In this tutorial will present you a quick 2D animation demo of how to make a 2D animation using the opacity feature in Marionette Studio animation software.

What is image opacity?

First of all, I would like to explain you what image opacity is. It mainly refers to image transparency which means that part of the image you are working with is invisible. Raster file formats that support transparency include GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, and JPEG 2000. In this tutorial we will refer to using PNG files only.

Create a quick 2D animation in only 2 minutes

You can start your work by importing your predefined character. When selected, on the right hand area image properties will be displayed. Here the image opacity can be customized. I will set the image opacity at 0.53.

Next, create bones for every part of the body by clicking and dragging the bones with the mouse. Also, you have to set the parent bone and its child. So when you move one of the bones, all the children will move too. For a easier identification of the bones you can change their color and their name.

Once we have created the skeleton we can move to image import step. This involves importing the game character assets into the workspace and rebuild the character by dragging the images to their corresponding positions. Moving to the rigging step, now we need to actually link the bones to the images we want to control during animation.

After all these steps we can start animating our character. Animating with marionette Studio involves only 4 quick steps:

• Import images into workspace.
• Create bones for your character and rig them to images.
• Set some keyframes for your animation in the timeline.
• Export your animation in game ready formats.

Finally, don’t forget to save all your work!