In Aseprite a document/file/sprite has the following properties:
- It has a size in pixels (width and height).
- It has a color mode, which tells you how many colors the image can handle. All images in the sprite are in one specific mode, you cannot mix RGB images with Indexed images in the same sprite.
- A color profile which indicates what color space the RGB values are in.
- It contains a set of layers. You can see them in the Timeline. The most important concept here is that there are two kinds of layers: the background layer for opaque sprites, and transparent layers. A sprite can contain only one background layer, but several transparent layers.
- It contains animation frames. Each frame has a duration, i.e. how many milliseconds the frame must be on screen when the animation is being played.
- Each layer/frame intersection is called a cel, and contains the image where you finally can paint.
The timeline shows you the whole structure of the sprite as a grid. Rows are layers and columns are frames, each little cell of the matrix is a cel:
You can see some extra elements like tags and linked cels. These elements are useful to organize several animations of the same sprite, and to re-utilize frames along the animations (or different animations).
SEE ALSO