Clean Pixel Art

[Ed94]

Alright so I my situation is I'm making a game currently as a hobby, and as a way to learn a bit of programming. I plan to use the sprites in GIFs in conjunction with MonoGame. I plan to have it so that the character played is able to be personalized in appearance and able to show different items equipped.

 

So what I've been doing is pretty much trying out spriter before I buy it down the road. I ended up liking it, since it allows me to streamline the asset creation so I can get to the programming part.

 

Currently the art style is what you would consider high res pixel art.

 

Here is the concept level I will be testing animations in: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53147455/Slum%20Level.gif (Its big so I did not post the image.)

 

Here is the two stances I've done so far:

 

My style for animation was to keep the key frames only to get that more classic 90s arcade look. Also there is minimal shading since I plan to use sprite lamp in the future.

 

Female Idle Relaxed:

Due to the  tiny amount of movement in the animation, my sprites come out clean and nice, however when animating the walk its completely different.

From far away it looks fine for testing, however at around 150 -200% zoom you can see the roughness of the resamples done on the arms and legs. Unfortunately I was not able to find a way to properly keep the animation clean without going back into my sprite editor and retouching each frame.

 

Even with these problems this is still much more efficient than drawing a new animation for every single appearance change.

 

Is there a way for me to use a different sampler within Spriter or use something to clean up the edges from the sprite transformations made during the various key frames?

 

Taking off pixel art mode and keeping it at point sample some fixes the problem however when in point sample mode I lose the ability to be able to snap my sprite ligaments together.Also the shape cannot change with the movement so without pixel art mode it looks a bit more like a cutout animation.

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

Hi Ed94,

 

We do plan on adding additional filtering options, specifically to improve pixel art rotation etc, but that is still likely a ways off. So currently depending on the the type of art you're after, resolution, number of color etc, your best bet is what you're doing, to choose whatever gives you to closest results to what you're after, then do hand clean-up as needed per exported frame.

 

Obviously if you aren't specifically going for a retro-pixel art feeling, then using high res PNGs with alpha and using Spriter\s default filtered sampling provides attractive results without the need for clean-up.  

 

cheers,
Mike at BrashMonkey

[Ed94]

I was afraid so but that is alright. The product is still amazing, I'm noticing that doing some pre-planned reshaping to each pixel ligament after doing the animation and then refreshing the sprites in Spriter does a pretty good job of making it quite smoother. Here is the new compiled animation after doing this without even touching it up.

 

 

Now when I do hot-swap body parts, such as the bare legs with some pants, there will be less to clean up.

 

 

Thanks for the quick reply, I'm loving this program.