Sprite sheet adjustment tool

Now as most will know, I am no artist and I even find it difficult to navigate my way around a simple program such as the Gimp. This generally isn’t a problem, except when I have received sprite sheets that are incorrectly rotated and I have attempted to do this manually, which takes ages, or I can always get the artist to do them – whether this is as much work as it takes for me, I don’t know.

Anyways, not wanting to put people unnecessarily out and having limited time to be messing about with images, especially in a recent situation where I am working on a simple c++ project using SDL, which doesn’t support rotation (yes, I know there is SDL_gfx, but it wasn’t suitable for the situation). I have eight spritesheets of two rows by six columns, therefore 12 frames per sheet and a total of 84 frames rotated (each sheet to face in one of four directions – up(this I already have), right, down & up)! I could always have just rotated the whole image, but then if I rotated either 90 or 270 degrees, I would have a totally different sized sheet, being six rows by two columns and would have to adjust my code to store all the extra parameters and well, it would just start getting messy.

To sort out this issue, I came up with a quick tool to dissect the spritesheets, rotate each individual image and put them back together. This tool also allows for changing the rows and columns of the sheet, so for instance a six by two can be changed to a four by three or a 12 by one etc.

Here’s a screenshot of what I can up with:

Sprite sheet adjustment tool

I like to think the whole think is fairly self explanatory, but then I would as I wrote it. Here’s a description of each of the fields:

  • Spritesheet – enter the name of the source spritesheet here, or browse for it using the button.
  • H Frames – the number of horizontal frames (columns) in the source spritesheet.
  • V Frames – the number of vertical frames (rows) in the source spritesheet.
  • Rotation – choose to rotate the sprite by any of the following degrees:

    • ->0
    ->90
    ->180
    ->270

  • Req. H Frames – the number of horizontal frames (columns) in the target spritesheet.
  • Req. V Frames – the number of vertical frames (rows) in the target spritesheet.
  • Process – starts the process.

    • Here’s the download: BBQImageTool

    If anyone finds this tool useful and uses it, please let me know.

    [edit]
    I thought that I would throw together an example…

    Original Image

    4x1Sheet

    1×4 sheet with 90 degrees rotation

    [/edit]

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    Mark, October 4th 2011 | Posted in Development, Tools