Just curious, why do GFX always incorporate the clip attached to the gun? It's would just make more sense to me to add the clip on during the gani process.

That seemed to be the norm so i just went with it. maybe to make it easier to deal with for idle animations?

When I used to do GANIs, it was a lot easier to have the solid sprite as well for the idle/walk/fire GANIs, especially if you were gonna make something complex (IE breathing animations, pulling a bolt on the fire, etc). Having to individually move and line up two sprites for every frame is more time consuming than importing an extra sprite.

Yeah, Amsel is right. There's only one gani per gun that needs a detachable clip, and that's the reload gani, and it doesn't make sense to make Gani artists' jobs even more time consuming just to save a few KBs in an image file.

On top of that, that's just how we draw it to start. Start with the whole gun -> copy and paste the clip and the gun without the clip separately. And it makes it easy to see at a glance what the whole gun looks like if you're looking at the image.

(Maybe if someone wanted to script a new, modern gani editor where you could link layers so they move with each other but otherwise still maintain their separation, like in Photoshop, we could stop including the whole gun)

I bet we could make a nice select tool to attach multiple images to each other. Sounds like a question for fp4.

While you're at it, add a visual sprite selector, so you can just see the image in the editor window and drag a rectangle over the parts you want to select to make a new sprite :D
(Like in Unity)

Would be much better than having to type in the position and dimensions by hand for each sprite.

Great idea.

Some criticism for the two gun graphics:

-Turn the contrast way up. Particularly on the AK74 thing.

-Also, you have some serious perspective issues. Your up down graphics are drawn entirely in the top down perspective, whereas your left right images are done in a side perspective. Era uses neither of these perspectives.

-You should choose a light source and your shading should reflect this.

No i'm not shading things based on a light source, im shading things based on there not being a light source at all. lol there is no sun in the sky on era bro. Everything shaded that way looks retarded. I prefer very slight different hex values all over the place to give i a metallic look and that's it. And as for perspectives era actually uses both of those perspectives, i see what you mean though i was having alot of trouble with the up and down and just slapped it together but i flipped through some other images and i think i know how to improve it to make it look a little more believable. I thought they were all basically from the top until i actually looked a little more cloesly at some other weapons. I still think it's gonna be alot of trial and error. As for the left and right, they are all just the side of the gun, i don't see what you mean there at all.

I'm not sure if you've seen the latest FP4 editor, but it has a sprite cutter where you can go into "preview" mode and click on a sprite, it automatically cuts out a rectangle based on where the transparencies start, and then gives you a preview. The preview function also works if you're doing it manually (typing in the x/y/width/height). It works really really well.

Edit: Also, totally sorry for derailing your thread Link lol, I'll stop talking about GANI editors now.

Era uses a 45 degree perspective from the top down. In order for your guns to reflect this you must be able to see the side as well as the top simultaneously, not just the side.

I get what you're saying. just have to grasp my head on how to emulate that with such a limited amount of pixels. Thats been the biggest challenge so far is how limited i feel. I'll get better with time. I threw the original versions of both of those together in around an hour while i was drunk. I'll bear what u said in mind for future projects though, i'll just have to extensively study some other gun models without directly ripping them off.

Edit: i think i got a grasp of it. the up and down models look alot more like what you were saying i think natchez, i think the left and right are already fine though


http://i.imgur.com/zZHZRi7.png

damn bro you're good. keep at it.

i don't hate it.... which means you are better than tim.

someone hire his man!

Aw shucks eclipse, you're making me blush.