TB3, there is no magic program that will make sprite rotations look good for all angles even when using professional sprite software like Promotion. Anytime you are rotating graphics that not in 90° or 45° increments, you will run into problems using problems to rotate them. Most graphics programs handle this problem in one of two different ones.
The majority of graphic programs such as Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks, and GIMP, will anti-alias the image that you are rotating. While this is fine and the preferred way when rotating photos or larger artwork, when you are dealing with small sprite graphics this might not give you the results that you looking for. It will create a blurred edge on the rotated image with parts of the edge having different levels of transparency and anti-aliasing applied to it. Some people prefer to retouch the edges of sprites that have been rotated with programs that use anti-aliasing.
A few more specialized sprite or pixel programs such as GraphicsGale, Pixia, ProPixel 2D, and Promotion, give you the option or being able to rotate sprites without using anti-aliasing. The results are sometimes better-rotated sprites depending on the image that is being rotated, but even this method will not always give you the results you want without putting more work into the rotated graphics.
If you look at a large number of the GK swords, you can see that they were rotated with programs that use anti-aliasing and you can sometimes see the extra blending colors and partial transparency in those images. One thing you need to remember is that since the images will be in motion and not one frame will be shown for a long period, you might not have to hand pixel the edges of anti-aliased rotated sprites. Again, this depends on the image being rotated and the degrees that you are rotating the image. If you stick with rotations that are nice multiples of 5° like 25°, 45°, 60°, and 90°, you will reduce the stretching and warping effects that you might get if you rotated the same image with a rotation at 38°.
Regarding the number of frames to use in your weapon animation, it depends on how smooth you want the animation to be as well as the size of the rotated graphics. Larger sprites will not suffer such bad distortion when being rotated unlike smaller sprites that will give you some problems. For the basic weapon template and system that we are using on End of Ages, I went with sixteen frames for the basic animations of the weapons but with a custom layout and rotation pattern that makes it easy to make new weapons for the new system. About half of the weapon frames are done by hand usually and the rest of the rotations are made by rotating the image in Photoshop running a custom action I made to automate that process for me. Since our weapon sprites are larger than most of the ones that are on Graal, this method has been giving us good results.
Next time you have a graphic-related question, problem or concern TB3, you will get better and more helpful responses if you post your message in the Graphic Design thread since not all of us graphic people that are on Graal will think to look in the Graal Main Forum thread for graphic-related posts.
Keep working on the sword graphics and template and before you know it, you will come to a good conclusion to your problem at hand.
Goes back to working on some new graphics,
02-08-2004, 08:29 PM
Linear Mode
