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Welcome to One Cut Studio's PIXEL DOJO Please take your shoes off at the door. In martial arts, the dojo is the training hall where the martial artists learn and practice their techniques. The goal of my pixel dojo is very similar. I will be posting tutorials here for you all to read and hopefully learn from. Even though this is the pixel dojo, I still may post tutorials about other topics as well. I hope you find my tutorials useful, easy to understand, and helpful. Show your support for the Pixel Dojo by adding the following into your signature: Tutorial 1: Spriting from Scratch (No Gens./Templates) Tutorial 2: Sprite Sheet Fundamentals in RMVXAce Tutorial 3: Animating Your Sprite to Walk Around Tutorial 4: Simple Evented Animations Tutorial 5: Creating a "Fallen" sprite from a Pre-Gen. Tutorial 6: Landscape Series Part 1: The Grass Tile Tutorial 7: Landscape Series Part 2: Cliffs and Rock Walls Tutorial 8: Landscape Series Part 3: Make a Wall Autotile Tutorial 9: Landscape Series Part 4: Water Auto-Tiles Tutorial 10: Creating RTP-Compatible Face Portraits Tutorial 11: The Pixel-Over Technique Tutorial 12: Texture Series Part 1: Metal Tutorial 13: Texture Series Part 2: Fur

which is a sprite for , and which is for my main character. I also did a few edits to the MC sprite to allow for others of the same race. Edit: Finished sprite for which looks like

Hi, í'm actually working in my own rpg game, i want to create my own character sprites but i don't like the chibi models, so i would like to make my characters with a mack model, but i can't find any tutorials on the internet to make them, i need tips because it's really hard (at least for me) to make a mack sprite compared to a chibi sprite, any useful help/tips/information will be appreciated. Also, just in case, the difference between those two models... Chibi sprite: Mack sprite: Basically, the mack sprites are larger and have a normal body/head size, meanwhile the chibi ones have a huge head and a tiny body.

Hey guys, At the moment, I am planning my RM-Game and I decided to not have the standard RTP- and JRPG-look. I want characters that are higher and not as wide as the standard chars. I really want to show the difference between muscular and huge guys (barbarians), "normal"/average guys, men/women, children, old guys, etc. Personally I think that you can´t do that very well with the RPG Maker and I want to have completely custom graphics. That means: Drawing own non-rtp-style characters, create parallax maps in Photoshop, create own Icons and more. Now my question: How high and wide can I make the characters, so they will work well with things like-door events, Side- or Upfront- Battle Systems, Animations and such. It would be so awesome if you could provide a charset template of what is possible in terms of more height and less width (so it looks more human). Or if you can´t or don´t want to do this, could you at least please give me some information of whats possible or have some screenshots of taller, non-JRPG-style characters that someone already created? A big thank you in advance Greetings, jet_black PS: I am just learning custom spriting, so I had set the goal how I want my sprites to look like and the template would show me whats possible, so I can learn very ressource-effective.

Spriter's Guide To Spriting :: Trees Hello all, welcome to my first tutorial in a long time. Some of you may know me, others may not(Still others might wish they hadn't). Regardless, I am here on an important mission. I far too often find myself reading about people complaining about how hard spriting is. They more often than not end up using MS paint and creating something like this: Not saying this is bad work, per say, but not what most people are looking for. And it's true, spriting does have a steep learning curve. But the good spriters out there are good for one of two reasons: A: They were born a spriting prodigy, or B: They received proper instruction in the art. What's that? You weren't born a prodigy? Great! I wasn't either! I hope you will be able to take some of this tutorial and apply it to better yourself. In this tutorial I use GIMP, so knowing your way around it would be a good pre-requisite. With that, let's move on to... Understanding Trees (From a spriter's prospective) So this tutorial is mainly about trees. Foliage can be the most difficult of worldly items to create, especially from scratch. Unless drawn fairly simple, it doesn't really have a basic shape to attach itself too. Nature is random and plentiful, so we need to use these attributes and apply them to our in-game flora. To simplify this concept, I have two rules that, if followed, will almost always guarantee a good tree; Bushes are made of leaves. Trees are made of bushes. This may not make sense at the moment, but the meaning behind this will become apparent soon. With these rules in mind, let's continue on to our first lesson. How to sprite a Bush Well, you've made it this far. Good, the force is strong with this one. Let's go ahead and start by spriting a bush. Open a new image in gimp, about 24x24 pixels. This should be plenty of room for you to make a nice little bush. Here is an example of 10 steps from start to finish. Below the image are some tips on each and how I progressed. Setup: Pencil tool set to 1px. Color of your choice selected. Zoom to about 400%. I start off with making a shape that's relative to the shape of the finished product. Makes sense. Use a color you want to use as the base color. I then start to branch off from the circle, making it almost look like a drooping starfish silhouette. It's also ok to use the eraser to form the leaves back into the circle a bit. Choose a lighter color, and start filling in your leaves, starting with the front most one, filling back. As you work back, make note of which leaves are in front, and curve your leaves to show them behind each other. Continue until your leaves fill to the back. About 7-8 leaves is a good number. Choose a darker color than your base color, and fill in some of the outer edges, and a few of the inner ones. Fill in the back most leaves with a medium dark color or two, shading the back leaves. Grab your base color again, and use it to highlight the back leaves, using more highlight the closer it gets to the front. Pick a lighter color, and make a few (not a lot) highlights on the front leaves. Too much can over power it very easily. Finish by filling in the front most lines with a darker color to sharpen the edge. Congratulations! If you were able to follow this fairly easily, you have created a cute little bush. We can stop here, but why? This topic is a work in progress, I will update and continue the tutorial through the next couple of days. My time constraints don't allow me to write this all at once.

Skill Level: Medium Technical (knowledge of layers), Basic/Low Artistic (knowledge on how to place pixels) (to skip to the tutorial, click HERE) You have a fantastic game idea, a clever set of characters, and a storyline all written up. Now it's time to take a visual approach – to decide on what your characters are going to look like in game. For artists both pixel and otherwise, this is a relatively easy task. But for those who feel like they don't have a creative bone in their body (or simply have a tough time working with tiny pixels), they get stuck with default characters and character generators.* *Now, this isn't to say that default characters and character generators are bad things! They all have their uses, and can be a great starting point. They also offer alternative genre parts if you're creating a game that doesn't fall under the Fantasy tag. Here is a comparison between 2 generated sprites, 2 RTP sprites, and 1 custom sprite. I want you to note the differences – not the really superficial stuff like the clothing and colors – but the way the eyes look slightly different, the ways the hair (or lack thereof) is shaded differently, how the clothing is handled. This really shows the limitations of the default generator – the right three sprites have eyebrows, facial hair, expressions. You can tell that there's a middle aged guy and that one guy possibly is a fairly angry individual. You cannot get this effect using a generator – they have one face, and one face only. So if you want to create a unique character that isn't aged 16-25 with minimal facial hair, you're stuck with the defaults. Here's where I teach you that isn't quite true. You see, that custom sprite I pointed out, the rightmost one in the comparison? He's not really custom. He's a frankenstein* of 2 different RTP sprites. *Keep in mind that people who create true custom charsets may not be happy with you using their parts to make your own character. If it isn't RTP, ask the creator before you go messing with their stuff! Sure, he's been recolored, given a v-neck shirt and grew a goatee, but the parts are still there. So that's what you need to start doing when you're hunting for that perfect character – not see them for what they are, but for the parts they're made out of. Here's an example of taking 3 different sources and making them their own unique character. Do you have a mine section in your game? Of course you do, mine dungeons are the best! Obviously you need the main character in a mine cart, but where would you get such a thing... [anchor=tutorial][/anchor] Now if you've made it this far (or clicked the link at the beginning, I guess) you may be interested in learning exactly how do do this. What I'll be using for the actual tutorial section is GIMP 2.8, mostly for one incredibly useful feature – the Select by Color tool. This fantastic little tool allows me to do exactly what the name says it does, and select all of a single color. This comes in incredibly useful when trying to separate hair from a head or change the color of any object. Photoshop has no equivalent, which is why I'm using GIMP.* *I am unsure if any other common programs have this feature. If you're using Photoshop or a program that doesn't have a real 'select by color' feature, you'll have to settle for careful use of the lasso or magic wand tool. I have yet to test this using Photoshop's region select tool. I start with a character concept – this is a lady that's a down-to-earth hunter, the sort of person who would rather spend a lifetime in the forest than a single day in the city. I find the hair I want in Actor 5-1 – which, yes, is a guy, but he has the perfect hair for a hunter character and the RTP faces (not bodies) are interchangeable between genders. Another great one is Actor 4-7, whose curly ponytail does not look out of place on any female character. After looking through the outfits, I settle on Actor 3-4's.* *I may be using resources out of the Actor set, but don't feel limited to that. There are some great character designs in the People set and even in the generator. Imporant Note: If you're not working on a fresh canvas and instead editing the charsets on their native canvas, make sure that you set the image mode to RGB. By default, the Actor sets are Indexed, limiting their color depth. This limits color-changing possibilities and can cause some ill effects when bringing in other charsets to edit in this space. We're going to start by selecting the hair, fur, and head accessories from Actor 5-1. You'll want to make sure your selection threshold is set to 0. Since we're dealing with incredibly small images and working with exact color, this will make sure we'll only select the colors we want to select. Be sure to press SHIFT to add to your selection – if you accidentally select something you don't want to, use CTRL and click on the part you want to get rid of to do so. As we start to select the pieces we want to transplant onto Actor 3-4's body, we discover that the whites and grays used in the feather are the same that are used in the gloves. This presents a problem. There are two ways to go about this – go with this selection and delete the gloves in the next step, or deselect the white and the manually select the white part of the feather. Since the gloves have more pixels than the feather, I opt for the second approach, deselecting the whites and grays and then use the rectangular marquee/select to grab the white feather portion on every facing position. In addition, select the blacks. It'll require some clean-up afterward, but will keep the defining shape of the hair. Now copy this selection using CTRL+C, and then paste using CTRL+V and press the new layer button in the layers palette. This automatically makes the pasted selection into its own layer. Make the old layer invisible. There are a lot of lines left over from selecting the blacks. Time to clean them up! Take the eraser tool, select 'Hard Edge' in the Tool Options and make sure the size of the brush is 1px. Then go and erase any black lines that aren't a part of the hair or fur. DO NOT erase the irises from the eyes. They will come in useful in a few steps. When in doubt, leave the black. We can always fix any errors at the end. Now that this half is largely cleaned up, we move over to Actor 3-7, who gets to lose her hair. I do like her angry face, however, so we'll be keeping that. If you're working with identical faces, or if you prefer the face that came with the hair, or if you're using a face from something else altogether you can simply delete the head altogether by using the rectangular marquee/select. Make sure to deselect her eyebrows before getting rid of the hair! Don't worry too much about cleaning it up right now, because we're going to move the hair from Actor 5-1 over to this body. Simply move the hair layer over and line it up until it looks correctly. This is where leaving the irises comes in useful – simply line it up with the existing ones and you'll get a pretty good placement. However, I can see we still have some cleaning up to do with the leftovers from actor 3-4's hair. Hide the hair layer and move back down to the body layer. Erase the ribbons and the floating blacks, leaving the body and the face. Now we need to clean up her face, get rid of the transparent bits around the warpaint and the ears. On the body layer, I color pick the skin tone and follow the shading patterns until it's all filled up. Basically, I start with the lightest one until the surrounding area gets a bit darker, then switch to the darker tone, and so on. I'll also reference a hairless head to see how the shading is done around the cheek there. You can also simply copy and paste from that area on Actor 5-1, which is what I opt to do here. Now in all honesty we could move onto recoloring and be fairly fine, but I want to make a few adjustments. Because we took the fur scarf from a male character, the shoulders are a bit off on the female frame, so I'm going to color pick and just even it out in some of the blockier areas. I'm also going to lengthen her shirt so it covers her midriff. Now that we've finished that, and are pretty happy with how the image turned out, we're going to merge the layers so we can begin editing colors. This is where some artistic or fashion knowledge comes in handy, but it's not necessary as long as you remember a few things. Keep all metallics the same unless your character is meant to look eclectic – all golds or all silvers or all iron or whatever. Our character has gold necklace and bracelet and a silver buckle – something that looks a little odd. Pick a color and then play with neutrals on the opposite side of the color wheel. If you want the primary color to be blue, use warm browns for any neutrals. If you want the primary color to be red, go with cooler/bluer neutrals. Remember tone contrast. When you have colors you're pretty happy with, duplicate the layer and desaturate it. Can you still see where the shirt ends and the pants begin? If not, you need to either brighten or darken one of them to increase contrast. Since our character is a hunter, her colors are going to be green, gold, and brown. Her hair is going to go to a coppery shade, her eyes are going to be brown instead of blue. We begin by selecting objects by color – we'll start with the hair. We're going to be using the Colors → Colorize tool to recolor, primarily. Hair can be a little tricky because the highlights can get washed out after a colorize. You can fix this by selecting the highlights only after it's recolored, and using the hue/saturation tool to raise the saturation to acceptable levels. Remember to zoom out to 100% to see what it'll look like in game! Repeat this for the rest of the clothing and accessories. At the end, I had this character. You may have come up with something completely different if you followed along, and that's fine. All you have to do is ask "Does this character look like one that wouldn't look out of place alongside the other main characters?" If yes, then fantastic! If no... you may want to make the character stand out a little bit more. Congratulations! You've completed a custom-looking sprite with minimal artistic intervention. You can apply this sort of technique to a lot of things that may be difficult to find otherwise, from downed sprites to special animations. Now, go forth and create beautiful custom characters! And show me any you make using this tutorial, I'd love to see!* *If you need any help or if any part of the tutorial is unclear, feel free to send me a PM or leave a note here. I'll do my best to respond promptly!

So, I've made some faces and a battler for a dragon boss monster/character, and I want to make a sprite for him to being all mean and stuff. So how big should he be, pixel wise? The actual dragon ingame would be quite big, approx. 20m tall from the feet to the top of the head. What size 'box' should I use to sprite him?

WARNING: THIS IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION... ~KOTORI METHOD~ (Spriting) Hello everyone~ Thank you for the warm welcome on my first part of the Kotori Method of Spriting and now we will continue for Part 2: : The Clothing and Accessories. ~TUTORIAL START: Patchouli Knowledge~ (Part 2 of 2) The tools we are gonna use are still the same ones mentioned on part one: http://www.rpgmakervxace.net/blog/399/entry-1317-kotori-method-of-spriting-patchouli-knowledge/ STEP 4: Patchy`s Headgear Front Okay, we will use the same method on drawing the hair to drawing the headgear. Patchy`s headgear is kinda similar to Yuyuko but still we won`t copy her style to make Patchy unique. STEP 5: Patchy`s Headgear Left and Right Side And yes, this will be another repetitive chore so I will shorten the steps for the Left and Right Side, just follow how I shade and do Line Art and everything will be fine~ hehehehe~ STEP 6: Patchy`s Headgear Backview STEP 7: Patchy`s Dress Front

I finished another sprite; A LoZ-esque knight enemy I did just for practice. I'm working my spriting skills for a large project I'm planning, so if you guys would be so kind to critique my work so I know where I am, that would be awesome! Here it is:

The tutorials posted here range from beginner to lower range intermediate. They are video tutorials so that anyone can easily follow along. They will cover the basics of: Making your own pixelated tileset Making an animated sprite from a behavior sprite Making a base from formentioned sprite Making add ons for the generator in ace Taking/Making XP sprites and using them in ace TUTORIALS Tileset basic Dancin Sprite Behavior Along with base creation Making Addons XP to VX/VX Ace Ripping sprite hair to make our own add on Recoloring an existing sprite Making a tileset to match the rtp Continuation of the last tutorial, this time making a chair. Making more furniture in rtp oh yeah! Making an animated water tile following World of Noels tutorial from Deviantart NEW! NO more blurry lines with free transform If you have any questions feel free to ask. ^^

Since I'm not a spriter, my game uses the default VXAce style of sprites. I've come to the issue that I need overworld sprites of monsters that I imported. Specifically of this fellow here: I attempted to create a custom one: but as you can see he doesn't quite seem to fit in with the other characters, and doesn't even look like he's even the same monster. That's where you guys come in, tell me what more I can do to make him look better. Tell me of VXACE or XP (as I own XP also, and as far as I know I can use them also, as long as it's for an RPGMaker game) overworld sprites that I can use to make a better base. (I used a sprite from XP as the first base.)

Well here's my unfinished sprite only the head is finished though any suggestion or critique?