Sprites in Photoshop

Sprites in Photoshop

Player

Member #6,274

October 2005

I am a little bit new to Photoshop so does anyone know how to make sprites side by side in photoshop for animation. I also want to make the spacing even. Thanks in advance.:D

Kevin Epps

Member #5,856

May 2005

I'm not an artist or anything, but I know a lot of people that use Graphics Gale as their Sprite editor and animator. It's easier to do pixeling. But if you want to stick with photoshop, you can use imageready. Imageready is great for animation and animation gifs.

Player

Member #6,274

October 2005

No but I don't want gifs because they take up a lot of room and it is hard to make them compatible with directx. So I wanted to know how to make the images side by side evenly and i just can't quite seem to do it.:'(

Paul whoknows

Member #5,081

September 2004

Photoshop was not designed for sprite creation, if by "sprite" you mean sprite, you'll need something else:
You can make your sprites with a true pixel editor, like "Deluxe paint", "Autodesk", even with "ms-paint", once you have your blocky sprites, then it's PS time.
Now you can do antialiasing, resizing, filters, convertions, whatever.

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"The unlimited potential has been replaced by the concrete reality of what I programmed today." - Jordan Mechner.

Archon

Member #4,195

January 2004

Weren't you investing in Maya?

Jonatan Hedborg

Member #4,886

July 2004

Why would photoshop not be good for sprites? It has excellent brushes without AA and is great for pixel work. As for spacing it up... what exactly do you mean? Do you want say 10 64*64 images next to each other oslt? do you want "frames" in which you draw each sprite? If the latter, then you can make an image with the border, make it a pattern and then fill the image with that pattern.

LordHolNapul

Member #3,619

June 2003

I've done my game with photoshop, and now, for Christmas, my girlfrien gave to me a graphical tablet!!!
Photoshop is very good not only for sprites, but for every 2D graphic request.

To use photoshop for your sprite you must use the level to obtain the alpha channel,
and save your single image as a TGA 32 bit or a PNG 32 bit

32bit means 8bit of red, 8 bit of blu, 8 bit of green and 8 bit of alpha channel.

That's all.
try my game!
ciao

raycrasher

Member #6,683

December 2005

Try putting each sprite in one layer, then position each one an even space apart using the Transform tool (put pixel coordinates using the x/y boxes at the top).

Ex: Layer 1 will be at 0, 1 at 30, 2 at 60, etc...

Tobias Dammers

Member #2,604

August 2002

Even easier:
1) Save each frame in a dedicated file, using a computer-friendly numbering scheme
2) Take 15 minutes to hack together a tool that combines the frames in whatever fashion you prefer.
3) Profit!
Really, loading an arbitrary number of files and blitting them side-by-side onto a larger target bitmap is trivial, unless the target is so large that it doesn't easily fit into RAM (but in that case, the whole thing would be pointless).
And btw, for cache performance reasons, I recommend arranging the sprites top-down instead of left-right; this way, you use unfragmented blocks of memory (complete successive scanlines).
If you don't know how to solve step 2, here are some hints:
- RTFM. Allegro comes with tons of useful functions for string and filename manipulation, image loading, image manipulation, and image saving.
- The basic procedure is this:
* Analyze the parameters from the command line. There should be at least one wildcard file path.
* Count all the files that match the wildcard path. Look into allegro's for_each_file_ex(). You will probably want to get their sizes, too, so you should load each one into a temporary buffer, then discard. Alternatively, you can store them in an array or a stl::vector so you won't have to load them twice.
* Create a bitmap large enough to hold all the frames.
* Successively blit all frames to the buffer.
* save_bitmap() the buffer to a new filename.

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Me make music: Triofobie
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"We need Tobias and his awesome trombone, too." - Johan Halmén

kentl

Member #2,905

November 2002

ProMotion by Cosmigo is good, it will cost you some money though.

Ultio

Member #1,336

April 2001

Do you mean spacing them out side by side, like in the attached image? I usually just use the grid for that, and a separate layer for each frame of the sprite. This is probably only effective for sprites that have a shared width and height.

My grid settings are every 16 pixels with 1 subdivision.

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"It's nice knowing that someday, the software I write will just be pirated by millions of people." :-/
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