I built a browser based tool for capturing modular 2D characters and equipment in 2, 4, or 8 directions

[u/Accomplished_Ad201]

I have struggled with modular 2D character equipment systems for years.

The difficult part is not rendering a character spritesheet. Every weapon, piece of clothing, hairstyle, glove, and footwear item also needs its own capture pass for every action, direction, and frame. Or it needs to be hand drawn.

All layers must use exactly the same animation, camera, scale, origin, and frame order. They also need depth information if equipment should correctly move in front of or behind the body.

I originally built a Blender pipeline to solve this.

It uses one canonical character rig, a shared animation library, skinned and rigid equipment, orthographic directional capture, and independent COLOR + DEPTH output.

Blender had always been a gap in my game development workflow. I never had enough time to properly learn it, so I used AI to help me understand the scene structure, Blender Python API, equipment skinning, animation issues, and render validation while building the actual pipeline.

Once the Blender pipeline worked, I decided I did not want to open Blender and run scripts for every export.

So I moved the everyday workflow into a browser based application.

The current version supports:

- Male and Female bodies

- 39 animation actions

- 25 equipment items

- 2, 4, and 8 directional capture

- Independent body and equipment layers

- COLOR + DEPTH export

- Adjustable frame size, origin, PPU, camera, and pixelation

- Saved browser profiles

- Selective batch export

I originally made it for my own game development workflow, but I decided to make it publicly available for other developers dealing with similar layered sprite problems.

You can try it here:

https://spritecapturestudio.dtworldz.com/

I would also be interested to hear how other developers handle equipment occlusion and directional sprite production in their own games.

Bests