Now this is a pretty cool tool from the group 2D Spritor. The new toolset allows you to create, customize and animate characters in 3D but then transform them into pixelated characters.

If you need help animating characters for your game, 2D Spritor has been designed to make that process as painless and as efficient as possible.

You can choose the settings and presets for the character, assign them the kind of animations you want, and then export the animations as 2D sprites for your game. You can get an idea of what the toolset looks like in action with the video below.

As you can see, it’s very similar to Smith Micro Software’s Poser tool suite. With 2D Spritor, however, the core design is centered around customization and animation purely for exporting for a 2D workflow pipeline.

The video reveals that you can alter a character’s head, eyes, ears, mouth, face shape, belly, breast, chest, legs, feet, skin color, gender, and body types that range from exo-skeletons and zombies to faeries, goblins and aliens.

After you get done customizing your character, you can then animate them by choosing their kinetic movements, animation speed and the animation types.

When you get done creating and customizing the character, you can then export them using the simple sliders to choose the scale of the character and how pixelated they are. You can also choose which angle you want, whether it’s classic side-scrolling, isometric in the ¾ view, or top-down. After choosing the basics you can then export the animations and you’re good to go, making the animation process a heck of a lot easier than manually hand-drawing your character’s movement.

This is likely a great tool if you need to create a bunch of NPCs for your game with different visual characteristics or aesthetics but you don’t want to have to manually animate them all.

You can learn more about 2D Spritor or download the alpha by visiting the official website.