I’m trying to do artwork for a game. I’m not the best artist and even worse on computer drawing programs. Any tips on what the best program is to use or how to create detailed pictures? I don’t wanna use graphics that look like a 2 year old drew it with a Crayola!
Use photoshop, or use 3ds studio max, you can render the 3d models and make it look nice.
Depends on the style you’re after. Each style has it’s own workflow and tool chain.
I don’t know what style I’m after :\
I just know I want 2d pictures…not 3d models. What do you guys recommend for this, or, if applicable, what do you use for this?
then we can’t help you much… like you may wont to do cartoony drawings, comic book drawings, realistic photo images… To put it simply, for “photo” images you can use photoshop-like program, and for drawings you can use vector based program, corel-like (google inkscape, it’s like freeware corel)
I don’t know what style I’m after :\
Toy around then for a few weeks to get a feeling for the different approaches.
Pixel art: Any pixel pushing app will do the trick. There are even a lot of pros who use mspaint.
Photo based or photo realistic: Something like Photoshop.
Vector: Inkscape is a good starting point. (I wrote some of the extensions btw ;D)
Pre-rendered: Lots of tools and skills are required for that.
Experimental: Clay stop motion, abstract, scanned pencil drawings… lots o weird possibilities.
So… try a few things and see what works best for you. Eg I really like pixel art, but it takes too long. Photobased or stop motion isn’t an option, because I don’t own a digital camera. Scanned stuff would be really meh, since my drawing isn’t that good and my scanner is too damn slow (it’s about 15 years old). Pre-rendered is quite nice, but my skills aren’t up to the task yet. I also don’t own a tablet. So, it’s vector for me.
why don’t you just turn around the Gimp ? It’s free and fast on many platforms. 
Thanks for all the info guys, helps a lot. I’ll probably download inkscape and give that a try later when I have more time – it can create pictures with transparent backgrounds right?
Not sure what the Gimp is :\
It’s something like a photoshop clone, but with an interface needs getting used to. It emerged out of the GPU/Linux community, is quite powerfull and has a scripting language for effects, so you will find tons of effects to download on the net.
I found Paint.NET being a good tool for my pixel pushing desires. It’s somewhere between mspaint and paint shop pro.
[inkscape] can create pictures with transparent backgrounds right?
Sure. The empty stuff is transparent by default. If you need something opaque you can either put a rect in the background or use the document properties (the background there is also used for export).
Help->Tutorials should get you started.
Sweet, inkscape definitely sounds like my ticket. Thanks for the info
If they wanted to steal some market share from Adobe Photoshop, the first thing they would have done was to keep the photoshop shortcuts… All of them are changed.
Marque -> R
Laso -> F
Magic Wand -> Z
etc.
I found Graphics Gale, it’s a very robust package made for pixel artist/animators, it has a free version with all the functions excepting save to gif.
No, but you can use the 3d environment in 3ds max and easily make rendered 2d pictures, that are for backgrounds etc.
Ok, I’ve been using inkspace and am really liking it, made some decent pictures that I never would have been able to make on paper. I’m having troube with details though, I have good outlines mostly, but they aren’t that detailed and I can’t really figure out what tools to use for small details, and I’ve only been able to pain graphics a solid color, not able to break it up into pieces, coloring parts differently and such, what tools should I use to do this and for the details? Didn’t see anything about this type of stuff in the tutorials.
I do pretty much everything with the bezier and node tool. The rest is fill/stroke (maaaaaybe a gradient), clones and clipping.
Here are two short screencasts about clipping:
http://kaioa.com/svg/clipping.mkv (xvid/ssa ~1.8mb)
http://kaioa.com/svg/clipping2.mkv (h264/ssa ~1mb)
Shading with clipping:
http://kaioa.com/svg/amgclip.png
(the shading of the skin was also done with clipping)
Simple shading with clipping:
http://kaioa.com/svg/carrot_steps.png [wireframe]
Overlap with clipping:
http://kaioa.com/svg/weave.svgz (FF/Opera required)
http://kaioa.com/svg/weaveclip.png
(as you can see I cross through the stroke edges and carefully chosen spots to keep the antialiasing intact)
http://kaioa.com/svg/weaveextra.png
(with an extra semi transparent green rect below the two extra pieces)
Well, you don’t really need clipping. But it makes some things a lot easier.
Blur is also quite cool. Keep in mind that there are other things then shadows you can do with it like:
http://kaioa.com/svg/boofinal.svgz (FF3 beta or Opera required) [856x480 png]
Glowy stuff will be a tad neater in the future if there are blending modes (lighten, darken, screen, overlay etc).
I can’t get it playing,. where do you make this movie file .mkv ? ???
It can be opened with windows media player. So you just have to find the codec I guess.
ok, but is this possible to get it coded with Java 2D??? That could be interesting… ;D
MKV is a container (like avi or mp4). You need a matching splitter to get ahold of the streams. MPC (media player classic) and VLC have integrated splitters (stand alone splitters can be found at that mkv page). But VLC has some issues when it comes to SSA. I could have used hard subs, but back then I didn’t know how to do that. Hard subs also have the disadvantage that you cannot simply add other languages. Btw those two screencasts don’t contain any audio streams.
If you don’t have any h264 codec installed try ffdshow tryouts.