How To Create Your Own Graphics

[MattNJ89]

I was wondering what tools I would need to get for my computer to create my own graphics? Would Adobe Illustrator work? Are there any tutorials on this site, or online, for creating RPG Maker graphics?

 

[terrorchan]

What kind of graphics are you wanting to make?


For painted styles, I personally use a combo of Clip Studio Paint and Paint Tool Sai


For pixel art, i use a combo of Paint Tool Sai and Paint.net (Though most people use Gimp, which I have a strong beef with)


It also depends on what engine you're using. There are templates and sizing tutorials for each maker as it varies. I can't give you more tutorials as I'm not sure what kind of art you mean. Facesets? Tilesets? Battlers?


The biggest thing, though, is that it can save transparently. 

 

[ロリ先輩]

Adobe Illustrator would certainly work, as would any other image editing application that you use.

Illustrator tends towards vector-based imagery, which gives you a high level of scalability- given enough scaling and detail work, you can certainly achieve similar quality as raster software. There are some people who actually use Excel- of course, with Illustrator, you have more powerful tools.

On a more dimensionally accurate microscale, for the 24, 32, and 48 pixel scale art in RPG Maker, especially character sets or icons, you may actually find it more helpful to use a raster pixel editor, such as GraphicsGale, PyxelEdit, Asesprite, or even Grafx2. Photoshop and GIMP work here as well, but they're over equipped for pixel art, which is more of the style of the older JRPGs, as well as RPG Maker MV sprites and RPG Maker XP artwork.

Another option is to just use raster editor and paint your assets. Photoshop, GIMP, Paint Tool SAI, Clip Studio, MyPaint, and Krita are all options here. This is going to be more like what Celianna does.

 

[Kirby~]

I agree with the person's question here. I think this would be very useful to have in my game as well. I second this!

 

[Sharm]

Yes, there are tutorials.  Go to the main page for RMW, there's a tutorial section under the support dropdown.  I don't think Illustrator would work very well, at least not on it's own, unless they've added a few more raster controls since I last used it.  In the end what you make will need to be rasterized, and some things will need to be a very specific size.  The thing that will be the biggest help is the help file that comes with RM.  It's got a section on resource standards that you'll need to refer to often, and it explains them fairly well.


@Kirby~ You second what?  The question?  More like 7th or 22nd, this has been asked before.  What would be useful?  The graphics you make?  Too many pronouns, not enough nouns!

 

[MattNJ89]

What kind of graphics are you wanting to make?


For painted styles, I personally use a combo of Clip Studio Paint and Paint Tool Sai


For pixel art, i use a combo of Paint Tool Sai and Paint.net (Though most people use Gimp, which I have a strong beef with)


It also depends on what engine you're using. There are templates and sizing tutorials for each maker as it varies. I can't give you more tutorials as I'm not sure what kind of art you mean. Facesets? Tilesets? Battlers?


The biggest thing, though, is that it can save transparently. 

I want to make monster characters and battlers. I am using RPG Maker MV.

 

[MattNJ89]

Adobe Illustrator would certainly work, as would any other image editing application that you use.

Illustrator tends towards vector-based imagery, which gives you a high level of scalability- given enough scaling and detail work, you can certainly achieve similar quality as raster software. There are some people who actually use Excel- of course, with Illustrator, you have more powerful tools.

On a more dimensionally accurate microscale, for the 24, 32, and 48 pixel scale art in RPG Maker, especially character sets or icons, you may actually find it more helpful to use a raster pixel editor, such as GraphicsGale, PyxelEdit, Asesprite, or even Grafx2. Photoshop and GIMP work here as well, but they're over equipped for pixel art, which is more of the style of the older JRPGs, as well as RPG Maker MV sprites and RPG Maker XP artwork.

Another option is to just use raster editor and paint your assets. Photoshop, GIMP, Paint Tool SAI, Clip Studio, MyPaint, and Krita are all options here. This is going to be more like what Celianna does.

That is good to hear Adobe Illustrator would work, but I guess I could still check out the raster pixel editors too.

 

[terrorchan]

I want to make monster characters and battlers. I am using RPG Maker MV.

I make battlers. I use clip studio for line art and sai for coloring. If its in a pixel style, sai. Are you wanting to make animated battlers? Because that complicates things, especially if you wanted to make them be bigger than the default size. 


Here is the guide for the animated SV 

Here are some pixel style tutorials


http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299


http://finalbossblues.com/pixel-tutorials/


I make a lot of SV battlers so I can help you more if you need it.

 

[TheHybrid]

Adobe Illustrator is a really powerful program that you could use, although I'd advice not to use it for making characters or tilesets. For those I personally love Aseprite.


Aseprite is especially a good fit because of the easy shortcuts imo (B to select brush, just scroll to zoom in and out) but also because it makes it really easy to create pixelart, it's really easy to make color palletes with them and also it shows a preview (if you turn that on) of how your work will look when at 100%, so that you can tell what editing one pixel will do to the image as a whole on 100%. In addition to Aseprite I use Photoshop CS6 because it's really easy to manage layers in there and I'm really used to working with Photoshop, also recoloring and the bit more fancy things I would like to do with graphics are way easier in Photoshop.



A lot of good programs have been listed above me, but I'd still advice you to just try making art in a few of them and just see what works best for you.


EDIT: As @terrorchan already said, there are some good tutorials. I'd personally really recommend the one on finalbossblues because I learned a lot from that. If you want to create animations, using Aseprite can be useful too since you can see the animated preview too while spriting.


Good luck!

 

[Sharm]

MattNJ89, please avoid double posting, as it is against the forum rules. You can review our forum rules here. Thank you.

 

[ロリ先輩]

That is good to hear Adobe Illustrator would work, but I guess I could still check out the raster pixel editors too.

Illustrator, and other vector-based utilities are very well geared towards scalable graphics- especially UI, buttons, icons...etc. I personally use Sketch and Affinity Designer here. Sketch works well for designing UI mock ups, and it supports pixel precise measurements and exports- while the latter, Designer, is really great for making scalable artwork, which certainly has a place for titles/backgrounds. There is a learning curve, though, but it's definitely doable. The biggest downside, as far as I can tell, is that RPG Maker products lack native support for SVG, so you'll want to manually configure any scaled artwork for each release (i.e., you may want larger icons/buttons on mobile/tablet, but smaller on PC, and even larger for Retina display).

 

[MattNJ89]

@terrorchan Thanks for the art software suggestions, pixel art tutorials, and offer of further assistance with RPG Maker MV battlers. Right now I am just interested in static battlers but somewhere down the line I will probably look into animated ones.


@TheHybrid Thanks for suggesting Aseprite and Photoshop CS6 to me for creating battlers and characters.


@ロリ先輩  If I end up switching from Windows to Mac I will defiantly check out Sketch and Affinity designer for creating battlers and characters.