Turning a sprite
Sides, elevation, and which angle fits which genre.
The Rotate bench takes one drawing and returns it seen from other sides — One view, Four sides, or Eight sides — laid out on the compass ring where those sides actually are. Four sides is the default, and not by accident: front, left, back and right are exactly the four drawings an animation takes as input.
What to feed it
One character, on a plain or transparent background — an upload (PNG, JPG or WebP) or anything from your parts bin. Two properties of the input matter more than anything you can set:
It should face the viewer. The side names — front, left, back — are measured from a character looking straight out of the screen. Nothing checks this: rotate a drawing that faces sideways and every file still arrives, every name still reads correctly, and every side is wrong by a quarter turn. If the character came from the Sprite bench, ask for "front view" in its description.
Its camera angle matters. The Elevation slider can redraw the views from a different height than the drawing was made at — but the further the output camera strays from the drawing's own, the less consistent the set tends to come back. The reliable path is a sprite drawn at the perspective your game uses, rotated at the matching elevation.
Elevation
The Elevation slider (−90° to 90°, default 0°) is the camera the finished views are drawn at — where the generator is asked to stand, not a description of your drawing. Set it to the camera your game uses:
| Your game | Elevation |
|---|---|
| Side-scrolling platformer | 0° — eye level |
| Isometric | around 60° — the angle most isometric games draw at |
| Straight top-down | 90° — directly above |
Negative values look up at the character from below — rarely what a game wants, occasionally exactly what a boss intro needs.
If the sprite was drawn for a particular camera, keep the elevation consistent with it: a three-quarter sprite rotated at 0° comes back drawn from eye level, and the set will not sit together in the engine.
Reading the ring
Sides are named for where the character faces on screen: left is the
sprite that walks left across the screen. This deliberately disagrees with
"where the camera stood", and it is the convention every file name and
folder uses, so an animation's left frames are the ones to play while the
character moves left.
Each side downloads as its own transparent PNG, or all of them together as one zip.