Cutout Animation Tools - Documentation

This is the Documentation for the Blender/Godot Addon Cutout Animation Tools.

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Description

The Cutout Animation Tools (COA Tools) Addon for blender is a 2D rigging and animation suite. It offers you similar tools as for example programs like Spine or Spriter. COA Tools offer you a rapid workflow to create 2D Cutout Character/Animations in blender. Thanks to blenders great animation system and and this addon you get a powerfull solution to create 2D animations. It is parted into 3 different components. Photoshop sprite exporter, Blender Addon, Godot importer.

Take a look at the addon in action.

Photoshop sprite exporter

Quickly export photoshop layers into separate files with json coordinate informations. This can be used in blender to import sprites very quickly. Features:

export layers as sprites
export folder with multiple layers as spritesheets
generate json data with all layer positions and spritesheet informations

GIMP sprite exporter

Export GIMP layers and layer groups into separate files with json coordinate information. For additional usage information see the README.md in the GIMP folder.

Cutout Animation Tools Blender

This is the biggest component, as most of the work will be done here. Features the addon offers are:

sprite importer (import single sprites or multiple, or use json data as import information)
animated spritesheet support for meshes
armature editing - superfast bone creation tool. Just draw bones and click append sprites to bones
mesh editing - draw vertex countours and fill them quickly with tesselated mesh. filling also unwraps and maps texture data
weight editing - fast weight editing for tesselated meshes
fast ik and stretch to constraint generation
enhanced animation handling for sprite_objects
Spriteobject outliner -> displays all containing sprites, armatures with bones for better and quick access to single sprites
ortho cam operator -> generates an orthogonal camera which can be used to render animations. Camera resolution fits perfectly the pixel space of sprites
json export - > Exports all sprite_object data to a json file. Supported features are: Bone and Sprite hierarchy export. Baked animation export

Godot Cutout Animation Importer

This is an advanced importer that helps you get all your exported blender data into godot. Features:

Json importer
sprites, bones and animations get imported
clever reimport functionality. Offers the possibility to merge local changes that were made in godot to the newly imported scene. This enables a very flexible workflow. Work in blender, then export. Import in godot. Make additions like adding new nodes, adding custom animations. After reimport all local changes will be preserved if merging is enabled.

Download and Installation

Download or Clone the github repository to your local drive. If you download the ZIP File from Github, please make sure to unzip. Don't try to install the downloaded zip file directly in blender. This won't work. Once unzipped follow the installation instructions below.

Photoshop Exporter:

The .jsx file has to be copied into the photoshop scripts folder which is located in:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC 2015\Presets\Scripts

Don’t forget to restart Photoshop and then go to File -> Scripts -> BlenderExporter.jsx

GIMP Exporter:

The coatools_exporter.py should be copied to your GIMP plug-ins folder which is located in:

Linux: /home/YOU/.gimp2.8/plug-ins/
Windows: C:\Users\YOU.gimp2.8\plug-ins

It should show up under Files>Export to CoaTools... after your restart GIMP

Blender Addon:

Zip the coa_folder. Go to File -> User Preferences -> Add-ons and click the “Install from file...” button. This will install and enable the Addon for Blender. Don’t forget to save the user preferences, otherwise the addon will not be activated after restart.

Godot Importer:

Notice, this importer will only run with current godot 2.1 dev builds. Create an /addons folder in your game projects folder and copy the coa_importer folder into that addons folder. Once the files are loaded go to Project Settings -> Plugins -> Cutout Animation Importer and activate the Plugin.