Graphics programs

[Obi1mcd]

I'm making an article about various graphics programs, and which are best suited to tileset making. Which ones do you use?

[Violet CLM]

PSP7 with Palsuite 2.

[Seren]

MS Paint for the tileset, TTM32 for a textured background, random person to make a palette for me (but few days ago I also forced TilesetPal to work) and PalSuite3 + IrfanView for multipalettes. If you're experienced enough in Paint, it will look great.

[Troglobite]

GIMP 2.6.8 with PalSuite 3 and TilesetPal.

[snzspeed]

MSPaint, PSP8, Jazz Palette Station, Palsuite, and Wally /TTM32

A long list... :P

[cooba]

Photoshop 7 for the tileset, Photoshop 7 for the textured background, Photoshop 7 for the palette.

[Toni]

Adobe PhotoShop CS3, Jacs Paint Shop Pro and mspaint for tileset, and wally for textures, and textured background.

[PurpleJazz]

Paint Shop Pro 9, Palette Suite 3.
I doubt that will change any time soon.

[minmay]

GIMP for drawing and texturing, Blender for 3D modeling. For palettes I either use PalSuite or edit the values in the palette file itself by hand (the fastest way to, for example, merge two 127-color palettes).

[Violet CLM]

Are these helpful replies, by the way? Some of these programs -- various PalSuite versions, JPS, TilesetPal, Gimp -- you can try for yourself, but the others cost money, and I wonder if it would be more helpful if we told you some of the advantages and disadvantages we've found, rather than you... guessing somehow? I don't really know what your plan is, so forgive me if this has nothing to do with your article or is something you've already thought of.

[minmay]

Good point.

GIMP's interface is apparently difficult to learn if you're used to PSP or Photoshop, but I picked it up very quickly since it was the first program I started using for "serious" graphics. Once you learn how to use it, it is a very powerful image editor, but it lacks the sheer number of built-in features that commercial programs have. However, it allows you to customize nearly everything very easily, and pretty much anything can be done with scripts. Textured backgrounds are easy to make with the wide range of filters available, provided you know what you're doing (color reduction can be painful, though). The only aspect of JJ2 tileset making I'd be uncomfortable with using GIMP for would be palettes; altering palettes in any way is painfully slow, and it maps colors to the nearest match in the palette, which is hell if you want two identical colors in different palette slots to get palette objects. Of course, you can easily work around that if you increase/decrease one of the RGB values by 1.

Paint Shop Pro is frankly an inferior program in general use, but it coincidentally has features that are <i>extremely</i> useful in making JJ2 tilesets, like that palette swap thingy. Not worth buying just for JJ2 tilesets, though.

Photoshop...as far as JJ2 tilesets go I don't think it really has any advantages over GIMP - if someone thinks of one, do tell me.

MS Paint, well, that one's kind of obvious. Sucks at pretty much everything, but if you're too lazy to learn to use a real graphics program I guess it'll do.



Blender is a generic 3D modeling program, and is easily on par with commercial programs. However, it has a reputation for being very difficult to learn. That said, once you do learn it you can do all sorts of great things very quickly. In the context of JJ2 tilesets you'd be using it whenever you want a 3D object - probably something in the background, or maybe a sucker tube. Of course, you need to wrangle the rendered object into your palette, not to mention getting the size right - I can't imagine a program that would make those any easier.
Of course, any 3D modeling you do for a JJ2 tileset will be very simple, so any program will do (but why pay for one when you can use the free Blender instead?).

TilesetPal is supposedly better than PalSuite, but neither one works perfectly under Wine. Editing the palette file in a text editor isn't nearly as bad as it sounds, but of course you still have to convert your image to the palette in an image editor - one of the many reasons I always try to get the palette before I draw much of anything.

[Obi1mcd]

Are these helpful replies, by the way? Some of these programs -- various PalSuite versions, JPS, TilesetPal, Gimp -- you can try for yourself, but the others cost money, and I wonder if it would be more helpful if we told you some of the advantages and disadvantages we've found, rather than you... guessing somehow? I don't really know what your plan is, so forgive me if this has nothing to do with your article or is something you've already thought of.

So far this is very helpful. In most cases I was sort of hoping the programs would have a 1-month trial or something, or that I could find a friend who has the full version. But yeah, any more detail would be appreciated.

Nobody's mentioned GraphicsGale. =[

[snzspeed]

MSPaint doesnt suck, it is good for the actual drawing, and once you know all the hotkeys and tricks, you can make much faster progress then in PSP. Also, if your computer sucks, and you make sets using 256 color method, I dont see any reason why you wouldnt want to use JPS in combination with MSPaint :P

These are mostly invidual opinions though, but I myself find it easier to work with MSPaint, and this is probably ive used it most of my life for the drawing. palettes and other effects i do with other programs.

Anyway I use psp too, mostly for decreasing colors of an image. I use Wally for textures, its a very easy to use program where you can make good textures at really fast speeds.

[Troglobite]

TilesetPal is supposedly better than PalSuite, but neither one works perfectly under Wine. Editing the palette file in a text editor isn't nearly as bad as it sounds, but of course you still have to convert your image to the palette in an image editor - one of the many reasons I always try to get the palette before I draw much of anything.

In my opinion, PalSuite is much easier and cleaner for actually creating/editing the palette, although TilesetPal is probably easier for applying it to your image. If I remember correctly, TilesetPal is a bit less stable too, from my experience, although nothing too serious.

@snz: If you're going to use MSPaint, I think you might as well just get GIMP. Everything you do on Paint can also be done on GIMP, plus so much more. The only exception I can think of is saving directly as a 256 color bitmap. Plus, GIMP can do so much more, and it's also free.

On a side note, I also occasionally draw with Inkscape, another freeware drawing program. It's similar to Photoshop, and is probably a bit nicer for drawing new stuff than GIMP. However, Inkscape most naturally uses vectors, while GIMP's pixel based, which makes GIMP much easier for editing in my opinion.

[Toni]

For palettes I use JPSP because of a great swapping tool. But also I made some backgrounds in wally, and I liked it, so told snz to download it and now I see he likes it :). Try to download wally, it is freeware, and not big program (I can bet it is not bigger than 2Mb) and have great tools for textures!!

[Obi1mcd]

Sorry, I should have put more detail in the first post. The article is just going to be a simple outline of a few programs, and what their pros/cons are for tileset making. Mostly stuff like how much they cost, what color depths they support, and that sort of thing. Mostly because it took me ages to find a decent program for tilesets a couple of years ago.

[Violet CLM]

Not to steal your thunder, but perhaps this could be a wiki article? You'd have to do less independent research that way, and everyone could fill in what would essentially be pretty tabular data on the programs they're already accustomed to.

[Obi1mcd]

Sounds good to me. I didn't think of that, but it will make things easier. Somebody else had better make the article, I don't know how. =b

[sonicnathan 1]

If you still want ideas, I use Paint Shop Pro CS2 for editing work, the tileset splitter and Pallet Suite 3. Those handle everything for me. If you want free GIMP is a good choice

[minmay]

The only exception I can think of is saving directly as a 256 color bitmap.
Actually, GIMP can do that easily. Just set the image mode to Indexed and give it a 256 color palette (you can make one in about 10 seconds with auto-palette and the palette editor).
If you want to do any actual palette editing, that's probably the one thing GIMP sucks at; changing colors is really clumsy and there's hardly any automation for things like gradients. But Paint doesn't let you edit the palette at all, and it <i>uses the same default palette regardless of the colors in your image</i>...so, yeah.

[Troglobite]

Actually, GIMP can do that easily. Just set the image mode to Indexed and give it a 256 color palette (you can make one in about 10 seconds with auto-palette and the palette editor).
If you want to do any actual palette editing, that's probably the one thing GIMP sucks at; changing colors is really clumsy and there's hardly any automation for things like gradients. But Paint doesn't let you edit the palette at all, and it <i>uses the same default palette regardless of the colors in your image</i>...so, yeah.

Ok, thanks, I didn't know that.

[snzspeed]

Also, JPS is useful since it has a preview for the events, and it can export palette into a bmp image.