Sprite Help

Hi All,

I wonder if anyone knows of any site or can give any tips as to drawing sprites. Basically in a nutshell, i'm useless at drawing. I want to be good but when I look at some sprites that people have made they use so many shading techniques I think to myself "how do they do that so well"? Is there any tools or anything that can help? I have the ideas for games but when it comes to actually making them I fall flat at the first hurdle.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

p.s. I was going to post this in a different category as this is not necesserily tech support but did not have permissions.

Hi,

There are lots of great spriting tutorials on deviantart.

Per

http://whaatnext.com/post/4700371635...-pixel-art-and

Dines has an article "Anyone Can Animate". This is one of the best articles/tutorials that I have ever seen.

http://www.create-games.com/article.asp?id=1874

Marv

These are very interesting and look very useful. Thanks for your help everyone. :)

I'm just starting to make 2D games and I'm using a 3D program called iClone to do all my graphics. I'm not artist either, but with iClone I can take tons of pre-generated content, modify it as I see fit, and create backgrounds, sprites, animations, etc. All these can be imported into MMF2 or other game engines.

goto Reallusion's website for info on iClone.

Tsugumo's "So you wanne be a pixel artist" is pretty much THE definitive article on the subject - http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/.../tuts/tsugumo/

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Originally Posted by MuddyMole

Tsugumo's "So you wanne be a pixel artist" is pretty much THE definitive article on the subject - url removed

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That's an awesome site and would help a good artist to make great sprites. But, like me, the original poster stated that he is pretty useless at drawing. That's why I suggested iClone, but other 3D programs could work as well. The beauty of iClone is that you don't have to be a 3D artist or animator to use it and you can produce phenomenal output for a 2D game engine. It does cost a bit to get all the extra content and animations that you might want, but even the stock stuff that comes with it is enough to get started. It even has toon shading and facial animation. The built-in animations are enough to do just about any game you could imagine.

When I get some time, I'll put up some sample screenshots to show just what you can do with little effort in a program like iClone.

You would tell us if you were in any way affiliated with the company that produces iClone, wouldn't you?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MuddyMole

You would tell us if you were in any way affiliated with the company that produces iClone, wouldn't you?

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I have no affiliation with that company whatsoever. I've been using it for several years though and it just occurred to me how useful it could be for something like this. When I tested my theory, it confirmed just how great a tool it is for this.

One the really cool things about iClone is that you can export animations as image sequences, which is handled very nicely in MMF2. So, if you have an animated character then you just export the sequence and then it imports directly into MMF2 as multiple frames. I just put my characters in front of a nice green screen background and then just pick that color for transparency and it's good to go.

Here is a quick sample I threw together. I picked various sample objects just to create a simple scene with an animated character. All content in this video is iClone generated, including the character animations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlKRM...ature=youtu.be