I was wondering what software was out there for specifically creating and editing sprites. I know of gimp, photoshop, etc. but feel that that’s a little bit of overkill in features. What do you guys use?
Sorry if this is a re-post. I did a search for previous posts on this topic and couldn’t find anything.
Photoshop. And there’s no such thing as overkill on features when it comes to art packages 
Cas
I find Gimp is good enough for game graphics, specially considering the price difference between it and photoshop :). I’ve always hated the photoshop UI… mainly because of the hoops they make you jump through to do simple stuff like save an image with an alpha channel.
Photoshop is obviously the more capable program, but a lot of it’s features are more useful for graphics going to print media rather than computer display.
Some people like PaintShop Pro. Though I don’t use it.
Thanks guys. I think I’m going to play around with Gimp for a little while. Can any of you recommend any best practices when creating things like animated sprites? Any good tutorials? What would be the best way of creating highlights in a painted object? Dodge and burn?
Thanks again
Rob
Hm, you might get some of this tutorial information from the sticky topic int he Java2D forum, which gives “pixel art resources”.
Ah, hell, here’s the link:
http://www.java-gaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=8246.0
JASC Paint Shop Pro (now Corel) is an old favorite.
Otehrwise GIMP cause its free and available on other platforms
Some of you may know Xara, the 2d vector package, which has been an awful program since its birth on the good old british Acorn Archimedes computers: Artworks from Computer Concepts (together with their DTP app Impression it’s been two so nice apps).
Several years ago it’s been rewritten for PCs and named Xara (and the company renamed Xara), then it’s been bought and published by Corel and later on bough back by Xara Ldt. Now the wonderfull app’'s being named Xara Extrame, or Xara X in short.
Now the interesting part:
Xara Extreme’s going to become OpenSource and free to use, and when it’s ready there shall be a Linux, Mac, Win version.
OK, I’m not an artist unfortunately, but everybody who used this nice 2d art package has been deeply impressed. Maybe it’s for you, too.
(Some of the nice cliparts are still from the Archimedes, hehe. See http://www.xara.com for cliparts.)
Photoshop is really really good to manipulate images and apply filters. I also like the UI event though some commands seem too tricky. If you want a painting programs to manipulate 2D vertors then you should check Illustrator. The Adobe software is far from cheap but is excellent.
I use photoshop (6.0), inkscape, mspaint (no shit), povray and eventually other 3d stuff such as wings.
For example this bunneh and all its frames were drawn in paint (4x res), offsetted in photoshop, traced and corrected with inkscape and finally touched up with photoshop. Sounds awfully longwinded, but it was actually the fastest way (for us) to do it.
Just get some, try em, see what you can do with em.
If its about pixel art… some use paint for that. Well, just take a look at the pixel art resource thread.
Photoshop 6, Painter 8, Lightwave 3D 8.5
GIMP 2.2 ;D
And mspaint.exe :
I figure that since I already paid for Winsnore, I might as well use the free stuff that comes with it
