When comparing SmoothMoves vs Spriter, the Slant community recommends Spriter for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D skeletal animation tools?” Spriter is ranked 3rd while SmoothMoves is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Spriter is:
Animation is calculated as movement paths between keyframes, and creating a keyframe requires only placing sprites and assigning a time index.
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Pros
Pro PlayMaker integration
Developers echo17 provide Playmaker action scripts for SmoothMoves.
Pro Texture swapping and tinting at runtime
Animations can be re-skinned in several ways, entirely on the fly.
Pro Quick and easy keyframe animation
Animation is calculated as movement paths between keyframes, and creating a keyframe requires only placing sprites and assigning a time index.
Pro Easy configuration of character maps
Spriter makes it easy to change the character skin, and the animations persists.
Pro Integration for Unity3D and Construct 2
Modules supporting direct import of Spriter's SCML animations are available for Unity3D and Construct 2.
Pro Price
Price is a lot less than Spine for the pro version and goes on sales often.
Pro Free upgrade to Spriter Pro 2
Free upgrade to Spriter Pro 2.
Pro Has a Free and a Pro version
Pro Steam intergration
Steam integration is great for updates and tracking hour progression with the software.
Cons
Con Bone hierarchy is not collapsible
When working with a complex skeleton, the entire tree is always visible. There is no way to hide bones under their parents.
Con Unity Middleware
SmoothMoves is not a stand-alone application. It runs entirely within the Unity Editor, and is not compatible with other engines.
Con Sluggish performance with Unity Runtime
Con This version will never have 3D mess support
Yes, there will be a free upgrade to Spriter Pro 2 which will have this feature, but it will be years until that program is read as mentioned on the official site. The issue being that they do not have a way to program this in their current exported runtime. So, for not both Dragon Bones, Spine, and Blender, are the best options it seems for 3D mesh support which really adds something to game animations.
Con No hotkeys for stepping through animation frames
Stepping the animation forward and backward requires using the mouse, extremely inconvenient when fine-tuning motion paths.
Con No curved paths
All motion paths are linear. Curves have to be simulated by hand-placing additional keyframes.
Con Pro
Need knowledge in animator specification of profession