Dragonbones (like spine but free)

dorobo, the export features are kind of odd, but you could export the image frame sequences and then composite them in another application to make the videos.

AFRLme, yeah, Spriter has a free version but like you said it has limitations, last time I used it it was a mess to work with since you don't (or didn't) get a proper fps output and ended up having either too fast or too slow animations. It also doesn't have mesh deformations, they say they are working on it for Spriter 2 but that seems to be a paid feature. I personally found Dragonbones to be far better to work with than Spriter.

I believe Spriter has mesh warping capabilites already, but only in paid version & in beta state. I know Spine has working mesh warp, but only in the pro version. The standard version of Spine is expensive enough!

Maybe Simon could eventually add support for multiple spritepart application runtimes & models - who knows!?

Is FPS really that important? In VS we tend to work with delay times in ms rather than FPS. Personally I prefer working with delay as I can specify the delay value for any given frame rather than having to rely on duplicated frames. In Game Maker Studio for example, I believe you have to specify defaut FPS of your game & then use duplicated frames to control the speed of your animations, though I'm not 100% certain as I've not used it much.

I've read in the Spriter forum people asking for mesh deformation and some mentions that it will be released in Spriter 2, I also dont remember seeing it listed in the current features so I'm guessing its still not a supported feature.

Spine would be the best of these applications, but at about $300 I'd go with the free one that in my opinion is in the second spot even with the flaws it may have.

Yeah, for me FPS is kind of important since I'm used to it, and if you need to work on animations for videos and cinematics you wouldn't export the output in an arbitrary way.

By the way, thanks for mentioning this, how does the delay per frame work in visionaire?, I mean, how do I set it on each frame?

There's an option in the properties tab (cog icon thing) for each animation, you know the bit where you set the global delay value. Just tick the option that says something along the lines of "set individual pause for each frame". Any frame that has a value of -1 will use the global delay value (this was added to 4.x) & any frame that has a value other than -1 will use that delay value for that particular frame. It's really useful for when you want to simulate speeding up / slowing down of movement or want to control the speed of an animation without having to resort to duplicating the same frame multiple times. All in all it allows you to optimize your animations better, meaning less frames needed = less hd space required & less loading time & probably less vram too.

By the way you can also simulate pendulum animation effect (play animation forwards > backwards - or vice versa, with a couple lines of Lua script). Actually can do a bit more than that as well. I've showed a few examples in the wiki before.

As for Spriter I know someone that uses it. Actually they posted a link on the pinboard (portal) section of this forum not long back about a competition being run by Spriter company. I'm pretty sure he said it was in pro version but it's classed as experimental as it's hard to use & if you mess up, you have to start from scratch. Actually maybe that's why they are saying it will be released with Spriter 2...

I've only had a passing glance at the 3 programs. Also had a look at anime studio pro ages back as well. I can see them being really useful for side-scrollers or static animations. They aren't that great when it comes to walk animations; especially those towards or away from the camera - though they might be more feasible with mesh warping!?

Ok, Cool!., i hadn't notice the box for it at the right in the timeline, and since one has to change windows to activate the option it wasn't obvious to spot it.

@Glenfx ye at least frame sequence works fine it's just that it makes alot of frames photoshop got clogged but i'll think of something

Take the exported frames & add them into any video editing application such as windows maker, camtasia studio or whatever. There's probably plenty of free / opensource ones out there that will probably do the job. I'm not very savvy on video stuff though to be honest. My strengths lean more towards audio & scripting.

P.S: remember that you shouldn't have to use duplicated frames, even in a video editing application as you should be able to specify the amount of time a specific frame / image should display for before showing the next one - well at least it let me do that in camtasia studio.