Best Quality Graphics.

C

colemanbeiler

Guest
Hello All,
I was wondering if anyone had some insight on their techniques to get high quality graphics into their game. Do most people use the in house editor? Photoshop? Spine?

Thanks,

Coleman
 

Rayek

Member
Pwah, that question is far too broad to answer in a few paragraphs. What I can tell you is that creating "high quality graphics" depends on an artist's base skills foremost and the particular software used is secondary to those skills to produce them. Good and appropriate tools will however assist the artist in arriving at the destination faster and with more flexibility.

Secondly, It depends on the type and style of game graphics you'd like your game to have that tends to dictate what type of software best serves the artist to produce them. For example, vector abstract styles are best and most efficiently created in a vector package such as Inkscape, Illustrator or Gravit Designer, or even PhotoLine (combination of bitmap and vector editor). Painterly game assets are most easily done with a bitmap-based editor such as Krita or Photoshop.

But instead of talking tools, I prefer to discuss asset PIPELINEs: it is naive to think that one tool only will provide all the flexibility you require when designing and developing games and their graphic assets.

In my case, I rely on various tools and software to produce assets: PhotoLine, Krita, Blender, Inkscape, ProMotion NG. various Photoshop plugins in PhotoLine (FilterForge, Nik), BlackMagic Fusion (for video editing), ClipStudio, OpenToonz, smaller utilities such as ColorQuantizer, and many more.

Each type of asset may require me to work in any number of applications to get it where I want it to be. I might start off in Blender, followed by Krita, PhotoLine, create sub-elements in InkScape, and animate in yet other software.

I almost never use image editors to create my assets which are built into game development environments. Just too limited. But I do use built-in animation tools, if available (Unity, Godot).

Anyway, it depends on the job at hand what asset generation pipeline I will adhere to. It is important to be tool-agnostic as an artist to produce "high quality graphics". And good technical knowledge how those assets will be implemented is highly helpful too.

Oh, and I'd like to add I absolutely refuse to rent my tools - in my mind I'd be stark mad to rely on rented dev and design tools. Which is why I would never use Adobe tools if I can help it.
 
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Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Which is why I would never use Adobe tools if I can help it.
GIMP is a pretty powerful free and open-source alternative (though it doesn't apply in your case since you rely on Photoshop-specific plugins). A lot of people has given it flack for its confusing GUI design, and I can definitely agree with that, but it's hard to argue with the price and it's still really easy to work in if you remap/memorize hotkeys for all your favorite commands. It's part of my "get hand-drawn art into my computer and make digital art outta it" pipeline, alongside a cheap Android phone's built-in camera. Really, you don't need that advanced tools if you just know how to use the tools at your disposal properly, and I've always been opposed to relying on automagic too much (because it has a tendency to go away because someone made an unrelated change somewhere when you wasn't looking).
 

Rayek

Member
I do use GIMP as a plugin of sorts in PhotoLine (PL supports round-trip editing in external apps). PhotoLine is an image editor which almost no-one heard of due to the developers' complete lack of interest to promote their application. It's been on the market since 1996 - over 22 years ago. I discovered it just before Adobe went rental-only, and haven't looked back. PhotoLine's layer stack does things Photoshop users can only dream of, and it is kinda a combo of Photoshop and Illustrator, with some DTP functionality thrown in as well.

But yeah, use whatever software gets you where you want to be. In my opinion a game developer ought to be very pragmatic and software-agnostic. And spend money when a commercial tool comes along that saves you hours of work. Don't limit yourself to free tools only.
 

Niels

Member
I use affinity designer, it's not free but it's a awesome program to draw sprites and assets!
It's basically illustrator with a build in pixelmode and all kinds of neat stuff.
 
Artistic skill matters a thousand times more than what tools you're using. If you're asking this question, you probably haven't been drawing very long...in which case, you should spend a few years with a pencil/charcoal and paper before worrying about doing any digital art. Every new artist out there asks "what tools should I use?", hoping to find the magic program that'll make their work look pro. The unfortunate answer is that it barely matters what tool you use at all. If you can't draw it on paper, you won't be able to draw it on the computer. The base process of drawing is almost exactly the same no matter what medium you're using.

That aside, there are a million digital tools out there, all suited to different art styles. Without knowing what kind of style you want for your game, it's impossible to give you a good answer to this question without just naming every decent art program on the market, haha!

Is there a certain game's look you had in mind that you wanted to aim for?
 
J

JLDP

Guest
I find Photoshop does everything I need. Although I wish it had better tools for creating tilables.
Hey Geoff Jones...I like your work mate!!!
A question to you (I am new to gamedev)...In Photoshop do you create your artwork in 300 pi or 72 pi? I want to create some backgrounds, characters and other graphics to use in GMS2.
 

mimusic

Member
tl:dr : when it comes to games, "good graphics" go beyond simply having well made art - it also requires that you are capable of using and manipulating that art in a way that does the gameplay and the art style justice.

---

Everything I'm saying here is in addition to what's already been said:
Keep in mind the skill level of yourself / teammates as a graphics programmer as well. You could have a set of beautifully crafted graphic assets that end up looking like a mess in-game because you don't know how to properly scale/rotate/animate the pieces. This applies even to the small-scale stuff like pixel art and minor iconography. I've seen plenty of games with either beautiful pixel art or hi-res art where things aren't animated or scaled properly and it ends up looking very unprofessional. This is probably why pixel art continues to be a very popular choice from a dev perspective, since it's pretty easy to animate a lil' pixel sprite (until you go higher res or throw in detailed shading, but a lot of indie devs don't bother with that).

Since games are real-time and not precomputed, there's also the trade-off between visuals and performance. Larger images means more/larger texture pages, meaning you need to be more mindful of how your organize the imagery within the program. More pieces in a skeleton means more transformations applied within a single frame, etc etc... The main point is that, from the programmer side of things, you want everything to be as small and simplified as possible -- without anybody noticing the difference. These days, this is more of a concern with 3D graphics than 2D, but efficiency is still efficiency even if you haven't hit the machine's threshold yet.

Now, if we're talking about character portraits or backdrops that don't really move or anything, the efficiency bit is much less of a concern...
 
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Rayek

Member
Hey Geoff Jones...I like your work mate!!!
A question to you (I am new to gamedev)...In Photoshop do you create your artwork in 300 pi or 72 pi? I want to create some backgrounds, characters and other graphics to use in GMS2.
When working on screen assets for games, DPI / PPI are useless, and you think in actual pixels used on a screen. This again depends on the game's screen resolution you choose.

Geoff's portrait images are drawn at 48x48 pixels (quite a low resolution) based on real photos. (Scroll down on his WIP page to learn more about his process: https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.p...e-savage-rpg-branching-dialogue-system.21447/)

In a nutshell, your game graphics choice of resolution depends on:
  • the base screen resolution of your game and the number of resolutions you must support. Forget dpi/ppi.
  • the game graphics style (pixel art versus something like Skull Girls or a painterly style)
  • whether you need to zoom in and out (more detail needed for zoomed in graphics, or not?)
  • minimum hardware requirements (high resolution 1920x1080 graphics take up WAY more video memory compared to a low-res
  • asset detail. Higher resolution generally means more detail, and more detail means more time required to create the assets.
  • your art and drawing skill.
  • the type of game. A point-and-click adventure game may require quite detailed backgrounds and graphics in general. But it depends on the overall graphic style.
  • future developments. You may want to decide to work at higher resolutions, and scale down your work. This will give more flexibility later down the road, if need be.
  • vector or bitmap based. For a very clean edge look vector graphics may be the best solution, and to maintain this look when converting the assets to bitmap, a higher resolution is required, e.g., Next Penelope and Mark of the Ninja.
  • mixed resolutions, which complicate matters further. For example, Shantae: Risky's Revenge combines low resolution 16-bit in-game pixel art with high resolution GUI and character dialog screens.
Which all means it depends on many factors, and there is no "best resolution". It depends. You need to decide what works best for your particular game.

Existing threads covering (parts of) this topic:

https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.php?threads/how-to-decide-on-resolution-and-graphics-size.586/
https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.p...d-aspect-ratio-management-for-gms1-gms2.7106/
 
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Joe Ellis

Member
Its definitely down to the artist to make it look good, doesn't matter what tools they use they find a way to make it look good, and sometimes limitations lead to more creative ideas
 
T

Timze

Guest
If you have a tablet you can use pretty much whatever.

If your a mouse only user? adobe illustrator. It has a built in line correction function. Say you draw a face shape in gimp. The micro movements your hands make will cause undesired results. Unless you happen to have the hands of a surgeon. Long clean up process. Illustrator uses vector images and any line you draw, corrects those micro movements. you can also manipulate the path at various anchor points to reshape how you see fit. Can also draw your designs on paper then trace over them easily to get a nice digital version.

Software does matter. In fact it makes a huge difference. If you're a mouse user. One program will inhibit your ability while the other will let it flourish. Some will argue that the free software is just as good you just need to know how to use it. Which means, taking over 3 months just to learn every in and out of the program. Every function. Every knook and cranny. Which is a long time away from game development.

Heck i used GIMP for 10+ years and am quite familiar with it yet everything i do in illustrator looks much, much better. It's more efficient, easier to work with, less clean up / fiddling and took less time to learn.
 
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If you have a tablet you can use pretty much whatever.

If your a mouse only user? adobe illustrator. It has a built in line correction function. Say you draw a face shape in gimp. The micro movements your hands make will cause undesired results. Unless you happen to have the hands of a surgeon. Long clean up process. Illustrator uses vector images and any line you draw, corrects those micro movements. you can also manipulate the path at various anchor points to reshape how you see fit. Can also draw your designs on paper then trace over them easily to get a nice digital version.

Software does matter. In fact it makes a huge difference. If you're a mouse user. One program will inhibit your ability while the other will let it flourish. Some will argue that the free software is just as good you just need to know how to use it. Which means, taking over 3 months just to learn every in and out of the program. Every function. Every knook and cranny. Which is a long time away from game development.

Heck i used GIMP for 10+ years and am quite familiar with it yet everything i do in illustrator looks much, much better. It's more efficient, easier to work with, less clean up / fiddling and took less time to learn.
Or just download Lazy Nezumi or Silky Shark, and use whatever program you want, even with a mouse, heheh. ;D
 

sylvain_l

Member
Artistic skill matters a thousand times more than what tools you're using. If you're asking this question, you probably haven't been drawing very long...in which case, you should spend a few years with a pencil/charcoal and paper before worrying about doing any digital art. Every new artist out there asks "what tools should I use?", hoping to find the magic program that'll make their work look pro. The unfortunate answer is that it barely matters what tool you use at all. If you can't draw it on paper, you won't be able to draw it on the computer. The base process of drawing is almost exactly the same no matter what medium you're using.
For me there is a giant difference between digital and real drawing/painting.
for example ctrl+Z (which is a wonder and a curse)
some principles applies to both, but how you work can differ a lot.
 
For me there is a giant difference between digital and real drawing/painting.
for example ctrl+Z (which is a wonder and a curse)
some principles applies to both, but how you work can differ a lot.
Well, how you work in any medium is going to differ a lot. Pencil is different than watercolor is different than oils is different than pastels is different from Photoshop. My point was that the core of drawing - visualizing an image in your head well enough to put it down on your canvas is roughly the same with all mediums. A good oil painter might have trouble handling pastels for the first week, but his knowledge of color and form is going to carry directly over.
 
Actually that is how all good art starts out with. Then "just" fill in the details :D
Not all good art! ;)


I've seen artists of much lesser skill drawing "straight through," too. Lots of artists skip construction and just start with the details straight away. I'm trying to practice this, too. It's great for your visualization.
 

Rayek

Member
That's because they are able to visualize the underlying shapes and forms in their mind's eye, and have so much practice drawing that they draw the detailed shapes without the need for initial construction.

I've noticed it myself: years ago I used construction for everything, but I no longer do this for everything. My mind knows how to construct things much better now, and often I can omit the very basic construction.

It's funny, because as young teens we (most of us) try to start drawing the details (such as eyes), and then draw other details and shapes around these. Then we learn it is better to start with basic construction, and fill in the details. Then at some point we get better at drawing and neuronal connections have settled, and at that point it becomes possible to do the initial grunt work mentally, and draw detailed forms right from the beginning.

Having said this, I am aware of young children who seem to be able to draw perfect detailed forms in perfect perspective. So somehow those children just "see" what to draw. Symbolic thinking doesn't get in the way of their seeing.
 
Actually that is how all good art starts out with. Then "just" fill in the details :D
No, I really meant in-game haha. Like no sprites, only using the inbuilt drawing functions haha.
You too can make something just as amazing as this jam game

Kidding aside, I usually use MSpaint to start and Photoshop to clean it up and make it pretty. I've started using my android tablet to draw a bit, using a nice program called Medibang, my last jam game Impulse I drew it all in Medibang. And that turned out kinda nice.
 

Joe Ellis

Member
Paint tool sai is a really nice drawing program, https://www.systemax.jp/en/sai/
and pretty cheap,
it's similar to fire alpaca but its just better somehow, my friend who I'm working with now used that for years, he uses clip paint studio now cus it's alot better for making animations with, it lets you draw each frame with the others behind it faded so you can really make the movements just right
 

Rayek

Member
Paint tool sai is a really nice drawing program, https://www.systemax.jp/en/sai/
and pretty cheap,
it's similar to fire alpaca but its just better somehow, my friend who I'm working with now used that for years, he uses clip paint studio now cus it's alot better for making animations with, it lets you draw each frame with the others behind it faded so you can really make the movements just right
ClipStudio is pretty awesome. I use that, Krita, and Pro Motion NG for most of my graphic asset creation, with PhotoLine for general image manipulation.

Btw, Krita runs circles around Paint Tool Sai, in my opinion - and Krita is free. Still, I know people myself who really seem to like Sai. And to be fair, the hardware system requirements for Sai are much lower.

Pro Motion NG is excellent for pixel art. Kinda like the "Photoshop" standard for that work. Not free, though, and a bit more complex to get into. But arguably the "best" in terms of features and control.
 
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