09-20-2008, 02:32 PM
I have recently gotten into heated discussion concerning the drawing and animation of sprites. Right now I am working on assets for a student game meant for the Nintendo DS and am one of the leaders. Unfortunately I'm no professional artist and am definitely new to pixel art. I thank you ahead of time if you read through this to help me with my dilemma.
Many tutorials I have seen say to use the pencil tool for sprites. That is, place every pixel by hand. However, a friend of mine who says he's studied a lot of low resolution art, says that using vectors such as shapes and such in Illustrator and Fireworks makes a cleaner sprite that is easier to animate. He also suggested lots of anti-aliasing to make it look smoother.
I can see where he is going with this, but I wanted to ask a spriting community for input. I find that using the pencil tool gives me more control, but the idea of vectoring to make it easier to animate sounds appealing. What should I do? Is it better to have more control and draw each frame by hand, or do I go with the shapes? Does anyone have more professional experience they would like to share? Thanks again, your help is appreciated.
Many tutorials I have seen say to use the pencil tool for sprites. That is, place every pixel by hand. However, a friend of mine who says he's studied a lot of low resolution art, says that using vectors such as shapes and such in Illustrator and Fireworks makes a cleaner sprite that is easier to animate. He also suggested lots of anti-aliasing to make it look smoother.
I can see where he is going with this, but I wanted to ask a spriting community for input. I find that using the pencil tool gives me more control, but the idea of vectoring to make it easier to animate sounds appealing. What should I do? Is it better to have more control and draw each frame by hand, or do I go with the shapes? Does anyone have more professional experience they would like to share? Thanks again, your help is appreciated.