Post by Morph on Oct 20, 2006 4:25:44 GMT -5
Welcome to "Spriting Lessons". Here, I will tell y'all various things you need to know about spriting. Also, you, the members, can contribute here by giving advice yourselves. After all, nobody's perfect, and that goes for me as well.
Spriting Lessons
1 - Sprite Resources
2 - Recolouring
3 - Editing
4 - Custom Spriting
Alright let the Lessons begin!
1 - Sprite Resources: Getting the sprites.
For your resources, you can simply search at Google for "sprites" and then also enter for what kind of sprites you are looking for. Examples are Link, Mega Man, Pokémon, and Sonic.
To make things easier for you, I'll go ahead and give you a few sites that have a lot of sprites:
The Spriter's Resource - one of the largest sprite sites I've ever encountered, having sprites of many games.
Sprites Inc. - has nearly ALL Mega Man related sprites. Nearly.
Crash & Bass - the site is for a Mega Man comic, but this page has sprites for everyone to use.
The Shyguy Kingdom - has a decent amount of sprites of a rather large amount of different games.
Pokemon Elite 2000 - for Pokémon sprites.
Game Sprite Archives - the name says it, a lot of sprites from a lot of games.
Ren's Comic Zone - they sure do have a lot of Chao sprites.
Aside from using those sites, you could also rip the sprites directly from a game. To do this, you'll need an emulator of a console or handheld, and have downloaded the game, such as from a site as DGEmu. After this is done, start up the game, and directly copy the image you wish to have by using ALT and PRINTSCREEN (located above the INSERT button). After this, you paste it into Paint of Photoshop or whatever you use, and erase the parts you don't want to have.
2 - Recolouring:
Recolouring is one of the easiest things in the area of spriting. You actually do nothing more than swap one colour for another, and repeat that also for the layers of shading and highlighting.
First, here we have a sprite, taken from Pokémon Elite 2000:
Looks cute, eh? Well, now we are going to change the yellow into light red.
->
Now that we have chosen the colour to be changed, and the colour to be changed into, let's move on.
Click on the eye-dropper tool - or whatever it's called - and select the yellow with left. Then, click the eye-dropper tool again, and select the light red with right. After this, click on the eraser, and HOLD the RIGHT mouse button. While you are holding it, go over the entire picture of which you wish to swap colours, and then...
However, you can see this doesn't look all that good. The shaded parts aren't yet recoloured, so that needs to be done as well. Since these shaded yellow areas are just darker versions of the formerly yellow parts that now are recoloured into light red, we will just need to take a darker shade of red for these shaded parts.
Finally, we will have something like this:
That's better!
3 - Editing
Editing means changing a sprite so that it looks like an original sprite. Often you can still see the base that was used for it, such as a Mega Man Zero styled Zero body:
Now, I'll be using this sprite as a base to create a different sprite of an original character. This is done by either erasing and adding parts to the base, sometimes the additions are parts from other sprites. If you want to use parts from other sprites as well, it is best to take parts from sprites that are in the same style as the base, such as a Pokémon and a Pokémon, or Vegeta and Goku, or, in my case:
Harpuia, green Guardian of the Wind!
Now, there are a couple of things to do:
1. Change the direction of where one of the two is looking to.
2. Decide which parts of Harpuia we will use.
3. Erase parts of the base that will not be needed because of the parts of Harpuia we will use.
4. Put together the base and the parts to get an as good-as-possible result, smoothly-looking-wise.
5. Recolour the whole. We don't want to see a green head on a red body in a way it seems totally off, do we? ^_~
So for 1 I will change the direction Zero is looking to by selecting him with the "select" tool in Paint, then click "image" in the bar at the top, and click on "mirror/change direction", where I will choose for "mirror image horizontally".
Then for 2 I choose Harpuia's head and lower legs:
Ai, that left leg (right for us) looks a little... "ouchy" at the top, doesn't it? It isn't complete, so we will have to add a little to that, perhaps... but wait! When we look closer, we see that Harpuia's lower legs are longer than Zero's. (Sleeker, too.) So that would make the tip of Harpy's lower leg get underneath Zero's hand if we place it on him. (Of course, to place it right, we'll first need to remove Zero's right arm, just to put it back after we have put Harpy's legs in place.)
After 3 and 4 are also done, we will have something like this:
Looks rather well put together, even though I'm the one saying it! However, the colours don't go together very well, so why don't we take a while recolouring him, eh?
So! After 5 is also done, we might just have something looking like this:
OTHER LESSONS TO COME AT A LATER DATE
Spriting Lessons
1 - Sprite Resources
2 - Recolouring
3 - Editing
4 - Custom Spriting
Alright let the Lessons begin!
1 - Sprite Resources: Getting the sprites.
For your resources, you can simply search at Google for "sprites" and then also enter for what kind of sprites you are looking for. Examples are Link, Mega Man, Pokémon, and Sonic.
To make things easier for you, I'll go ahead and give you a few sites that have a lot of sprites:
The Spriter's Resource - one of the largest sprite sites I've ever encountered, having sprites of many games.
Sprites Inc. - has nearly ALL Mega Man related sprites. Nearly.
Crash & Bass - the site is for a Mega Man comic, but this page has sprites for everyone to use.
The Shyguy Kingdom - has a decent amount of sprites of a rather large amount of different games.
Pokemon Elite 2000 - for Pokémon sprites.
Game Sprite Archives - the name says it, a lot of sprites from a lot of games.
Ren's Comic Zone - they sure do have a lot of Chao sprites.
Aside from using those sites, you could also rip the sprites directly from a game. To do this, you'll need an emulator of a console or handheld, and have downloaded the game, such as from a site as DGEmu. After this is done, start up the game, and directly copy the image you wish to have by using ALT and PRINTSCREEN (located above the INSERT button). After this, you paste it into Paint of Photoshop or whatever you use, and erase the parts you don't want to have.
2 - Recolouring:
Recolouring is one of the easiest things in the area of spriting. You actually do nothing more than swap one colour for another, and repeat that also for the layers of shading and highlighting.
First, here we have a sprite, taken from Pokémon Elite 2000:
Looks cute, eh? Well, now we are going to change the yellow into light red.
->Now that we have chosen the colour to be changed, and the colour to be changed into, let's move on.
Click on the eye-dropper tool - or whatever it's called - and select the yellow with left. Then, click the eye-dropper tool again, and select the light red with right. After this, click on the eraser, and HOLD the RIGHT mouse button. While you are holding it, go over the entire picture of which you wish to swap colours, and then...
However, you can see this doesn't look all that good. The shaded parts aren't yet recoloured, so that needs to be done as well. Since these shaded yellow areas are just darker versions of the formerly yellow parts that now are recoloured into light red, we will just need to take a darker shade of red for these shaded parts.
Finally, we will have something like this:
That's better!
3 - Editing
Editing means changing a sprite so that it looks like an original sprite. Often you can still see the base that was used for it, such as a Mega Man Zero styled Zero body:
Now, I'll be using this sprite as a base to create a different sprite of an original character. This is done by either erasing and adding parts to the base, sometimes the additions are parts from other sprites. If you want to use parts from other sprites as well, it is best to take parts from sprites that are in the same style as the base, such as a Pokémon and a Pokémon, or Vegeta and Goku, or, in my case:
Harpuia, green Guardian of the Wind!
Now, there are a couple of things to do:
1. Change the direction of where one of the two is looking to.
2. Decide which parts of Harpuia we will use.
3. Erase parts of the base that will not be needed because of the parts of Harpuia we will use.
4. Put together the base and the parts to get an as good-as-possible result, smoothly-looking-wise.
5. Recolour the whole. We don't want to see a green head on a red body in a way it seems totally off, do we? ^_~
So for 1 I will change the direction Zero is looking to by selecting him with the "select" tool in Paint, then click "image" in the bar at the top, and click on "mirror/change direction", where I will choose for "mirror image horizontally".
Then for 2 I choose Harpuia's head and lower legs:
Ai, that left leg (right for us) looks a little... "ouchy" at the top, doesn't it? It isn't complete, so we will have to add a little to that, perhaps... but wait! When we look closer, we see that Harpuia's lower legs are longer than Zero's. (Sleeker, too.) So that would make the tip of Harpy's lower leg get underneath Zero's hand if we place it on him. (Of course, to place it right, we'll first need to remove Zero's right arm, just to put it back after we have put Harpy's legs in place.)
After 3 and 4 are also done, we will have something like this:
Looks rather well put together, even though I'm the one saying it! However, the colours don't go together very well, so why don't we take a while recolouring him, eh?
So! After 5 is also done, we might just have something looking like this:
OTHER LESSONS TO COME AT A LATER DATE
