Flipbook

In Odyssey, you can create and edit a Flipbook, a Paper 2D asset that can play a couple of frames to make sprite animations. This type of asset is useful for 2D video games, which can be used in Unreal Engine.

It uses a Layer Stack, you can add a raster or a vector layer and you can as well put them all inside a folder. For layers properties, please read this lesson.

Create a keyframe

Click on “Add keyframe button”, on the top left corner of the timeline to open the panel “Create Texture Asset”. This panel is the same as the one you get when creating a new texture asset in the Content Browser.

A new keyframe will be created in the timeline. From that point, you can start to draw on the canvas in the viewport. Each new keyframe will be added at the end of the timeline.

In the Content Browser, adding a new keyframe will add a texture asset and a sprite :

Keyframe actions

With a right click on a keyframe, you can display a pop-up menu “Keyframe actions”.

Duplicate: duplicates current keyframe and places it just after current keyframe.

Delete: deletes current keyframe (but won’t delete the corresponding texture and sprite assets from the Content Browser).

Insert Key Before: creates a new keyframe before current keyframe.

Insert Key After: creates a new keyframe after current keyframe.

Show in Content Browser: shows the sprite assets used for the Flipbook in the Content Browser.

Edit Sprite: opens Paper2D to edit the sprite.

Exposure & timing

After creating several keyframes, you can change the timing of each keyframe separately.

You can either modify the exposure by pushing next keyframes :

… or adapt the exposure the global timing :

Navigation and play

In addition of the left and right arrows, you can navigate in the timeline by using the following icons.

Icon	Description
	to go to start frame or end frame.
	to move backward / forward from keyframe to keyframe.
	to move backward / forward from keyframe to keyframe..
	to play backward / forward the animation.

When the animation is played, the icon turns into a pause button.

Icon	Description
	to stop the animation (cursor will go to its original position).
	to play the animation as a loop.
	to play the animation once.

Framerate

The framerate can be changed here, at the top right corner :

Scale

The timeline can be rescaled at the bottome right corner:

Layer types

Flipbooks are based on Texture 2D. Therefore, the Layer stack has the same options as Texture 2D.