Hi all,
I've recently started playing around with creating my own pixel art for prototyping a game idea I have, but I'm feeling a bit frustrated with the experience so far, so I thought this might be a friendly and knowledgeable corner of the internet to ask what everyone else is using and if anyone has any specific recommendations or advice to share.
I bought the full version of Pro Motion NG (
http://www.cosmigo.com/) some time ago, thinking I might as well spend my time learning a proper tool for this. While I've managed to piece together a reasonable workflow for working with animations, the near-vertical learning curve (very non-intuitive user interface and apparently not much of a user community) constantly makes me switch back to GIMP or Krita for trivial editing tasks.
I'm a bit frustrated at the moment - it feels like it shouldn't be this hard to create pixel art, when I compare it to other skills I've learned over the years - or maybe I'm just getting too old to pick up new stuff? :-/
Anyway - what do you pixel purists out there use? Should I just learn to love Pro Motion or would it be better to use a combination of tools I already know?
Comments
Hexel 2 from Marmoset (the toolbag guys).
As with any art tool, you can do some neato stuff in there
(Also comes with something to make animations, inside the tool)
(Sprite Illuminator is neat as well!)
https://www.humblebundle.com/game-developer-software-bundle
This was done, out of the box with the bevel tool. 1 Pixel wide and no softening.
I think it looks superfancy (rotating light is a thing made in there as well).
So, it generates normal maps, and they work well in unity too.
However, I haven't yet figured out how to give each frame in an animation the corrosponding normal map (I use the standart shader on the sprite in unity). Also, the lack of a bacth process feature would mean that I need to do all by hand.
Anyways. Have some lighting:
You CAN do batch processing in SpriteIlluminator!
And it all works amazingly easy in Unity as well!
I experimented a bit with some animation I had:
This is how I started:
And this is what became of the experiment:
And this is in a Scene:
I have to admit, I did cheat a little. Once I experimented enough with SpriteIlluminator, I took what I knew and applied it to some Photoshop aktions, in order to work more precise.
Nonetheless, I agree!
If you are into 2D stuff, this bundle is WAY too good to ignore
This is something I wanted to get into as well!
How did you get it to work?
Basically you need 2-3 things!
1.) a double-sided shader, that allowes a diffuse, a normal and a lightwrap slot for textures
2.) a normal map (which in my case was basically just a white silhouette of my sprite, with soft edges, on black background)
3.) an edge mask (which basically is just a white line, that discribes the outline of the sprite, with a very tiny soft edge going in)
Edit:
I haven't manages shadows though!
Teach me your secrets!
Then you throw a material onto the sprite, select the shader and put on the textures!
I'm rubbish at explaining via text, so a video will come soon