best program to create vector art.

T

teamrocketboyz

Guest
Hello all i have made a few small games here and i work alone. so far the games look ok but i create my sprites using a mixture of the in engine sprite editor and gimp, im yet to ever make a tileset myself i usually grab one offline, (bad i know).

as a big fan of the vector art style, especially in 2d games im wondering what are the best programs to create tilesets and sprites, especially in vector form. that can be used in gms? are there any specific programs that exist with the sole purpose of just creating tilesets and sprites?
 
W

Will

Guest
Adobe Illustrator is great for vector art. Comes at a US $19/month price tag, so it's a little pricey.

For pixel art, I can't recommend Aesprite enough! It does have a free trial version, and the license for the full version is only a one-time payment of US $15.
 

The-any-Key

Member
This have been covered before:
Best program to create vector graphics:
For an artist: Any program that is used to create vector graphics (ex Inkscape...)
For an coder: undefined, null, chr(0), simply don't exists (hire an artist)
 
M

mjadev

Guest
for vector art, I recommend Affinity Designer:
not very expensive (about 55€ for lifetime license), powerful and easy to use (even for a beginner like me...)
 

Rayek

Member
I am just going to throw in PhotoLine, which is a bit of a strange beast, since it is BOTH an excellent image editor AND a good vector editor, opening up original ways of doing game art. It works together really well with the other apps I use (Inkscape, Krita, and others) via the built-in external app link option.

PhotoLine is 59 euros. No stupid rental: you get a perpetual license. And it works on both 32bit and 64bit systems, PC and Mac. Can be installed on a USB stick too. https://www.pl32.com/

If you are interested in a free option that offers a LOT of vector functionality then Gravit Designer is definitely worth a look as well. No bitmap editing support, though. https://www.designer.io

Inkscape is quite nice too, and is open source and free. It is used by the guy behind http://www.2dgameartguru.com/
I use it in combination with PhotoLine - they complement each-other quite well. Send a vector layer or group to Inkscape from PhotoLine, edit, save, and it automatically updates the art in PhotoLine.

The missing link is animation in PhotoLine, Affinity Designer, Gravit Designer, and Inkscape, though. A primary reason why Flash or Animate CC is often still used to create game (vector) art.
For vector animation, I use OpenToonz (https://github.com/opentoonz/opentoonz_nightlies/releases), which (in my opinion) blows Animate CC out of the water for this type of work, and is open source and free again!

Btw, none of these will magically turn anyone in a good game art designer ;-P
 

Coded Games

Member
I use Affinity Photo, its not meant for vector art but still has enough features to do stuff. Affinity Designer is basically the same but entirely focused on vector art; I just haven't seen a reason to buy it since I already have Photo.
 

Niels

Member
I use Affinity Photo, its not meant for vector art but still has enough features to do stuff. Affinity Designer is basically the same but entirely focused on vector art; I just haven't seen a reason to buy it since I already have Photo.
The power of affinity designer is that you can draw in vectors and switch to bitmap/pixel for shading/coloring with 1 buttonpress
 

Rayek

Member
The power of affinity designer is that you can draw in vectors and switch to bitmap/pixel for shading/coloring with 1 buttonpress
That's one of the things I like in PhotoLine as well. Although in PL there is far more control over the bitmap layer itself compared. Then again, Affinity Designer has more advanced bitmap brush controls. Win some, lose some.

Unfortunately, both applications and Affinity Photo don't allow the user to work with an indexed colour mode. I wish developers would focus a bit more on the wants and needs of the game asset creation workflow at times.

And animation is always a sore point in vector drawing software. Which is why I like OpenToonz so much, because it has quite nice vector drawing tools and an advanced bitmap brush engine (MyPaint) which goes beyond what Affinity can do. It's also easy to draw your line art on paper, convert it to crisp normalized vector strokes in OpenToonz, colour your work, and start animating.
 
A

AnonyMouse

Guest
I am using Seriff DrawPlus which is the predecessor of Affinity Designer and it does everything I need (almost). For tilesets you can test Pattern Studio by Mediachance, it has great features but is missing some features. It can work at seamless mode with 9 squares. For animated sprites I have some old app I think it was called Moho but I am not sure (it has bones), my vector animations are simple and I am using DrawPlus.
PhotoLine is very interesting but I dont have enough time to switch to it now.
Actually most software is for painting like Painter or photoediting and software for tilesets/games backgrounds-texturing are hard to find.
 
Top