Best Drawing program to make sprites?

[lsmart]

I've always heard Deluxe Paint was good, but I can only find ver III (3) on E-Bay right now.  Would IV (4) or V (5) be better or have tools that would make getting an earlier version a mistake?

If you only need OCS-Screenmodes Deluxe Paint III is IMO even better than Dpaint IV & V. I used it religiously in the 80s and 90s. Be sure to get the manual as well because it teaches all the essential tricks.

Damn I really loved using that program. Too bad it doesn´t run without emulation on AmigaOS 4. I´d pay $200 for a decent 64Bit Windows version of DPaint.

EDIT: I just tried "MyPaint" under Windows. Just like Gimp they didn´t even include a line-, rectangle- or circle-tool. Why? These are the most basic functions ever and they are useful when you want to draw guidance lines that help you positioning stuff. This is disappointing.

[XDelusion]

What you want to do is to get Windows 3.0 emulated on your Amiga, then use an old version of Microsoft Paint. You can't go wrong there!

Personally I've been using a mixture of DPaint and PPaint for my sprite editing needs, though I am not too well versed in either program as I project originally began while working on a Windows machine some 11 years ago. None the less I like to try to do as much of the graphical work on the Amiga that I can because of the program's unique ways of dealing with things.

I've always been curious about Brilliance, but never really stuck around to learn much of it. I'll prolly get back to it sooner or later.

[Rebel-CD32]

It's useful to have all three programs installed if you have them. Personal Paint of course being free is the most practical choice, and I peronally use it the most anyway. It has a much larger undo buffer than Deluxe Paint, which only lets you undo a single step. Brilliance is excellent, especially for its colour depth control which is useful for working on OCS palettes on an AGA machine without having to reboot into ECS mode, or for working on Mega Drive/PC Engine/Master System graphics or for other limited-colour systems.

Still, I find myself using Personal Paint every day. I pixel icons, GUI images and game graphics. It has really good palette control and a useful Halfbright brush mode. It does just about everything I need it to, I usually only switch to Deluxe Paint for the onion-skinning and animation controls, or Brilliance for the colour depth stuff or painting in 24bit.

[Ral-Clan]

I haven't found anything that Dpaint could do with animating that Brilliance couldn't.  They just use a different interface to achieve the same result.  brilliance also seems to load anims faster too.

Well, Brilliance doesn't do onion-skinning.  If it did then I'd probably use it exclusively, because it is great.

All three programs mentioned in this thread are great and compliment each other.  PPaint is also good because it supports RTG screenmodes.

[XDelusion]

What is Onion skinning?

[lunithy]

If you only need OCS-Screenmodes Deluxe Paint III is IMO even better than Dpaint IV & V. I used it religiously in the 80s and 90s. Be sure to get the manual as well because it teaches all the essential tricks.

Damn I really loved using that program. Too bad it doesn´t run without emulation on AmigaOS 4. I´d pay $200 for a decent 64Bit Windows version of DPaint.

EDIT: I just tried "MyPaint" under Windows. Just like Gimp they didn´t even include a line-, rectangle- or circle-tool. Why? These are the most basic functions ever and they are useful when you want to draw guidance lines that help you positioning stuff. This is disappointing.

I could not agree more :lol: you just made my day

[stefcep2]

Well, Brilliance doesn't do onion-skinning.  If it did then I'd probably use it exclusively, because it is great.

Never realised that!

[stefcep2]

What is Onion skinning?

Animations consist of several frames.  Traditional animators used to work on transparent sheets, each frame was on one sheet, and to test that the relative positioning of the moving components looked right they would overlay one or more sheets in the order they would need to be to create the illusion of motion.  Onion skinning means that you can see a faint outline of the previous or next frame on top of the current frame you are working on. This is the same concept digitally as what traditional animators did.

[ChaosLord]

There are thousands of monster animations in Total Chaos AGA and most of them were drawn in Dpaint and/or Ppaint.

I use Dpaint for my pixelling because I know how to use it.  I learned from the Dpaint Tutorial Videotape which is a zillion x easier to learn from than reading the manual.

Many of my gfx friends tell me that Ppaint is better than Dpaint.

I think I read somewhere you were making an OCS game?
If so then Disney Animation Studio totally R0xx0rz!