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Many of the sprite sheets online have non-uniform sized rectangles as the animation frames and often use a portion of the image for credits, etc., this makes it hard for a game engine to correctly clip the sheets.

Is there any tool that can help you quickly define frames in a sheet, export animation data which the game engine would use?

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    \$\begingroup\$ Wow, I was thinking about asking this -exact- question about two weeks ago. \$\endgroup\$ – Lunin Aug 22 '11 at 22:28
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    \$\begingroup\$ There is a sprite sheet packer, but it generates spritesheets from raw frames. \$\endgroup\$ – Ali1S232 Aug 22 '11 at 22:31
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Dan7: If these tools help achieve what you want and therefore answer your question, you should post the links to these tools (and maybe a short description how you solved your problem) as an answer. They don't really belong to the question, unless you want to list them as "unusable" solutions to your problem. \$\endgroup\$ – bummzack Aug 23 '11 at 16:04
  • \$\begingroup\$ They are not exactly what I wanted though, they have their own "catch" when it comes to the approaches. But you are right I should move them to an answer. \$\endgroup\$ – Dan7 Aug 24 '11 at 12:27
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    \$\begingroup\$ Hey, I'm the creator of darkFunction Editor. It does exactly what you asked for (in fact specialises in animating non-uniform sprite sheets). Check out the Beta, it's very stable now. What are the 'catches' you are referring to? If there is anything missing please let me know and I can try to include it in the next release! :) \$\endgroup\$ – Sam Aug 24 '11 at 13:47
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[Moved from question body] Here's a list of what I've found by googling:

  • Sprite Vortex (http://spritevortex.codeplex.com/): It can auto-detect frames. There has been some crashes and is still buggy, otherwise it's a very good option. When you are exporting, make sure you click the root item instead of individual animation in the tree view to export all animation definitions.

  • darkFunction Editor (http://darkfunction.com/): By double-clicking a sprite, it will automatically make a frame. Still some manual work but works great so far.

  • Spritimator (http://www.google.com/search?q=spritimator&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t): Saw this used by a tutorial, but the author's webpage seems down at the moment.

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    \$\begingroup\$ darkFunction Editor isa really good tool. \$\endgroup\$ – Tony Jan 19 '14 at 13:45
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Usually such sprite sheets come with an additional file with coordinates for the packed frames (some might even be rotated). Extracting frames without these coordinates can really be a cumbersome task. Automating it would also be very hard to do, since a single sprite doesn't necessarily have a contiguous shape.

If the coordinates file is missing, I'd probably use the Photoshop Slice tool to mark individual frames and then you can export all slices at once by using "Save for Web & Devices".

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