This is a bit of an odd one, but hopefully the logic can be seen.
So I have a base body which has animations, such as idle, walk, block, attack etc, however in the game they can change equipment and use different weapons and armour etc. So currently I basically have one big file with each equipment type being a layer, then I just hide all other layers and fade it, however it would be handy if I could just have them as separate files (or maybe grouped layers may help more here).
So what would be handy is if there would be some way to load a sort of background image in which you can use as reference for your other animations, so rather than having to put everything into layers and showing and hiding them, I can basically just load in my base_character_poses.png or whatever and then like with the onion skin notion paint my stuff over the top knowing where the pixels will be of the character at that point in time.
Now I am sure most people will be thinking "just use layers, this seems like a lot of faff", but let me provide a scenario where having all your equippables etc in the same image as layers is not fine. So as with most game dev scenarios you have more than 1 artist working on content, so lets say 1 guy is working on a tower shield and is doing the animation frames for that based upon the poses of the underlayed character body template, then another guy is working on a sword slash attack based upon the same underlying character poses. Now problem here is when they both save their changes (which are in the same image on different layers) they then push that change up into the version control it blows up, because 2 people are editing the same file, so effort has to be expended to manually add in the new changes then commit up again hoping no one else has changed the file.
So given the above scenario it makes sense (for us at least) to develop each equipable in its own file, but currently we have to copy and paste in the base poses as a base layer and then hide it etc, its not the end of the world, but it would save time if we could temporarily load in a background which would allow us to overlay easier without having a hard dependency on the other image, this can also be useful for seeing how a character would look in a given environment etc.
It is a bit like how with 3ds max you would often load in a background image to make the modelling easier, but its not SUPER important as there are work arounds available, I just want to make it easier to do overlay animations across multiple files.
