Animate a Sprite from Video

This raccoon never learned that kick, he copied it from a video, and here is how to animate a sprite from a video with AI, from the clip to the game.

This is Ludo's Sprite Generator on ludo.ai, and Transfer Motion is one of its six modes.

It takes a sprite and a short clip of a move, and puts that move on the sprite.

The sprite is one character on a transparent background, with a pose close to the clip's start, facing the same way.

A good reference is a short clip with one clear move, the subject clearly separated from the background, the whole body in frame and a steady camera.

The clip can be your own footage or one made in a video generator, as long as it shows that one move.

Then trim the clip to just the move, since a longer clip gets squeezed into the animation, and up to four seconds works best.

Back in Transfer Motion, Reference Animation takes a motion preset with Presets, or a video with Choose Video, and here it is the kick.

Step 2 is optional, and one plain sentence describing the motion is enough, like a strong front kick.

Hydra is the model for your own footage, one of four, and Max duration runs from three to five seconds, so three for this clip.

Animation Margin is Auto, Manual or No margin, and Manual gives Horizontal and Vertical sliders, so a wide kick gets forty percent horizontally and five vertically.

Under Sprite Sheet Options, Max Frames offers seven counts, and we take thirty six, while Sprite Size stays on Max, the full resolution.

Loop Animation trims the sheet to its best loop, so we switch it off for a one-shot kick, and then we press Transfer Motion.

Back comes a sprite sheet on a transparent background, thirty six frames in a six by six grid, with the kick playing in the viewer.

Now check the frames: the kick goes the way he faces, the whole body stays inside every cell, and it is the same raccoon in every frame, so the sheet is ready for the game.

The same steps work for any move: a punch from a pixel art robot, a jump from an anime fox girl, and a walk from a paper cutout cat with Loop Animation on.

The result's menu has downloads like Sprite Sheet, All Frames and Sheet and JSON, and for a game the Sprite Sheet is the PNG grid, with its frame count, rows and columns in the file name.

To export several animations together, choose Export, then Animation Pack, tick your sheets, continue, and export, and every sheet gets one frame size and a shared ground line.

In Godot 4, an AnimatedSprite2D takes the sheet through Add frames from a Sprite Sheet, with Horizontal and Vertical at six and six, and a speed of frames divided by seconds, about thirteen for this kick.

Then call play with kick on the button press, return to idle when animation finished fires, and use the pack's Global Ground Offset to keep his feet on the floor.