My dream is to make a rpg.I''m making some headway with the code little by little but now I want to learn how to make a gamesprite.I was thinking of something close to Final Fantasy 3 type game sprite.I''m sure making a sprite like this is harder than it looks but I''m pretty good at drawing and I would love to give it a shot.Can anyone give me some tutorials to look at or if there are any books out there you might suggests.Either one would be helpful The road to hell is paved in good intentions

It''s not as hard to make a sprite/Sprite animation, it''s just like anything else, it''s just harder to make the best sprite animation (Movement/frames/Fluidity). I don''t know your skill level as far as drawing goes but you can make sprites by drawing them in a paint program like photoshop. The animation is where there is more explination needed. I remeber seeing a website that had the whole process laided out in great detail. I''ll check my files right quick and post the addy if I can find it.

peace

-Sage13

www.planetmorningstar.com

 

~In "Sonic Adventure" (Dreamcast), select Knuckles. Jump on a wall and let him hang on it.
Watch in bewilderment as he proceeds to hump the wall.
-WGM


Find something you want to do in life, find out how to do it, and then do it.
~Sage13

look here : http://pixeltutorial.cjb.net

this tutorial by Tsugumo is well done,
chapter 8 is for you ...

Oh yeah, I forgot about that one heh.

peace


-Sage13

i will be releasing some tutorials sooon that may add another resourse to the net for people who are learning to make sprites. if youre interested ill post a link around here when they are available
-steve

Thanks I''m going to check that tutorial out right now Jotarah.And if you have any links you want us to see stOven feel free.I''m sure I''ll need as much help as I can get.Thank you all.

The road to hell is paved in good intentions

cool tutroial guys.I''m going to practice with it for awhile.I just had one question.The way I''ve always drawn is to draw it on paper first then to scan it into photoshop and do the painting there.Would that work here or is it best to do as the tutorial says and just draw the sprite using the paint program??


The road to hell is paved in good intentions

This depends on:

1) The time you''re willing to spend drawing your sprites.
2) The resolution of the game.

Remember that FF3 is very low resolution. Thus it was natural to do tile-based pixel-drawing. Tsugumo and the other dudes over at the Pixelation forums have a lot of experience in pixel-drawing.

But drawing characters for a higher resolution game from scratch pixel by pixel will take a very long time.

On the other hand, creating fluid animation from scanned drawings is going to be tricky.

What do other people think?

well it depends on the style you are looking for in my opinion. I personally find it VERY difficult to keep shading consistent in sprite animation if you are coloring and blending each frame individually (with smudge tool, airbrush, etc) but when doing large sprites pixel by pixel as well, you have an incredible amount of control with the fluidity and detail of your sprites/animations. i did this pixel by pixel but feel it would have been impossible to do by scanning in each frame and redrawing it and blah blah blah.

http://www.geocities.com/st0ven/heel.gif?

-steve

Or, you can create a model in a 3d program, and render the frames of animation to images. While the initial part of creating the model will take longer, animation will be much easier. Im sure this is how the characters in games like diablo2 are made, because each sprite has too many animation frames. (i think in d2 theres like 32 directions or summin a char can be facing, multiply that by all the different ''poses'' or actions it can do, it would mean making a lot of seperate 2d images, therefor 3d renders seems to be the best choice in such cases).

Of course, for simpler games where you probably only need a few animation frames per sprite, its a different story. also, if you want to have ''cartoony'' sprites, then it would be hard to achieve that using rendered 3d models