Even if you are using Xcode or some other SDK to create your game app, the ease of creating animations for your game in Flash^R is something developers don't want to give up. But you've probably been disappointed with the difficulty of converting a movie clip into a sprite sheet. Until the release of Flash Professional CS6, exporting movie clips as sprite sheets was very difficult and time consuming and the few ways to do this required third-party scripts. It could be done but not easily because it required exporting the individual frames of the animation and then using a third-party script to import them into a sprite sheet.

In my opinion, the best new feature in Flash Professional CS6 is the sprite sheet generator. Once you've perfected your movie clip or clips, it takes only a few clicks to convert them to a sprite sheet. The new sprite sheet generator in Flash CS6 can be used for movie clips, graphic symbols, buttons and bitmaps from the Library or stage.

1. Select your movie clip or clips in the Library panel. As with most sprite sheets, it's better to put as many of your movie clip sprites on one sheet as possible.
   
   
2. Right-click and choose Generate Sprite Sheet from the pop-up menu, to open the dialog box.
   
   
3. As you can see, on the left we have a list of the movie clip symbols that we included in the sprite sheet. When you click on each name in the list, you will see the information about that movie clip including number of frames, frame rate and duration, at the bottom of the left panel.
   
   
4. In the right panel, we see the individual sprites displayed as they will be placed in the sprite sheet. At the bottom of this panel, you will see that the new 2048 x 2048 pixel retina display dimensions are set by default, along with the image format at 32 bit png. Because the Starling SDK has been integrated into Flash CS6, the Data Format is set by default to Starling. However, we can also choose from several other popular SDKs.
   
   
5. Another nice feature is the option for a Basic or MaxRects Algorithm and the choice to Trim and Stack Frames. The MaxRects, Trim and Stack Frames options save space in the sprite sheet and reduce the file size.
   
   
6. Before you export your sprite sheet, you can preview the animation for each movie clip by switching to the Preview tab and selecting the movie clip name you wish to preview.
   
   

By default the png is named with the same name as your Flash fla file. Just click Export and you will have your png sprite sheet and xml file.

*Adobe provided a copy of this software to me for review purposes.

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