2d Sprite Making - help

achillesian

Hey polycounters, i know there's no polycounting per-say in this issue, but, what the heck, thought I'd give the question a try here.

So I'm gonna be making a 2d sidescroller in XNA with some friends.

Is there a really optimal program for sprite making?

My favorite drawing program is painter 9, is there a way to make it work well with transparency? because that's the major problem I'm having with it.


example.






Okay, you can see the problem here, this sprite, as it is now needs to be picked clean of color values, similar to crazy purple i used as the background, i don't like this.

The one solution i know to avoid this is basically do everything with a 1pixel brush so there's no anti-aliasing around the edges of the stroke, well i dont like that, i want the nice width changing stroke that my sprite has,

so it has more of an art feel, than eww, a sprite feel.

everything I'm gonna make will have a black line border, so my question is, is there a variable width brush like the (scratch board tool, is the name of the brush) in painter 9 i can use, or another program that has variable width strokes with no anti aliased edges,

or is there just another program i should use to do sprites.

thanks for any help.

arrangemonk

dude, you can use more than 1 bit alpha in yna, just save it with transparency in a format that supports transparency and is readable by xna

and when you really want 1 bit alpha just make one color for transparency(without shading)

Mark Dygert

Yep like arrangemonk hinted at you're using a 1 bit technique meaning your transparency will either be on or off, no blending. You can't have a purple pixel and expect it to be partially transparent. If you sample the pixels around the edges of your image they are not exactly your transparent color.

To fix this you need to eliminate the transparent pixels around your image on the bush layer. Here is how I would do it:
- Select the bush (Shift click the layer thumbnail, marching ants around your bush)
- Create a new layer fill the selection with black
- Create a new layer under that, deselect and fill the whole layer with white
- Merge the black and the white layer together
- Do a brightness/contrast and crank up the contrast so the pixels are either white or black no gray pixels should be in the image. You can also play with the levels to do the same thing bla bla bla
- Do a selection by color, select black, cut and paste it under your bush, select this new black bush (shift click the layer thumbnail)
- create a new layer with the selection still active paint in pixels that are the same color as the bush but do it at 100% opacity with a pencil brush.

Next time you do pixel art do it with the pencil brush. It takes a little getting used and its a different skill set but honestly its better than having blurry images you have to clean up.

achillesian

so this would show up perfect in xna transparency wise?

achillesian

thanks for the pointers vig, but a simpler way, is to just keep (pick up underlying color toggle) in painter, off. This way it doesnt antialias with white, or whatever was under the brush when u did the drawing.

The rock above was made this way, and then i deleted the background in PS (cant do it in painter arrgh) and saved it as a png, walla!

Great help guys, i have no more sprite problems.

achillesian

awesome.

arrangemonk

and now do me a favor and make some kickass game

praxedes

a character draw with the pencil brush:

you can turn anti aliasing off completely and produce this SNES esque style in photoshop when using all tools, and the pencil tool is pretty much designed for such things.

Or use a format that supports better transparency, such as TGA or PNG (depending on what your engine can handle- I don't do "tech" :P)

~P~