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Spriting is usually defined as the act of creating partially transparent 2d raster graphics for use in video games, commonly refered to as sprites; however, it is also occasionally used to refer to the act of creating pixel art, though this is technically incorrect due to the definition of a sprite.

The most commonly used program is MS Paint because it is included in most versions of Microsoft Windows and has the least steep learning curve. Other programs such as Pro Motion or GIMP can prove to be more powerful tools of greater complexity for spriting, in particular as a result of their ability to seperate graphics into layers and their color modifying functions.

A distinction is sometimes made between sprites and pixel art. An image is often called a sprite once it has been integrated into a larger image, such as a video game. However, the image as it exists independently from the larger context falls into the category of pixel art. There are also restrictions that a sprite has to follow due the limits of memory in older video game consoles. Pixel art is often used as backgrounds and intros in video games and thus can have a bigger size and degree of detail.

Beginner styles of Spriting

Recoloring

Recolors or palette swaps involve only changing the color-scheme of a sprite or set of sprites. Doing this is simple; doing it well takes a good deal of skill and finetuning. To make things easier, it is often wise to prearrange the order of the colors in your sprite palette, so it is easy to apply one palette-swap to all related sprites.

MS Paint can be used to instantly recolor sprites, but using a spriting-oriented tool such as Pro Motion makes it a lot easier and quicker to control the process. Recoloring is also a term used in relation to the editing of non-original sprites. This article is concerned primarily with the creation of original sprites, so more detail will not be given here.

Editing

Editingprobably the most general term for beginners, and the most common. Editing is, quite simply, the art of changing a sprite into a new one. This may be as simple as fixing an outline, or as complex as an objective edit, as opposed to mixing (where the parts are already made). The latter, a very popular style of editing, involves changing characteristics of a sprite so that they clearly represent an edit. Edits are easily accepted if an object or character are similar, and thus don't require to be recreated. Sometimes very simple editing will still fall under the category of "recoloring". Mixing (also splicing, mutating, editing, frankenspriting etc.) is the technique of combining two or more characters to create a new one with obvious traces of both. Fire Emblem, Pokémon, and Megaman are common subjects of mixing. Although mixing can be rather simple, it requires originality. Since not all sprites are similar, somewhat complex principles are involved, such as proportions, light and shading, and how well the sprite blends .

Advanced styles of Spriting

Custom spriting

Custom Spriting differs from editing and ripping in that the sprites are wholly the creation of the artist. Sprites made from scratch (without using parts from any existing sprite) are generally called "Custom". Often, these sprites are in the form of actual video game characters, whether from 3D games with no sprites, or merely new versions of a 2D character. Sometimes however, the spriters make their own characters, which may be anything from their own made up character to pixellated self portraits.

Spriters may make their own style, or attempt to follow a particular style of sprites, using a "base sprite", an unedited video game sprite. When a spriter uses a base sprite, he or she modifies the original sprites to fit their character(s)' appearance. Some popular base sprites include the characters from Super Mario games, Megaman games, Pokémon games, and Sonic the Hedgehog games. Perhaps the most popular base sprites for human characters are Zero and Ciel from the Mega Man Zero series. Differences between styles include border style, size, shading, proportion, and types of colors used.

Aesthetic Spriting

In common spriting, the authors usually attempt to imitate the appearance of the sprites on a specific game, by such methods as using the same number of colors, same light source, etc. In aesthetic spriting, however, the authors are more concerned with how much the sprite please the viewers' eyes. For such, they make use of various resources.

For example, a difference can be found in the shading of the sprite. Although it is not as widely used as most outline effects, a method known as overshading may be used to smoothen the shading of a sprite and even make it look more three-dimensional. Overshading consists in increasing the number of shades used on a sprite (usually double the original), such as by mixing two existing shades of a color to create the center shade or by manually creating extreme light and dark shades. Overshading usually goes hand-in-hand with shaded all-color outlines (no black), and it requires good shading skills to be effective. A poorly done overshade may cause the sprite to look flat or even pressed down. A spriter use dithering (mixing two shades in a checkerboard pattern) to smooth out a sprite's shading. This is used more in larger sprites.

There are also some other minor yet still well-known styles of spriting. These, however, are currently not very popular. In addition, as mentioned above, spriters are constantly creating their own styles, and therefore a complete list is virtually impossible to compile.

Sprite Ripping and Compiling

Sprite ripping

Sprite ripping is the term used for copying certain sprites from a game and then pasting groups of sprites into a single file, called a sprite sheet. A spriter will use emulators and images of the original game data (usually called ROM images) to play the games, from which they try to copy every frame of a sprite's animations, be it an object, character, or effect. They then paste the individual poses onto a large bitmap file (the "sheet") in a program such as MS Paint. This process, commonly referred to as ripping, is usually accomplished by running the game image in a computer emulator, playing the game until the desired sprites show up on screen and taking successive snapshots to obtain bitmap images containing the sprite. Some emulators, like ZSNES have an option to disable background layers, making sprite ripping easier, as one doesn't have to separate each sprite from the background in an image editor.

Once all the sprites have been pasted and organized on the sheet, tags, messages or titles may be added to make the sprite sheet look good and pose restrictions on its usage. It's very frequent for the person who ripped a sprite sheet to ask for credit or permission (usually by email) before its usage on sprite comics, for example. For ripped sprites, these claims are not legitimate, because the sprite ripper did not create the sprites, and as such, its copyright belongs to the company that created the video game. While most people use ripped sprites in sprite comics without giving credit to the sprite ripper, taking a whole sheet, removing existent tags and messages and claiming to be its ripper is extremely frowned upon.

Sprite dumping

Another form of sprite ripping is sprite dumping, which is the same as the actual sprite ripping process, except for the fact that the ripping is fully automated, e.g. one does not need to play through the game with an emulator. In 3D games this is called texture dumping, since it involves textures being dumped.

Sprite sheets are often first saved as Windows bitmap files for MS Paint and other personal uses. They can then be saved into compressed formats, such as the GIF or PNG formats to show to other users on the Internet or send into sprite archives, although PNG images are sometimes hard to open on older versions of Microsoft Windows. A common mistake made by novice spriters is saving sprites in the JPEG format, a format that relies on lossy compression. As such, it's better suited better for photo-oriented images, not for images with very few colors. Saving sprites in the JPEG format causes those to acquire compression artifacts, rendering it useless for most uses, such as recoloring and inserting them in sprite comics. The GIF and PNG formats use lossless compression, making them better suited for storing sprites. Use of the JPEG format is usually looked down upon, but occasionally spriters will intentionally present their sprites as a distorted JPEG, in order to prevent unwanted use by others.

See also

• Pixel art
• Sprite Comic

References

1. http://darkut.free.fr/Tutorials/sprite_ripping.htm
2. http://spriters-resource.com/resources/rules.php

External links

• A sprite relolouring script on FE Planet
• The Spriters Resource
• Sprite Database
• The Mystical Forest Zone
• Spriting Zone

• Computer graphics
• Computer art