At 4/6/06 05:28 AM, Lara17 wrote:
Hey, I like these little men! How do you create them?
Everyone seems to have a different way of doing it. If you're creating sprites from scratch, this excerpt from something I posted back in '03 is the process that I've found works for me.
"Since I'm very new to the art form, my process for making custom sprites is rather long and drawn out. It's gonna take me some time before I learn to streamline it. Right now, I'm just interested in getting them to look right. I'll worry about economy of time later.
"I work on a Mac with Photoshop (PS), Illustrator (AI) and Flash MX (FMX). First, I draw the sprite on paper (I'm still VERY old fashioned that way) and scan it into PS saving it as a PS file. I bring the PS file into AI, clean it up and color it with highlights and shadows. I then take the new AI image and shrink it down to the average sprite size. I select the image and copy it.
Back in PS, I open a new file making sure the background is transparent. I paste in the AI image making sure there is no check mark in the anti-alias box - this retains the blocky look. Then I select the pencil tool and touch it up. Once retouched, I save it as a PNG file since I find that file type is most successful in retaining the transparent background when importing into FMX.
In FMX, I select the object, go to Modify > Trace Bitmap. Once that's done, I group it. Unless I'm going to tween the image, I don't bother converting it to a graphic symbol since I don't need to.
That's the LOOONG way right now, but it works for me just fine. The first few steps I'm used to already since that's how I start off all my Flash projects. The only thing that takes time there is waiting for the scanner to warm up."
If you're customizing already made sprites from a site like The Shyguy Kingdom or The People's Sprites, then simply bring them into a raster graphics (graphics that are made up of pixels) program like Photoshop or Paint and customize 'em. Just be sure that whatever tool you're using, be it a paintbrush or pencil, is set to the size of one pixel.
I hope this helps!