ask a general question. There are few sprite resources and they are hardly liked by me. I would like to learn from the absolute scratch, such as how do I create a sprite from my idea.
Can I ask do I create it this way or what's the standard process?
1. draw it on white paper
2. scan it into a .png jpg etc
3. render it in photoshop
Thanks.
It's not quite right for Stack Overflow indeed, but I have a few suggestions anyway.
If you want to hand draw your art there are a few approaches. I started drawing the resources I needed on paper and scanning them, but this raises a couple of problems.
The first problem is that it can be hard to remove the white background properly leaving nasty bitty edges. This can be solved with time, practice and patience, and as far as I know there is no good way around this.
When using paper, it can be very hard to get clean areas of solid color. Pencils and the like leave and extremely distinctive paper texture, but approaches that give more solid colors using inks tend to go very blotchy.
The other problem is that if you want to animate these, or indeed reuse part of one sprite in another, you're left drawing bits of sprites - this lead me on to my currently favored methodology.
My recommendation would be to use ink onto acetate. You'll need to do some research into the best inks to use, but it means you can build the sprites in layers, much like animators used to do for film back in the day. You still have to solve the white background problem after scanning though, and if you pick the wrong ink it can be very easy to smudge your drawings - not ideal.
The other, more expensive alternative is to use a graphics tablet, and cut out the paper/acetate stage all together. This solves the white background problem, but some people find drawing with tablets oddly difficult - myself included.
Adobe software wise - I would personally use Illustrator while working with a graphics tablet, Photoshop for making adjustments to the resulting images, and Fireworks for building UI interface elements.
Hope this helps!
This is not really a coding question. As far as I know stackoverflow is only for technical problems. That said, I would recommend Illustrator to get started. There are some great tutorials out there. :)
Related
I'm looking for an efficient way to draw curved lines and to make an object follow them in Unity.
I also need to draw them using a custom image and not a solid color.
And on top of that I would like to apply an outer glow to them, and not to the rest of the scene.
I don't ask for a copy/paste solution for each of these elements, I list them all to give some context.
I did something similar in a web app using the html5 canvas to draw text progressively. Here a gif showing you the render:
I only used small lines to draw what you see above. Here a very big letter with thinker lines so lines are more visible:
Of course it's not perfect, but the goal was to keep it simple and efficient. And spaces on the outer edges are not very visible in normal size.
This is used in an educational game working on mobile as a progressive app. In real world usage I attach a particles emitter to it for better effect :
And it runs smoothly even on low end devices.
I don't want to recreate this exact effect on Unity but the core functionality is very close.
Because of how I did it the first time, I thought about creating a big list of segments to draw manually, but unity may have better tools to create this kind of stuff, maybe working directly with bezier curves.
I a beginner in Unity so I don't really know what is the most efficient way to do it.
I looked at the line renderer which seemed (at first) to be a good choice but I'm a little bit worried about performances with a list of 500+ points (considering mobiles are a target).
Also, the glow I would like to add may impact on the technique to choose.
Do you have any advice or direction to give me?
Thank you very much.
I'm currently trying to write an app, that would be able to show the effects of glas, as seen through the iPhone Camera.
I'm not talking about simple, uniform glas but glass like this:
Now I already broke this into two problems:
1) Apply some Image Filter to the 2D-frames presented by the iPhone Camera. This has been done and seems possible, e.g. in the app: faceman
2) I need to get the individual lighting properties of a sheet of glas that my client supplies me with. Now basicly, there must be a way to read the information about how the glas distorts ands skews the image. I think It might be somehow possible to make a high-res picture of the plate of glasplate, laid on a checkerboard-image and somehow analyze this.
Now, I'm mostly searching for literature, weblinks on how you guys think I could start at 2. It doesn't need to be exact, in the end I just need something that looks approximately like the sheet of glass I want to show. And I'm don't even know where to search, Physics, Image Filtering or Comupational Photography books.
EDIT: I'm currently thinking, that one easy solution could be bump-mapping the texture on top of the camera-feed, I asked another question on this here.
You need to start with OpenGL. You want to effectively have a texture - similar to the one you've got above - displace the texture below it (the live camera view) to give the impression of depth and distortion. This is a 'non-trivial' problem, in that whilst it's a fairly standard problem in its field if you're coming from a background with no graphics or OpenGL experience you can expect a very steep learning curve.
So in short, the only way you can achieve this realistically on iOS is to use OpenGL, and that should be your starting point. Apple have a few guides on the matter, but you'll be better off looking elsewhere. There are some useful books such as the OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide that can get you off on the right track, but where you start would depend on how comfortable you are with 3D graphics and C.
Just wanted to add that I solved this old answer using the refraction example in the Khronos OpenGl ES SDK.
Wrote a blog-entry with pictures about it :
simulating windows with refraction
I have a straight image and I want to deform it in a wave-like manner.
Original image:
straight texture http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/107/woodstraight.png
and I want it to look like this (except animated):
bent texture http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/8496/woodbent.png
I haven't tackled the learning curve of openGL yet so if I can do this with Core Animation it would be great.
Is this possible?
Unfortunately, I think this is a job for OpenGL. You could achieve the same affect in Quartz by slicing the image up vertically and drawing segments with different vertical offsets... but I don't think you'd be able to achieve good enough performance to animate it. (At least, with 1px or 2px wide slices)
You could also leave the image stationary, and use Quartz to animate a masking path that would create the waving edges. That probably wouldn't look too natural, though.
As far as I know, Core Animation on the iPhone isn't capable of doing this, either. On the Mac it comes with some more advanced filters, but I think you'd probably see a lot more stuff like this if the iPhone filters could do it :-)
OpenGL does have quite a learning curve, but here's what you'd want to do to achieve the effect: Create a flat rectangle in OpenGL with several verticies along it's length. Point the camera at the rectangle so that it appears flat. Then, use a sine() function of some sort to animate the verticies back and forth in place.
This approach is also used to achieve the rippling-water effect, and you might be able find an example or two of it.
Sorry to bring bad news :-) Hope that helps!
I'm writing a game that displays 56 hexagon pieces filling the screen in the shape of a board. I'm currently drawing each piece using a singleton rendering class that when called to draw a piece, creates a path from 6 points based of the coordinate passed in. This path is filled with a solid color and then a 59x59 png with an alpha to white gradient is overlayed over the drawing to give the piece a shiny look. Note I'm currently doing this in Core Graphics.
My first thought is that creating a path everytime I draw is costly and seems like I can somehow do this once and then reuse it, but I'm not sure of the best approach for this. When I look at the bottlenecks with Shark, it looks like the drawing of the png is the most taxing part of the process. I've tried just rendering the png overlay or just rendering the path without the overlay and both give me some frame gains, although removing the png overlay yields the most frames.
My current thought is that at startup, I should render 6 paths (1 for each color piece I have) and overlay them with the png and then store an image of these pieces and then just redraw the pieces each time I need them. Is there an effecient machanism for storing something you've drawn once and redrawing it? It kinda just sounds like I'd be running into the whole drawing pngs too often thing again, but maybe there's a less taxing method that does a similar thing...
Any suggestions are much appreciated.
Thanks!
You might try CGLayer or CALayer.
General thoughts:
Game programming on iPhone usually necessitates OpenGL. Core Graphics is a bit easier to work with, but OpenGL is optimized for speed.
Prerender this "shiny look" into the textures as much as is possible (as in: do it in Photoshop before you even insert them into your project). Alpha blending is hell on performance.
Maybe try PVRTC (also this tutorial) as it's a format used by iPhone's GPU's manufacturer. Then again, this could make things worse depending on where your bottleneck is.
If you really need speed you have to go the OpenGL route. Be careful if you want to mix OpenGL and Core Animation, they can conflict.
OpenGL is a pain if you haven't done much with it. It sounds like you could use Core Animation and make each tile a layer. CA doesn't call the redraw again unless you change something, so you should be able to just move that layer around without taking a big hit. Also note that CA stores the layer in the texture memory so it should be much faster.
Some others have mentioned that you should use OpenGL. Here's a nice introduction specifically for the iPhone: OpenGL ES from the Ground Up: Table of Contents
You might also want to look at cocos2d. It seems to be significantly faster than using CoreAnimation in my tests, and provides lots of useful stuff for games.
This isn't strictly a programming question, but I'm asking it here because it's certainly a software development question, if you take "software development" to include all aspects of creating a software system.
I am an independent iPhone developer. Except for translations, I handle all aspects of my apps myself—graphics included. I have to create icons, buttons, and UI elements of all sorts on a regular basis. I've learned a few tricks along these lines, and while they're certainly not works of art, I can effectively use gradients, shadows, border strokes, transparency, and textures to create minimalistic, attractive effects.
So far, I've used a vector drawing tool called VectorDesigner for all of my development, with occasional raster postprocessing by Pixelmator. It's worked mostly okay so far, but VectorDesigner has a host of issues:
It uses a package format for its files, which interferes with the use of Subversion.
It is very much a print tool, and I have to be very careful not to end up with objects on fractional pixel values which cause antialiasing.
While you can take the union or intersection of shapes, or add and subtract them, curves tend to deform with repeated boolean operations, sometimes quite dramatically.
And it offers very little control over strokes, to the point where I barely use them.
So I'm looking for a better tool for this specific purpose: shape-based drawing of simple icons, buttons, and UI elements on a Mac by someone without graphic design training. Good functions for exporting would be a plus—ideally it should be almost as easy to export a PNG to the place it goes in my project as it is to save (not save as) the file.
The perfect tool for me would be one that would allow you to define an object's shape by stacking up areas and masks defined by primitive shapes (which would remain separately editable), then define properties on those objects like transforms and strokes. I have no idea if something like this exists, though.
Adobe's tools generally strike me as very heavyweight, and are usually expensive, but I suppose they're a possibility. (Fireworks, with its emphasis on screen design, seems like it might be particularly suitable, but I don't know that much about it.) But what else is out there? If you're in a position like me, what do you use? What do you recommend?
Edited to add: Of course a graphic designer could get better results from an ancient copy of MacPaint than I could from Illustrator CS5. No tool can replace skill and taste, and many programmers have little of either. I'm aware of that. But I'm fortunate enough to have at least some taste—enough that my users compliment my apps' appearance in their reviews. I'm not hugely talented, but I do know my limitations, and I don't let myself produce anything ugly. Given my budget, that will have to do for now.
Try Opacity. A little rough on the edges, but one of the coolest and most unique features they have is export as source code (in Quartz, Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, or Canvas)
I'd suggest OmniGraffle
OmniGraffle is easy to use, can save as a PNG, can create binary non-package files (it's an option in the interface). You can also set the units to pixels to ensure exact alignment. (Canvas Size -> Ruler Units)
Finally, the Graffletopia website has some nice iPhone stencils for getting it right:
http://graffletopia.com/search/iphone
I think the only acceptable answer here should be "hire a designer".
But it sounds like Pixelmator/Inkscape are your best bets.
Though if you do find something better, that'd be really cool. Like a jQueryUI but for native.