Turn one character image into animated sprite sheets

Prompt-to-character is fun, but plenty of projects start from art that already exists: a concept you commissioned, a character sheet from an artist, or a design you generated and fell in love with in another tool. The problem is never the image — it's the other 40 frames. This page shows the image-to-animation path with a real, shipped example.

A real run: concept image → playable hero

A Phaser starter project began with this concept reference — a single static image, no animations:

Spriterrific turned it into a west-facing anchor with the design preserved:

…and then into a full animation set — idle, walk, run, jump, plus a custom walk-into-portal move — all on the standard 256×256 frame grid, promoted into the game's public/assets/hero-v2/ with a provenance manifest recording every generation run:

The hood, cape, outfit color blocks and proportions survived from concept to every frame — that's the acceptance bar for this workflow, and it's why the anchor step exists.

How the identity is preserved

1. Anchor from your image. Your image becomes the base for a canonical directional anchor (1024×1024, clean background) using a reference-preserving preset: the pipeline is told to treat your image as the identity, palette and style ground truth, not as loose inspiration.
2. Animations pin to the anchor. Every animation prompt uses the anchor as a strict first-frame reference and explicitly forbids redesigning, recoloring or simplifying the character. Costume details are enumerated as must-keeps.
3. Same grid, same metadata. Output is identical in format to prompt-born characters: fixed 256px frame cells, manifest JSON, foot-anchored frames. Engines can't tell the difference — see the Phaser and Unity integration guides.

Second facings and outfit changes

The hero above later needed to walk into a portal — a back view. Rather than regenerate the character from scratch (which invents a new face and style no matter how careful the prompt), the project generated a variant: same character as the source, new n (north/back) facing, then animated that. Variants also handle outfit edits — “replace the cloak with a leather jacket” — while pinning the face, proportions and art style. The rules for what to say (and what not to re-describe) are covered in the character generator guide.

Practical input notes

• One character, full body. Head-to-feet, not a bust crop. Extra characters or busy scenes confuse the anchor step.
• The direct-image rule (API users). If you drive this through the HTTP API, sourceImageUrl must serve raw image bytes — share-page links (Google Drive, Dropbox preview pages) return HTML and are rejected. Uploading through the Studio sidesteps this entirely.
• Design ambiguity becomes animation ambiguity. If the concept's feet or hands are vague, the animations will guess. The cleaner the input, the more on-model the motion.

Cost

Starting from an image skips a generation: 260 credits for a character with walk + idle, versus 290 from a text prompt. Extra animations are 100 credits each on the same anchor; frame re-cuts are free. New accounts start with 500 free credits — enough to animate your character with two moves, no card required (pricing).