Let me say, I have no animation skills, and I thought that if I could use CTA, I might be able to create a passible animated video. So, I am using the latest trial version of CTA 3. This is not the first time I have tried CTA, but I have never been able to master it in the past. This time I was determined to learn to use CTA and not get discouraged by my incompetence. The ads say that it is the simplest animation program around and anyone can do it. I may be the exception to the rule.
At any rate, the sprite editor issue seems to be working now- I must have been doing something wrong before, don’t know what, however. I am on a MacBook Air – MacOS Mojave, Version 10.14.2.
I am trying to follow along with the video tutorial, ‘Character Creation with G3 Template’. I am trying to make a dog, so used the dog dummy. Today I was able to replace dummy with my dog picture in sprite editor. One miracle accomplished. However, moving to the bone editor, I could only accomplish moving a bone by locking all the bones except the ones I wanted to move. I was able to, more or less. move the bones using this method. But the little square boxes that show up on the video don't consistently show up for me when I try to move the bones., and I can’t figure out how to get them to appear. Also, there is no way I can move the bones as easily or precisely as in the tutorial. Again, I must be doing something fundamentally wrong, but I feel I have followed all the steps in the tutorial religiously. Nevertheless, as I said, I managed (with much difficulty) to get the bones in my picture approximately where they should be.
Next step, ‘sprite import’. Well this didn’t work at all. Even though I checked ‘keep parent transform’, my sprites came in enormous and, even if I reduced their size, they often popped up enlarged again because in order to keep them small, I had to R or L click on my mouse, and this was tenuous, because by trying to move the sprites to the correct position (which I couldn’t do), I often couldn’t keep the mouse depressed correctly. So total failure.
My thought about all of this, is that I don’t have Photoshop. So, although I created sprites (I actually created them in ‘Preview’ in my Mac) and saved them in PNG format, perhaps Photoshop is required to do many of these operations. But I didn’t want to invest in Photoshop, which I’m sure is way above my skill level, if I couldn’t use CTA. I apologize for this response, as I am sure it is much more information than you wanted to know.