what would be the best program to make graphics on the tools page (http://gamesalad.com/wiki/resources#tools) for a beginner trying to learn and start off with graphics making?
To get started you can make some ok art with paintbrush. It is basically MS Paint for mac. It won't be the quality of inkscape or illustrator. But it is easy to use and a great place to start for a beginner. Otherwise go with inkscape and check out Spriteattack's tutorials on the forums, they are incredible!!!
I think it best to try a few things out, each for a few hours to see how you get along with them and which suits your style. I work heavily with drawn images and animation and tend to avoid vector graphic, as I often work with scanned drawings and want to preserve the line quality and look. For this photoshop or the free sumo paint are great. If you want to build art that is shape based on geometrics or have a style that is suited to vectors... then vectors is the way to go. The advantage of vectors is scaling, in that it doesn't matter what size you work at the graphics will scale until you export as bitmaps.Working with bitmaps you have to bear in mind the maximum output size you will ever want at work or that size or you will end up with visible degrading of the images. Any program that uses layer can be used to output animation as you can move the layers about to export different frames, but actual animation programs or programs that have animation features will allow you to see the movement as you work.
Pixen (which is bitmap and free) offers animation and is very good at retro 8bit style graphics. I wouldn't use it for ease of use for backgrounds. There is also a free animation program called Pencil. This is good (if a little buggy) and does vector and bitmap animation. I use it in preference to Flash, but I draw very quickly (with a wacom in this case) and the bitmap tools suit me.
If you use a variety of tools one issue is the scaling to final sprite art. For this I use after effect. This is great but expensive. (There are student deals for Adobe products which I would check out if you are in education). After Effect can also take graphics and you can build them into puppet with parent and child relationships (The foot bone is connected to the leg bone, the leg bone is connect to the knee bone, etc) This is fab, and you can also add shape distortion over time which allows quiet complex animation of simple shapes. There are other animation programs that have similar tools. If you have an ipad look at DoInk as it is cheap and you can do some clever stuff with it. One problem is that it outputs movie files so if you want to make sprites that have alpha transparency (so you can have shapes other than rectangles as actors), you have to put your animation on a solid colour that you can 'key out' in another program.
A lot of the kids drawing and animation programs out there are simple and good, and I would advice having a look at them to see if they cover what you want to do. On iOS devices there is a simple geometric drawing program from Japan called 'Maru'. This is limited but fantastic for making symbols and icons for things like pause/play button, sound icons and the like.
I know this is a lot to take in, and I may just be confusing you, but I would say 'play', and draw with almost anything that gives you results you like. It might take a while to get there, but it is really worth it. A Wacom tablet is far better than trying to draw with a mouse but you can draw on paper and scan or photograph you images to get them into the system.
cheers kipper
Braydon_SFXMember, Sous Chef, Bowlboy SidekickPosts: 9,273
@RKS - Also, sumopaint is 100x better then even PhotoShop (when it works). If it didn't stop working every once in a while, it would be AMAZING.
Comments
Youngster9
Pixen (which is bitmap and free) offers animation and is very good at retro 8bit style graphics. I wouldn't use it for ease of use for backgrounds. There is also a free animation program called Pencil. This is good (if a little buggy) and does vector and bitmap animation. I use it in preference to Flash, but I draw very quickly (with a wacom in this case) and the bitmap tools suit me.
If you use a variety of tools one issue is the scaling to final sprite art. For this I use after effect. This is great but expensive. (There are student deals for Adobe products which I would check out if you are in education). After Effect can also take graphics and you can build them into puppet with parent and child relationships (The foot bone is connected to the leg bone, the leg bone is connect to the knee bone, etc) This is fab, and you can also add shape distortion over time which allows quiet complex animation of simple shapes. There are other animation programs that have similar tools. If you have an ipad look at DoInk as it is cheap and you can do some clever stuff with it. One problem is that it outputs movie files so if you want to make sprites that have alpha transparency (so you can have shapes other than rectangles as actors), you have to put your animation on a solid colour that you can 'key out' in another program.
A lot of the kids drawing and animation programs out there are simple and good, and I would advice having a look at them to see if they cover what you want to do. On iOS devices there is a simple geometric drawing program from Japan called 'Maru'. This is limited but fantastic for making symbols and icons for things like pause/play button, sound icons and the like.
I know this is a lot to take in, and I may just be confusing you, but I would say 'play', and draw with almost anything that gives you results you like. It might take a while to get there, but it is really worth it. A Wacom tablet is far better than trying to draw with a mouse but you can draw on paper and scan or photograph you images to get them into the system.
cheers kipper
That is all just your opinion m8.
My GameSalad Academy Courses! ◦ Check out my quality templates! ◦ Add me on Skype: braydon_sfx