toolkitzone.com - the official home of the rpg toolkit

HOME

COMMUNITY

1. Part 1: South-Facing

2. Part 2: Making a Sprite from Your Base >>

Creating and Using a Sprite Base
Part 1: South-Facing

This tutorial will cover everything I know about making and using a sprite base, from making the base to animating it to making sprites with it. I will cover both standard and isometric views. If you have a question, please comment and I will do my very best to explain! Please note which page you are commenting on, though, if there's something specific.

This part of the tutorial is not for southeast/southwest isometric views - those will be covered later in the tutorial. For now, start with a south-facing sprite. It can't hurt.

Step One: Choose a size for your sprite. This will depend on the type of sprites you are going for, so if you want to, find some sprites you like and note their size and proportions. Here, I have picked a 32x64 space to work in, and marked out some things:

X - Approximate top of head. (Putting it relatively low will give me plenty of room for big hair and varying the size of the sprites between short and tall characters.)

1-2 - Chin to hips. (This will also approximately mark the length of the arms.)

2-3 - Legs.

I am going for a highly stylized, "chibi" look, but with longer limbs, inspired by some art by various Nippon Ichi games, like this.

Step Two: Split your work area in half. Aside from helping to make your sprite symmetrical, this is also to make sure the sprite is centered. Remember to leave your guidelines intact. Make the two sides different colors if you are working with an even number of pixels horizontally.

Step Three: Now to start drawing your sprite! I always like to start with the chin, draw the head, and then work downward. I initially skip drawing the arm or draw it in another color so that I can still see the body. Depending on the type of sprite you want to make, you might want to draw a silhouette and avoid drawing lines, at least for now. It might be helpful to draw some parts that overlap the main body in another color. You should also mark in important features - in the case of my sprite, its most important feature is its eyes, so I have determined a general shape and size and marked them in.

Guidelines: For small/stylized sprites, start with a large circular shape for the head. From there, draw a rectangular body and add some width for the hips. Draw a line for the bottom of the feet, and mark out their width, then draw a line from the hip to the outside of the foot. (Paint's line tool is extremely useful for all of this as long as you understand that you will have to fix any bad lines later.) Do the same for the inside of the legs. Last, draw in some blobs for the hands at the sprite's sides, and mark out the width of the shoulders. Draw a line from the outside of the shoulders to the hands, and if necessary from the body to the inside of the hands.

Step Four: (Optional) If you want your sprite to have lines, this is when you should put them in. For each part of the body, you will have to decide whether your lines should be on the outside or inside of the color. Often you will have to just do what looks best on each piece and even omit lines in some places. For example, I have outlined my sprite here, but I decided to just leave it lineless.

That's it for the first part of this series of tutorials! Next up: Making a sprite from your base.

1. Part 1: South-Facing

2. Part 2: Making a Sprite from Your Base >>

Comments (19)

Grindalf

Pretty cool, incredibly simple and to the point TBD

1.12pm, April 18th, 2010