Ok, this is a rather large obstical I cannot seem to over come. Because no matter who I ask all I get is, 'use photoshop', which does nothing to help me. I know how to find programs, what I'm looking for is;

HOW to create my own sprites. Such as how do the developers create there sprites?? From scratch and drawn pixle by pixle on the computer? Or do they scan in a drawn image, and edit it in a certain way to give it that look? (Sprites such as final fantasy 1 and rpg maker xp)

I can never seem to be able to think on how they do this. And before I really even start getting to code, resources are needed. Such as how do I make a clean animation? I know its simple as frame by frame. But its 2D, do I draw each frame as closly as I can and hope it doesn't shift to bad were it looks like the character is spazing?

 

Please help; Jemik.

You have it exactly! This isnt going to be what you want to hear, but you create sprites any number of ways.. Pixel by pixel, or you can draw them, scan them in and color them, etc.. artwork (even sprites) takes a LOT of patience and talent..

Read these pages:

http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tutorials/tuts/tsugumo/

The way artists do it depends on the level of detail they need to achieve. Usually for final fantasy 1 characters, or characters that are 16x16 or 32x32 are usually done pixel by pixel as they are too small to trace an image or add lots of details. Characters like the street fighter characters are usually drawn on paper first, then traced in a program of choice as they are big enough to add small touches, and is much easier to animate frame sequences when you have your characters drawn first then traced, rather than drawn pixel by pixel. Not to mention, it gets quite difficult and tedious to draw large sprites.

Hí Jemik

Maybe you got all the answers you needed already, but the main point is, you can create your sprites anyway you want. I've even used Paint for simple sprites some times :) Before I started playing around with 3D and still used 2D sprites I used Blender to make a model and render an image. This way I could make good looking sprites although I lack artist skills entirely. When making animated sprites I rendered an animation made in blender (of a character walking for example) to a set of bmp-images or something and then copied them to a spritesheet which I could use my graphics device to read them off from. You can copy them programmatically also, I think there's even a example of it here on xna although I haven't checked it out.

Hope this answers some of your questions!

/Mike

 

Alright, thank you guys for the much more needed info. Its a relief to know I atleast was on the right track.

But Mike (tengil) is there a way you could post more on your blender method? I thought blender was 3D creation program. How do you get it to work for 2D? This method actually sounds very good, since I'm already bogged down with trying to find a job, learning coding as well as trying to get back into drawing.

So is there a way you could give me more to go on?

Thanks guys for the help. ^^

Jemik,

yes blender is a 3d modelling program. But when you have modelled something you can render it to a 2d image of any format you like (.bmp, .jpg etc). The thing is that you can add lighting, materials and animations which will look better than anything I could make in gimp or photoshop. Especially if you are making an animation it is quite a lot easier to make it in blender, render it to a set of images and then use those for your sprites than drawing everything yourself. Now there is a bit of a learningcurve before you'll be making any advanced stuff but to your help there's a lot of online tutorials and a very helpful community. You can download it and find all links you need at www.blender.org

The thing is though, that once you know how to make the 3D models you won't be able to resist putting them in a 3D space... :)

Hope it helps!

/Mike

Hm, sounds helpful.

Alright, thanks. I'll try this method once I get some time, which should be tomorrow. So yeah, hopefully it wont be to bad, but then again was learning to make games ever easy? lol.

Thanks again mike, ~Jemik

Yes i agree blender is the best direction to go into

I did some research into using 3D models for 2D sprites a few months ago, and I discovered this:. SpriteForge.  It's a massive time saver for this type of work. If you can create a working 3D animation, this program will do all the hard work involved with creating the sprites, in any number of copies and at whatever angle you choose.

I suggest you use a tablet for some of the work.  They are very convieniant when you're doing your own sprite work.  They allow different pressure sensitivity, AND it's basically as fluid as a regular pencil.  I highly reccomend you get one if you don't already have one.

 

I have been using 3d applications for ages to do my sprite and artwork for 2d games.

For example when using Blender 3d I would model the animation that I would like and make sure it looks good, then inside the 3d modelling tool I would render out the application saving each of the frames as seperate files (Most Apps allow this). Then using one of the 2d art applications I would break up the images and strip out my sprite, and finally make a sprite sheet that would include all of the images.

For the 3d applications you have several choices but most will depend on your budget, Blender Does well, but I also use 3d studio max. For the 2d Application I prefer to use Photoshop, but you also have the choice of The Gimp, or Paint.Net which are both free... there are others but the above are the most used.