Sprite sheets underlie the basic functioning of many 2D animations. A better name for a sprite sheet might be a sprite (key) frame animation sequence, but it wouldn't be as easy to remember as the former. In essence, that's what it is, however—a collection of the (key) frames described in the previous section. Here, we can distinguish a number of different types of sprite sheets that result from the approaches described previously.
The most basic type of sprite sheet has the complete animation sequence (or sequences) captured for one or more sprites. These sequences can be generated from a hand in the form of pixel art, drawings, photographs, and renderings of 3D models. You can also use key frames as the basis for a full-sequence sprite sheet, performing tweening offline using tools such as the gimp-gap (Gimp animation package) plugin. This plugin is used with the Gimp image editor application to generate animation frames using input key frames. You can find the...