Game Development Community

Image map creation TGB

by Jon Law · in General Discussion · 06/11/2006 (12:31 pm) · 6 replies

I was just wondering what people where using for drawing/animation, and then finally creating image maps for TGB. ive looked at a few and they either seem very pricey or not exactly complete, in terms of the features one would need... also i should mention im running on a mac.

thanks
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Torque Owner Anthony Fullmer
#1
06/11/2006 (4:16 pm)
Photoshop would be ideal, I am not sure what you consider to be 'very pricey' but with what you get with Photoshop, I would say nothing is better (also the lisence if i am not mistaken states that even if you only own their cheaper educational version, you can sell the work you create with it). There are of course freeware programs, but as you have said, those are very incomplete or hard to work with usually. I would just say that you are going to have to pony up the dough for photoshop or GIMP... or be doomed to the world of freeware.

Torque Owner Travis Hamersley
#2
06/11/2006 (4:55 pm)
GIMP is open source (free) and while I find it a tad annoying to use it is full featured.

Also look into inkscape, open source vector based editor. I am not an artist but it seems like a full featured vector solution.

No ideas on animation specific tools.

Torque Owner Jon Law
#3
06/12/2006 (1:59 pm)
So far ive been working with photoshop but it just doesnt draw the same way that flash can draw and also dimming each layer as i add a new frame is annoying. Flash is really good for the animation and drawing part but exporting images is a pain also none of these programs are really GREAT for laying out a image map... photshop can but if your using an image with transparency its harder to line up the frames, becasue they are no longer squares.. anyone else have any suggestions

Torque Owner Andrew Douglas
#4
06/12/2006 (4:15 pm)
Are you looking for something like www.toonboom.com/main/?
edit: what we do is we have all the individual cells of animation saved as separate images and then we use a little utility to concatenate them into rows and columns automagically. There's a resource here www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=8200 but we made our own.
-Andrew

Torque Owner Andrew Douglas
#5
07/03/2006 (7:03 am)
Our artist wrote up a [url=http://theoreticalgames.com/portal/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/11/Default.aspx"]blog entry[/url] about how toon boom works. He has a follow up post planned for doing rigging of the characters as well. We've gotten a lot of use out of toon boom for our TGB game [url="http://mybogle.com"]My Bogle[/url]. Hope this helps.
-Andrew

Torque Owner Brian "Ayavaron" Ross II
#6
07/04/2006 (12:26 am)
There's a farily good Photoshop knockoff available caleld Pixel for $32. I like how the author copied almost every one of Photoshop's worthwhile features and how the program will run on any operating system I've heard of anyone using these days.

www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12

You can also wear a patch on your arm that says "Arrgh!" and use whatever program you want. Of course, such patches present risks of a legal variety.