My partner and I are creating a game in Java. We've been using After Effects to create animations and export them as png sequences. Part of the reason I'm using AE is so that I can get some really smooth animations. Well, we've been doing the traditional sprite sheet procedure with the png's, but there are a lot and our graphics are HD. Loading times have gotten out of control.
My question: Is there some generally accepted approach to implementing AE animations into a game engine (ours supports keyframe animation, btw) without simply doing it frame by frame? Like, a way to just give the engine the layers of the AE project along with the directions to animate them? That way we wouldn't have to have so many images.