A dedicated tool for pixel art

[Eigen]

Hey.

I have never been really active here but I used to hang around a few years ago, anyway. So, what's new? The reason I'm posting this is because I'm looking for suggestions and ideas for a little plan I have. I'm thinking of writing a program as a final work in university to get my degree. I'm not sure yet, if that plan goes into action, but nevertheless I want to write a little paint program especially for PIXEL ART. I'm posting this here because I know there are a lot of artists here. I looked around in different forums where people were discussing best software for pixel art and it was mostly either heavyweight Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro, GIMP or MS Paint, so mixed results. I like Paint best myself, but it lacks layers and other smaller features like gradients, dithering and such (and alpha channel).

Then I thought to myself "hey, I can write a paint-with-layers-plus-other-stuff (tm) myself". So, here I am. I gather that besides being able to paint and zoom in (man, the features of this thing ..), the software should be able to handle loops and frames for animation, preview animation, export sprite sheets and sequence of images. Sprite sheet import would be nice as well, at least for uniformly sized sheets. Ability to manage palettes would be nice as well. So, going from daytime to night would only require changing the palette not repainting the frames.

Also layers for sure and attaching animations to another animation. For example, you animate a walking character and want it to hold a flaming torch. You assign a hot spot to character hand on each frame of the walking animation and attach a torch animation to it and export the sprite sheet. Done. And when you want, you can replace the torch with an balloon or a blue cup without having to redraw the character's frames.

I looked around and there's nothing specifically for pixel art, so, is this idea worth pursuing? If it is, post your ideas what else this program should include If you think this idea is rubbish, I'd like to hear about it as well.


Eigen

[Anian]

Easy alpha channel/transparency handling, anitaliasing (though this is not a must), gradient, you can always try a tracing tool, like Adobe Illustrator has, but instead of vectors, pixels are drawn... 

[Pinback]

It sounds like a fantastic idea. If you can get the hotspot animation feature working, to allow one to attach an animation to another- I'm sold. That idea alone would likely double my productivity, not to mention open up a huge range of posibilities for complex animations on the one sprite, without the legwork of doing them all simultaneously frame by frame- which I find extremely tedious and difficult to do with any level of complexity/dynamism.

[GarageGothic]

Pro Motion isn't free, but as far as I can tell one of the best dedicated programs for Deluxe Paint style pixel animation. I think it would be hard to beat, but a I'd be happy to see a free alternative and perhaps it can provide inspiration. Good luck with the project.

[Gilbert]

Grafx2 is another free and modern DP clone that's worth checking. I mainly do stuff with Edge though.

[Calin Leafshade]

www.aseprite.org is the one i use for animations due to its simplicity and palette control.

[RickJ]

I really like how Graphics Gale handles animation especially it's ability to name and export animations as individual frames.

http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/

You may also want to consider using QT as the basis of your project.  It is cross platform (the same source can be compiled for Win, Linux, Mac, and others), it has an extensive 2d and SVG drawing capabilities as well as web/network libraries.   

Of particular interest for animation it has built-in ability to group and attach graphic objects so that if an object is rotated or moved then any objects that are attached are automatically moved/rotated.  Consider a leg animation consisting of thigh, calf, and foot objects connected at the appropriate points.   If the calf object is rotated at the knee  the foot object moves along with the ankle end of the calf object and is moved and rotated so that it maintains it's orientation and position relative to the ankle connection point.  It seems to be all built into the  drawing libraries.   

Just some ideas to consider.

Cheers and good luck with your project

[Eggie]

Sounds like a great idea.

There's a feature I've been wanting in a decent paint program for ages; the ability to shift the whole image in a direction and have the pixels you moved off the page appear on the other side; really useful for making seamless tiles.
I believe the only program I've seen to have it is the built in RPG Toolkit tile editor and in other respects it's quite an unusable program.

[Snarky]

Errr, Photoshop does that. (Filter|Other|Offset...|Undefined Areas:Wrap Around)

[InCreator]

ArtGem does all my layers, grid and pixel work
Sprite Editor of Game Maker does all the animation, tilesheets, etc stuff.

Never needed anything else.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

GG mentioned it already, but Pro Motion is what I use every day and it has paid for itself 10 times over in versatility and features.

[Eigen]

Thanks guys for the feedback.

Easy alpha channel/transparency handling, anitaliasing (though this is not a must), gradient, you can always try a tracing tool, like Adobe Illustrator has, but instead of vectors, pixels are drawn... 

Sound like sensible features, though I haven't used Adobe Illustrator, so what's that tool?

It sounds like a fantastic idea. If you can get the hotspot animation feature working, to allow one to attach an animation to another- I'm sold. That idea alone would likely double my productivity, not to mention open up a huge range of posibilities for complex animations on the one sprite, without the legwork of doing them all simultaneously frame by frame- which I find extremely tedious and difficult to do with any level of complexity/dynamism.

Yes, this was the first thing that came to mind when I was thinking about what this program should do. Seems useful.

You may also want to consider using QT as the basis of your project.  It is cross platform (the same source can be compiled for Win, Linux, Mac, and others), it has an extensive 2d and SVG drawing capabilities as well as web/network libraries.

QT seems a little excessive for what I want to do. I tried it out though, and seems it's more useful when dealing with vectorized graphics rather than pure pixels. Having a 3x6 set of pixels (for a foot eg.) attached to a "bone" and then rotating it would probably not look nearly as good as with vectors. For a first prototype I'm using GTK in which I have a little test app running already.

There's a feature I've been wanting in a decent paint program for ages; the ability to shift the whole image in a direction and have the pixels you moved off the page appear on the other side; really useful for making seamless tiles.
I believe the only program I've seen to have it is the built in RPG Toolkit tile editor and in other respects it's quite an unusable program.

Sound simple enough. Thanks for the idea.

I'll check out these programs you guys mentioned.

[InCreator]

There's a feature I've been wanting in a decent paint program for ages; the ability to shift the whole image in a direction and have the pixels you moved off the page appear on the other side; really useful for making seamless tiles.
I believe the only program I've seen to have it is the built in RPG Toolkit tile editor and in other respects it's quite an unusable program.

ArtGem (see above) also does. You can even spraypaint/stroke/whatever and everything teleports around eges.

[Eggie]

Huuuh, I visited it's page and it sound good but... it's also been discontinued and the version I downloaded needs a registration thing so...uh... fuurghh...
And I can't afford photoshop.
So feature still needed!

[InCreator]

When I say "see above" then I've probably provided something useful, such as a link

Crack included and since it's discontinued, I guess cracking is legal. Cracked state tends to fail sometimes (once in 3-4 months or so), it's easy to restore if you simply manually erase whole "HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareRL Vision" folder from registry and restart program (which will restore it).

---
It's rather simple program, say, MSPaint on triple steroids. Perfect for pixel work, not so much for photo manipulation, etc. Biggest downside is odd way it uses snap-to-grid (32x32 snap results in 33x33 rectangles?), only 16 layers per image, and lack of (useful) filters, but everything else makes it quite a powerful tool. Been using for ages and every image I've ever made.

99% of work is done basically by painting an area with base color, pressing "3" on keyboard to switch processor to brighten/darken, and right/left clicking like crazy.

See my youtube drawing tutorials (link in signature) to see how quickly things get awesome.

[Wersus]

since it's discontinued, I guess cracking is legal.

Understandable but not legal. Just because you stop selling your product doesn't mean that you lose the copyright to it.

[InCreator]

Who cares? They don't. I don't.