flaredshadow
Member
Hello all,
I was just wondering if there was anyone out there who could give me some advice for bringing in drawings done with actual pen/paint/paper and using them as sprites. When I use a camera or scanner to get a digital version of my artist's drawings the resulting file is huge compared to the traditional sprite sheets I've used in the past. This comes as no shock to me since my artist used most of the space on a standard size piece of paper to draw the first character (I'm talking one still image here, not even the entire sprite sheet). I intend to ask my artist to break down the character drawing into several different pieces such that things like facial expression. limb motion, clothing/accessories can all be drawn in parallel at run/time.
I have been looking into hiring a Spine animator so that my artist does not have to draw frame by frame. My artist is a family member who offered to design my characters (he is a retired professional artist). Animating isn't really his thing but he is quite talented imo. I don't want to go overboard with this favor by asking for animation from him.
My two main questions to the community are:
1. Do you generally feel Spine is well supported in Gamemaker (GMS2 to be specific) to the point that it is worth learning how to integrate it? (I'm skeptical of using it since I've seen a lot of complaints about it not being fully implemented / well implemented according to people on the forums here)
2. What approach would you take to making an artists hand-drawn images be the right size for a game?
a) Asking the artist to draw smaller
b) Scaling the scans down with a program like paint.net
c) Using variables like image_xscale and image_yscale (I figure this is the worst idea since it could have the most direct effects on the games code and processing)
d) Some other strategy not listed here
thanks for reading!
I was just wondering if there was anyone out there who could give me some advice for bringing in drawings done with actual pen/paint/paper and using them as sprites. When I use a camera or scanner to get a digital version of my artist's drawings the resulting file is huge compared to the traditional sprite sheets I've used in the past. This comes as no shock to me since my artist used most of the space on a standard size piece of paper to draw the first character (I'm talking one still image here, not even the entire sprite sheet). I intend to ask my artist to break down the character drawing into several different pieces such that things like facial expression. limb motion, clothing/accessories can all be drawn in parallel at run/time.
I have been looking into hiring a Spine animator so that my artist does not have to draw frame by frame. My artist is a family member who offered to design my characters (he is a retired professional artist). Animating isn't really his thing but he is quite talented imo. I don't want to go overboard with this favor by asking for animation from him.
My two main questions to the community are:
1. Do you generally feel Spine is well supported in Gamemaker (GMS2 to be specific) to the point that it is worth learning how to integrate it? (I'm skeptical of using it since I've seen a lot of complaints about it not being fully implemented / well implemented according to people on the forums here)
2. What approach would you take to making an artists hand-drawn images be the right size for a game?
a) Asking the artist to draw smaller
b) Scaling the scans down with a program like paint.net
c) Using variables like image_xscale and image_yscale (I figure this is the worst idea since it could have the most direct effects on the games code and processing)
d) Some other strategy not listed here
thanks for reading!
