playing upon doing anything in the program, forcing me to listen to the same 1 minute long audio until it cut itself off with another play, or crashing. This program also doesn't include any Onion Skin option, forcing me to make jank ass movements blindly with really bad tweening functions. Bone tools didn't help at all either, as there's no indication to tell what the bone is actually connected to, besides for the worlds' biggest menu with no option to hide sprites, sure it shows you a line, but I don't understand how to change the layers of them, and I don't want to read a long ass help menu that could've been fixed by just letting me switch where the bones lie. I was also expecting, due to literally every animation program I've ever used having this "feature", to open a windows explorer menu to add sprites to the program, however, you have to add them to the project folder, and restart the project file to update sprites, forcing me to clone all of my game's assets to this one folder, instead of letting me use the folder I have containing the high quality archives of all my sprites. This program is by far one of the worst tools for animating I've ever used, and I'm better off using Microsoft Paint to animate sprites, "animated with the powerful, yet easy to use toolset" is really bad false advertising, as it's nothing similar to other animation programs that makes sense and it can barely handle more than 4 sprites at the scalings of around 500x500p.

great idea overall but, 1. No 2D Mesh, can't rig one single layer The fact that you can't rig multiple bones into one single layer really turn me down. every modern 2D skeletal animation tools or software have this feature and it doesn't exist here. 2. Experimental Deformation this feature is really good on paper but the implementation is very buggy and since its experimental mean no support or help center for this feature. 3. Clunky and bad sprite sheets export i actually like how they implement export the animation to sprite sheets feature, but the auto export feature doesn't care about the canvas size. It doesn't care about compression in game engine, so if you want to make the sprite sheets have compression support like DXT1 or DXT5 you need to measure the size manually from their editor and everytime you exit the exporter menu, the value that you input gone.

Way too many bugs appears when you start to go deeper in the engine Unless you get it for at 50% off, do not waste your money with this below average software Try DragonBones, it's better and free Also the developers pretty much gave up on this software.

I have zero experience in animation. Let me state that first. I am still working on playing with the program, but the great thing is, the staff is really responsive, and will go well out of their way to help you out. I had some issues at first, but within 5 minutes, they explained some basics to me, that will allow me to move on. So far the "help" option in the software helps you out a ton getting started, and explaining alot of to you. Follow that by watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t__eWKEMadE "that is a basic tutorial" and it should be a great way to get you started.