I took a brief look at the sticky, and was wondering what might be a good program for creating 2d sprites. Im thinking of creating a sidescroller using SFML, and would like to create maybe some simple sprites for it. Not as detailed as say starcraft sprites, but also more so than a stickman.

The Gimp or Inkscape depending on your style.

You could also use Daz Studio to render 2d images of 3d characters, though most props and characters do have a cost.

I second the GIMP, and I also recommend paint.NET.

I use gimp for photoshop-like tasks. Cropping images, creating some for the web and that. I dont think my experience with it is good enough to create some sprites. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to learn. With inkscape im okay, ive done vector graphics with corel draw in highschool, and have used inkscape to create some basic images.

I use Paint.net and it suits my needs perfectly. I also use Inkscape a few times, I could never get into GIMP UI, it was using a multi-window paradigm which really isn't intuitive (maybe the latest one is better haven't checked it out in years).

Starcraft sprites are all done in a 3D program and then rendered into iso 2d format. Doing it by hand isn't the best, if that's what your looking for then you should get Blender and model the units in 3D and then render out the iso 2d sprites as you need.

Good Luck!

-ddn

I guess something like Super mario bros/3 is what im looking for really.

Quote: Original post by agm_ultimatex
I guess something like Super mario bros/3 is what im looking for really.

Then you don't need a program, you need ready made sprites.

Short of investing time (and maybe money) with DAZ 3d to produce orthographic renders, you'd have more luck in the deviant art forums asking for help, you could use ripped sprites from SNES games, those are easy enough to find on the web, but they are illegal to distribute, so they won't be of any use other than for internal development, and even then, its not such a legally safe area.

You could also look for spritelib on google.

If you want to do pixel art, I second ddn3 opinion of using Paint.Net.
There's also GraphicsGale, a freeware (there's also a shareware edition, lets you save GIFs) pixel sprite editor with features for animating easier.

You need one program to draw textures and another one to animate that textures.
I have experience in drawing animated sprites for pseudo 3d games and platformers.
I use Corel Draw to draw vector textures and Anatomy Sprite Animator to animate my characters and landscape objects.

You can find a lot of tutorials how to draw textures and how to animate them at spritetools.com

goodluck