Sprites

obviously yes :unamused:

Samus with dark colors does not a Dark Samus make. She has a lot of other details. You fail.

And that frankenstein is one hell of an ugly something or other. You can NOT mix bittages like that!

DSP: The select tool is on the left toolbar in MS Paint. It should be at the top left corner or so.

Dazzy with Yoda grammer? I could have never guessed…

A: those are examples
B: no everyone has your spriting skillz
C: the mixage sprite was supposed to look like a mishmash, a ‘frankensteins’s monster’

Tips for Paint:
The buttons do the following things, in order:

  1. Selecting Tool 2) Rectangle Selecting Tool … These two allow you to draw around a part of the image and move it around. When you have one of these clicked, you’ll see two images below the toolbar, and the top one will be highlighted. If you click the bottom one, your secondary color will become transparent when moving things with these tools. I’ll get to the colors later. The Selecting Tool will allow you to draw in any shape around the part of the image you want selected, and will draw a straight line back to where you started when you release the mouse button. Everything within the lines will be selected. After you’ve selected an image with either tool, move it around by scrolling over it, holding down the mouse, and dragging it.
  2. Eraser 4) Paint Bucket … The Eraser will change everything you go over with the icon while holding the mouse down to the secondary color. You can change the eraser size by clicking the things below the toolbar. I don’t like using the eraser, cause you can do the exact same thing just as or more efficiently with almost any of the other tools. The Paint Bucket finds all pixels of the same color vertically and horizontally from the pixel you click it on, and all the pixels vertically and horizontally from those, and so on, until it reaches a certain point, and changes them to your primary color, if you click with your left mouse button, or your secondary color, if you click with your right mouse button.
  3. Pipette 6) Magnifying Glass … The pipette allows you to select any color on the canvas (which is the area you can draw on) and make it your primary color if you click it with your left mouse button, or your secondary color, if you click it with your right mouse button. The color you are scrolled over will appear under the toolbar if you hold down the button, and will change to that color once you release. The Magnifying Glass will allow you to zoom in. It is defaulted to x2 magnification, but if you click the x4 or x8 under the toolbar, it will change to those magnifications, and zoom in on the top left corner of the screen. A handy trick: If you want to zoom in on some part of the screen which isn’t the top left corner, click the magnification you want, zoom out by clicking on the canvas with the magnifying glass, and then click again on the part of the canvas you want to zoom in on.
  4. Pencil 8) Paintbrush … The pencil is the simplest tool, and the greatest friend of the spriter (unless you just use the Paintbrush, but I don’t) This tool simply plots single pixels of either the primary or secondary color (depending on the button pressed) as long as you hold it down. The Paintbrush is similar, but you can change the number and organization of these pixels with the buttons below the toolbar.
  5. Spray Paint 10) Text … The Spray Paint plots pixels of primary or secondary color on random points in a radius selectable below the toolbar. I haven’t found any use for it in spriting, but I’m not the best spriter I know (or the second-best) so I might be wrong there. The Text plots text where you want it to be plotted. Notice that when you click the text button, the same icons as for the selecting buttons appear beneath the toolbar; these serve the same purpose, and will make the background of the text box you’re typing in transparent. You can only use the text when fully zoomed out.
  6. Line 12) Curve … The line will plot pixels from point A to point B of either color. Point A is the point where you pressed the mouse button, and Point B is where you let go. The curve will do this, but then skew that line twice. I can’t really explain how that works, so you’ll have to play with it. It’s a pretty fun tool =3
    13, 15, 16) Shape Tools 14) Polygon Tool … The Shape Tools plot shapes that span from point A to point B, these points defined as above. You can select what colors you want plotted below the toolbar, the light gray symbolizing the color you’re not clicking, and the black symbolizing the color you are clicking. The Polygon Tool works in the same way, but the shape you draw by yourself, by clicking from one point to another, until you either click back where you started, or double-click, in which case a line is plotted to where you started for you.

Other things: The color toolbar below the canvas shows your primary and secondary colors on the left, and other colors on the right. You should, for the most part, ignore the colors on the right, and keep the colors on the left in your head, so this toolbar is rarely useful.

The Image drop-down menu has some cool stuff you can do. Bear in mind a few things: When increasiong sprite size, you should always use Stretch/Skew and Stretch it by a multiple of 100. The maximum is 500, but you probably won’t use that anyway.

The Colors drop-down menu will allow you to edit colors. Left-right on the custom colors rectangle is hue, which changes between red, green, blue, and all the colors in-between, up/down is saturation, which changes the grayness of the color, and the bar on the right changes the brightness, which is self-explanatory.
The numbers on the bottom work like this: The Hue, Saturation, and Brightness colors will simply plot the cursor on the points you want them to be plotted. The Red, Green, and Blue numbers will change the amount of Red, Green, and Blue in your colors. The closer your numbers are to each other, the less your saturation. The higher the sum of the numbers is, the higher the brightness.

That is all =)

A) Poor ones.

B) Skills != knowledge. Your ‘examples’ displayed a complete lack of basic spriting knowledge.

C) Mishmashing parts is one thing, but you do NOT mix bittages when mixing parts. Hell, there’s plenty of 32-bit Bass sprites out there too, so sticking a 16-bit one in a bunch of 32-bit parts is asinine anyway.

way way WAY too much contrast of colors on the Dark Samus sprites. I give them a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10… (BEING VERY GENEROUS OF COURSE!)

Ok, Ok, I get it! I don’t sprite good/well/whatever. This isn’t a flame war against me, it’s a help topic for DarkSamusPrime.

He is right You guys and now i understand and don’t get mad at MaxPwnage

sry… its just constructive critisizms though…

hey how do i post my sprites??!! :metroid:

You can go to www.imageshack.com and make a link then ether post it or pictofy it.

A couple things that Timaster left out for paint.
Polygon tool: Hold shift down when using to make perfect circles and squares.
Line tool: Holding shift allows you to make straight lines and diagonal ones.
There is also a grid feature under View, Zoom.

I didn’t even know you could do that. XD

The shift thing, that is.

Whoa… I never looked in the View menu.
That’s pretty cool… the thumbnail and the grid.

The other two I just forgot, though. Thanks for pointing them out!

never ever ever ever ever ever you Adobe Photo Shop thats my only advise. I do all mine from scratch and I just keep screwing around with the outline until it looks nice then I just shade the inside. I have never used a refrance once.

What’s wrong with Photoshop?

Everything’s wrong with Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro. I mean, come on, all those features? Saving into tons of file types with lots of compression options? Detailed effects? Everything you can do in Paint and more? Bah, who needs it…

>_>;
I think what he meant was if you do use Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro for making sprites, you shouldn’t heavily rely on all the pretty effects to make your sprites look decent, because that’s not really spriting. I personally limit myself to Paint when making sprites for the simpler GUI, since Paint has all that’s really needed for sprites, but one could easily do the exact same thing in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop.

Photoshop is easier to use and makes it easier for the user to navigate through the picture when you use the zoom than Paint when you learn all the keyboard shortcuts. You can zoom 1600% and you have access to a grid that you can change the size on.

It makes it easier to make a map or anything else big out of small aprites.
If you are a Macintosh-user, then you can use RepTILE to do the same thing, but Photoshop is easier to use.