Tutorials, links, tips - City of Heroes Forums

Red Nile · 08-04-2005, 12:53 PM

I'm interested in learning how to create sprites. I love the style of them, and from what I heard about how they're made, it sounds like a similar process to how I make signature banners.

But I'd like this thread to be a general sharing place for useful tips and links on doing what you do.

I started making signature banners quite some time ago. Unfortunately, the tutorial that first showed me the basics is gone now, a dead link.

One link I can share is the resource I use for the fonts of any text in my banners. A fabulous site, 1001 free fonts.

Quakester · 08-04-2005, 02:04 PM

Well I'm not much help on the tutorial side but here's where I got most of the sprites I used.

GSA

Sebastian Kain · 08-04-2005, 02:19 PM

Bah! You'll not be my competion!

pouts

J/K always willing to help those that want to learn the trade. I could use a assistant..

Eitherway..I'll provide you with some links to tutortials and sprite pages and even rip a few bases for you..(Mugen mojo wise) when i get home today..since that's where all my links are.

Bluek250 · 08-04-2005, 03:07 PM

Red Nile's request is also one of mine. I'd really like some sprite tutorials as well.

the_starcrosser · 08-05-2005, 06:08 AM

*Wanders in* Ooo, cool!

Hmm. Since a few people have already asked me if i have any tutorials, which sadly i don't, maybe i can put out a couple tips on things that i've found really helpful, who knows, they might be useful to someone else too. *shrug*

* The "Magic Wand" selector is your friend. When cutting/copying, coloring, erasing, moving, and any number of other important things, I find it really helpful to use the magic wand. It's my staple tool - looks like a dandelion puff on the tool box, if you don't know where it is. It selects by color, and you can select how specific or vague you want the selection to be by the number box when you're using it.
If you're daring or good with the mouse, also try the Lasso tool for freehand selecting.

* Coloring: Don't just brush on color with the pencil or brush, since sprites rely heavily on specific areas of flat color to show shape - use the Hue and Saturation command (Enhance> Color> Hue and Saturation) to CHANGE the color of your selected (with the wand or lasso or box) area. "Colorize" is useful for this. Make sure to check all three sliders to adjust the color, especially the saturation.

* Layers: don't be afraid to make several layers when puttin' things together. You can merge them later, or wait until they automatically merge when saving as a GIF.

* Swapping Parts: try swapping different parts from sprites to create new things that better express what you're going for. Heads, limbs, eyeballs, especially hair. Be a mad scientist. Also look for specific shapes for other things you need in other sprites - being original is good, but a chunk out of another sprite is already going to have the right dimensional shading so you don't have to figure it out yourself. Be creative, just look at random shapes. Somebody's hairbow could become the assault rifle you're looking for.

* Transparencies: be careful with transparent brushes, since a GIF will sometimes flatten your nice hazy color into a funky-looking solid one. Most sprites are all about flat, sharp areas of color, not blending and shading. Keep the edges of your sprite clean - also, try not to rotate pieces by hand too much, it'll make 'em fuzzy - 90, 180, 270 degrees only will keep 'em sharp.

Here's some links that may or may not be useful and might have already been posted, i forget. I got 'em originally from other spriters, some have the big ones i use, some have small animated ones that are also fun.

http://gsarchives.net/index2.php?cat...0=non-animated

http://gifsyndicate.com/

http://www.angelfire.com/nb/kofunlimited/gal2000.html

>_> ummm.... yes.... and stuff. Go! Fly! Do art!

Poison · 08-05-2005, 09:19 AM

I tend to make little palettes on the side of the pic with the colors I use. Like, when the original sprite has 4 different skin tones which I want to change, I make 4 squares with the original colors and make 4 new squares with the new colors next to them.

When you are done and save the pic, make sure the GIF information only saves as many colors as you actually use. If your sprite uses 16 colors total (including transparency) but you save it with the info for 256 colors, it'll have unnecessarily big filesize.

Make sure not to lose informations you'll need later.

If you want to add stuff like belts, tiaras, headbands, etc, use a new layer.

One pixel can change a lot.

Sebastian Kain · 08-05-2005, 11:19 AM

Here are some sprite sites...

http://www.gifsyndicate.com/

http://www.fightersgeneration.com/main.htm

and a tutorial

http://primeop.tripod.com/mugenboss/tutorials.html

Red Nile · 08-05-2005, 12:48 PM

Beautiful! Just the kind of things I was looking for, thanks everyone.

I already use the magic wand tool a lot when extracting images from their backgrounds for my banners. Very useful. I also find the smudge tool to be invaluable in smoothing out any pixellation that might happen from editing. And it also helps to smooth out pixellation that happens if you increase the size of a picture a bit, though it takes a fair bit of smudging to clean up an image when you do that. Any areas that look pixellated, just zoom in on them and run the smudge tool along the jagged bits, even if it's in the middle of the image. Looks bad zoomed in, but when you zoom back out it often looks much better. I did a bit of that when I increased the size of the sprite in Tsarina's banner that I did for her, for example.

Those tips are good. I'm not sure about creating new parts of my own, but I'll start out trying to mix and match existing sprites.

I'll probably start playing around with this a bit on the weekend. At a brief glance through a couple of those sites, I'm impressed at how good the "artjacking" looks, when I see some of the things you've changed around.

Bluek250 · 08-06-2005, 12:56 AM

Links are greatly appreciated guys, especially that tutorial page, SK. Also, star_crosser, you have no idea how much I'd LOVE to edit those KOF faces. I take it Photoshop is the only way to go on those?

Sebastian Kain · 08-06-2005, 01:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bluek250

Links are greatly appreciated guys, especially that tutorial page, SK. Also, star_crosser, you have no idea how much I'd LOVE to edit those KOF faces. I take it Photoshop is the only way to go on those?

I use an old version of Paintshop Pro, that came with Animation Shop. That's how I usually operate..