WTF is a Frame Template? | Egret DragonBones

When you start a new Project you get prompted with a dialog asking you what type of project you want to make.

When you select "Create Animation" you get a new window asking about what template you would like to use

And one of these templates is the Frame Template. But what is a frame template?

At first glance it looks pretty much like the Armature template. But in a closer look there is a lot of things missing here.

No bone tool
No weight tool
No slots
No scene panel
No draw order
Transform panel looks very different
And on bottom we got a totally new panel called Frames

If you ever used Photoshops Timeline this actually should look familiar to you. All that the frame template does is to play a sequence of frames. So that your sequence of png images turn out into an animation like a GIF.

Simple Usage

Just drag and drop your sequence of png images into the frame timeline. (You can't miss it with the text "Drag images here")

It will line up all dropped images in the Timeline. And you will see the current active frame on t he scene view.

Fix FPS

Before you play or work on these you might want to fix the FPS.

The FPS here should be around the number of your frames dropped onto the timeline. So in the example above I dropped a run animation with 9 Frames.

I first set the FPS to 9 but that was a bit too slow. I experimented with the FPS number till I found that 12 is a good FPS for this particular run animation. 24 FPS as default was a way too fast. It's hard to guess what's going on.

24 fps too fast / 12 fps normal for 9 frames of run animation

Manipulate Image

I wrote manipulate big but there is not much that you can adjust here.

Horizontal / Vertical Flip

You can flip the image

Transform

You can transform the image

Apply to All

You can apply changes done t 1 Frame to all frames. This is important to have. When you edit 1 frame the editings only apply to that 1 frame and not all frames in the timeline. However when you click on apply to all , all frames in the timeline are updated according flip rotation and positon.

Linked Frames

In addition to being able to play a sequence of images you can add more images and this way link 1 or more sequenced images into 1 animation.

I added a jump animation after the running for example

run + jump

The problem was that the jump was not changing the height. So I selected those jump frames where the character is considered to be mid-air and moved them up little bit to give the illusion that the character is jumping.

chained actions

You can add more images of different characters even or some visual effects what ever you like.

The frame template is good for

Testing your character which you animated in armature template and then exported png images of the animations. So you can put the output images here for testing if they really work the intended way
Making a GIF of anything. Even game unrelated stuff which DragonBones main purpose is. Think out of the box here.
Quick edits on sequence of images. For example if your images are facing the wrong direction simply put them into the frame template flip and save again.

What you can't do

You can not add a GIF into the Frame timeline. Editing or putting GIF's here is not supported yet.

Useful Suggestion For Future Development

A thoughtful idea that might turn out useful. If we were able to say that while the timeline is playing the animation that it should stay x seconds on a specific frame. And only after this seconds passed it should jump to the next frame.

For example

on frame 5 stay 2 seconds long
on frame 9 stay 0.25 seconds long

Basically some speed parameter that determines how long we stay on a specific frame.

DragonBones