Hi!
I'm new to the game development world so here's my question. My current workflow for getting my characters into Spine is consisting of sketching in sketchbook with my tablet, then to illustrator for making clean vector lines and shapes, then to photoshop and export to Spine. However my images never have that crisp clean look like Spineboy does. Are their any digital game artist out there that can give me some tips/pointers as far as starting resolution, file settings, ppi, tools to use illustrator/photoshop ie. "make pixel perfect", smart objects? Just looking for things I'm missing to make my characters look a little less blurry and more crisp and so that I will be able to use them across multiple mobile platforms iOS and Android devices.
Thank you for any help/advice.
How do I get crisp images cross mobile device platforms?
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Could you post the images you make to get an idea of how you're doing it? (so that it's easier to get specific advice)
Sure thing,
I attached 2 ..png files showing the source in illustrator and the end product in Spine after transfer through Photoshop. I'm an amateur in game art, but I want anything I design to look crisp cross platform so I'm more interested in tips/tricks.
I'm no expert artist either. I'd like to say Illustrator is my poison of choice too. Since it's vector art it should theoretically be "pixel perfect" already, just export directly from Illustrator and scale up your images if needed.
There is an Illustrator to Spine script though it's nowhere near as robust as the Photoshop script. I don't use it because I'm okay with manually positioning my images in Spine. You're already doing extra work by exporting to Photoshop and you're probably introducing more artifacts that way. I can't say I see it from your images though.
Thanks for the input Raeleus. Yup, it's kinda hard to see in the images I posted but there is some blurriness that happens when the images come into spine. Not a lot but enough for my taste I guess lol. I've taken a few 2d game art classes online and have a few kindle books, but nowhere do they really go over how to best create your 2d art for deployment on multiple resolution devices. I guess I'm just going to shoot for a 16:9 ratio and let game engine do the rest? I'm sure there is more to it than that? Like certain settings and such.
There are different strategies that I'm sure the seasoned pros can elaborate on. Some folks would create a single high resolution texture atlas that would look best on your highest performing target device and hope it scales down well to lower end devices. Others would create multiple resolutions best suited for low, mid, and high end devices. The resolution selected automatically would be based off of the calculated DPI and remembering to set the Spine runtime scale appropriately. There are other techniques that may or may not be relevant to your platform too.
I also would love it if Spine would allow for use of vector based assets. That would be amazing, it would make it the perfect tool for me and for various projects that use multi platform distributions as well as later releases that reuse older assets!