Pixel animation

Pick the motion

Export the sprite sheet

Bring a sprite, pick a motion and get a looping pixel art animation back in about 90 seconds.

Idle, walk, run, jump, attack, hurt, death. Seven actions ready to go, or describe your own.

A looping GIF, a packed sheet, or a JSON atlas that drops straight into Godot, Unity and Phaser.

Animate a sprite

How pixel animation actually works

Four steps from one still sprite to a finished pixel art animation.

  1. Start with one sprite

    A single still frame, anywhere from 32x32 up to 256x256. Upload a PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF, or pick something you already made here.

  2. Pick the motion

    Type what the sprite should do, or take one of the seven presets. Idle, walk, jump, run, attack, hurt and death. The presets are tuned prompts rather than bare instructions, so they land more reliably than the same word typed by hand. Free-text motion needs a plan.

    hovering in place, wings beating, tail flicking
    8 framesAnimate16

  3. The frames come back drawn

    Holding a character on-model across eight poses is the hard part of animating pixel art and it is what the model was trained to do. Each frame returns at the source sprite's own resolution, quantised to the palette it arrived with.

  4. It plays as a loop

    Eight frames is the default and the sweet spot, four to sixteen the range. The character in frame eight is the character you drew in frame one.

Frame counts, action by action

Frame count is the setting people get wrong. Too few and the motion stutters, too many and you pay for frames nobody notices at this resolution. Here is what each action actually needs.

4 frames
Idle

The breathing loop a character sits in when nothing is happening. Tiny movement, and it does more than any other animation. A frozen sprite reads as a bug. An idling one reads as alive.

8 frames
Walk

Legs alternating at a steady pace, ending exactly where it started so nothing jumps when it repeats. Eight is the standard count because it gives each leg four frames of its own.

6 frames
Attack

Most of the frames go on the wind-up and one or two on the strike. The pause before the hit is what sells the weight, which is the thing people get wrong when they animate it by hand.

8 frames
Death

The one that plays once and stops. Give it more frames than anything else, because it is the only animation a player ever watches all the way through.

Getting it into a game

Five ways out. A PNG, a looping pixel art GIF, a sprite sheet, a ZIP of separate frames, or a sheet with a JSON atlas. Take whichever one your engine already reads and skip the slicing.

Godot

The SpriteFrames editor slices a sheet by rows and columns. Export with zero padding and the grid lines up on the first try.

Unity

Set the sheet to Multiple, then slice by cell size in the Sprite Editor. The cell size is your sprite's own resolution.

GameMaker

Import the sheet as a strip and GameMaker splits it into sub-images at your frame width, in order, ready to play.

Phaser

The JSON is Phaser's own hash format, so load.atlas reads it straight off disk. Frame durations come along with it.

PixiJS

Pixi's Spritesheet parser reads the same JSON. TexturePacker opens it too if you want to repack alongside other art.

Aseprite

Open the numbered PNGs as a sequence to get a real timeline you can retouch frame by frame.

Pixel art animations made here

Every loop below started as one still sprite. No rigging, no keyframes, no frame-by-frame redraw.

Animate a sprite

Pixel animation questions

The things people ask before they start.

Frame by frame. You redraw the character in each pose and play the poses in sequence, because pixel art is too low-resolution for rigging or tweening to do anything useful. A walk cycle is normally 4 to 8 frames, an idle is 2 to 4 and an attack is 4 to 6. Here you skip the redrawing. Give it a sprite and an action and the frames get generated for you in about 90 seconds.

Yes and this is one of them. The model takes a single still sprite and generates the in-between poses, then the result is quantised back to the source sprite's palette so the character does not shift colour or detail between frames. It is not a video model upscaled down. It outputs real pixel grid frames at your sprite's native resolution.

One sprite, between 32x32 and 256x256 pixels. Upload a PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF, or pick something you already made on this site. If you do not have a sprite yet, generate one with the AI sprite generator first and it lands in your library ready to animate.

Eight is the default here and the right answer most of the time. Four is enough for an idle or a hurt reaction and going past twelve rarely reads as smoother at low resolution, it just costs more. The frame count runs 4 to 16 in steps of two. If you are matching an existing character, use the same count as the animations you already have so everything plays at one speed.

Seven are ready to pick. Idle, walk, jump, run, attack, hurt and death. Each one is a tuned prompt behind the scenes rather than a generic instruction, which is why they land more reliably than typing the same word yourself. Custom motion is a text field where you describe whatever you want and that one needs a paid plan.

Five formats. A pixel art GIF, a sprite sheet PNG with adjustable columns, padding and scale, a ZIP of every frame as a separate PNG, a single frame on its own, or a sprite sheet packaged with a JSON atlas. The atlas is a Phaser-format hash with per-frame coordinates and durations, which Godot, Pixi and TexturePacker also read. All exports are transparent-background and alpha-bled so they do not fringe in an engine.

Yes. The GIF export writes every frame at your sprite's own resolution with the transparency preserved, so a pixel art GIF drops onto any background without a white box behind it. It loops by default at the playback speed you saw in the tool. Use it for a portfolio, an itch.io page or a Discord post. For anything going into a game, take the sprite sheet instead.

Around 90 seconds per animation. You can close the tab while it runs and it still finishes, the result shows up in your library either way.

Yes, on a paid plan. Creator, Studio and Production all include a full commercial license, so an animation you generate is yours to ship in a game you sell and we claim no ownership of it. The free tier is there to try the tool rather than to ship with.

Yes, to a point. The free tier is 15 generations with no card, and another 10 for joining the Discord. That covers the seven preset actions. Writing your own custom motion prompt needs a plan, from $8 a month.

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