Art Asset Size Preference?

Hi all. I've recently decided to start selling animated characters and effects on the Scirra Store and I have a quick question. What size do you like to get your art in?

I'm working on my own project so I know the dimensions that I like, but I'm not sure if there is a universal size that works for other people.

I'm already planning on including 2 or 3 variations of each item to accommodate HD and more retro graphics. But I want to get a ball park idea of what those sizes could be. I'm talking mostly about character art. What size box would you want it to fit in?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

-Ben

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The bigger the better I guess. You can always resize the asset to make it smaller without quality loss, but not otherwise.

I'm agree with —

I'm just worried about going too big because of all of the frames of animation. I work in 600 by 600. That's really big if I have a 12 frame walk cycle. And I'm planning on 6-10 animations for each variation.

ALWAYS work in power of two sizes. So 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024 etc. I have no idea why. I'm just an artist. I just know that's the way it has to be

I created this at 512x256 (doesn't have to be a square, just make sure each axis is a power of two) and then resized it down to 256x128 for in-game use. I always work larger than I need to and scale down afterwards. Just in case I need a larger image than I thought, and because I find it difficult to create art at really small sizes.

-Silver- very nice

construct is rather quirky in that sense, that making every animationframe in power of two will actually NOT fit well in the final spritesheet because it automatically adds an extra pixel,.. personally, i find it a big mess to figure out the best fit, theres no feedback on how your assets will be distributed, except checking the final export...

Bigger the better is good but you let it to the customer to handle the best resizing, wich is not always good for everyone, will it actually look good at every size? idealy i want to give the original, (the biggest you want to go) and then a couple of steps, so the enduser can choose the best size/quality for the project, again ideally, because this all takes time, you can also take the approach as what do you find the best options for your assets...

The same for how many frames..., its easy to give someone a complex 50 frame animation, but for mobile and online you want that to be optimized, the size of your art x amount of frames can add quickly to couple of mb...

600*600 is pretty big and thats really HD for a character, a couple of options down from that and your good i think,.. good luck with your assets sman118

Thanks for the responses everyone. I forgot I posted in the forums and just now saw the results.

I've decided on doing a pack of character animation at about 100x100 and 50x50 and just including those together. At the same time I'm going to release an HD version that is a Spriter pack. I figure that should cover all of my bases.

Thanks again for your help and -Silver- , I love the wolf animation.

-Ben

Hi all. I've recently decided to start selling animated characters and effects on the Scirra Store and I have a quick question. What size do you like to get your art in?

You don't really have to make the graphic the power of 2, its mostly due to older graphic cards, where the power of 2 were faster than using some odd numbers and some cards needed that scale. But most graphic cards today will handle it just fine as they have a dedicated GPU, memory and of course better in general.

However it used to be that you made graphic in the sizes of 64x64, 128x128 etc. Because the graphic was converted to these dimensions anyway, as far as I know. Which means you don't save any memory anyway and might cause worse performance If not the power of 2. but anyway not 100% sure about whether that still the case with newer graphic cards. Would probably need Ashley to explain how it works, to be certain. But personally I wouldn't worry to much about it.

Also regarding sizes, its generally a good idea to make the graphic the correct size so no scaling is needed. Regardless of whether you scale up or down, it will hurt quality. But in general its always better to scale down than up in my opinion.

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Images that are in the power of 2 are the most easily scalable because there are no odd numbers. It's generally a good rule to follow if you intend to scale images for different devices and resolutions, not only for you as an artist but for the programmers as well. No matter the size when you divide an image that is in the power of 2 you eventually end up with one pixel, always. That's not the case for images not in the power of 2, and the amount of times you can double the size without ever getting an odd number is indefinite.

actually work on 2^n -2 images.

example - n = 8 = 1024-2 = 1022 x 1022 images and 62x62 and 14x14 and 254x254, 126x126 and so on... because that way they are best spritesheeted. but even if you go 2^n it won't matter cuz a few frames will slip

But then you can only divide it once, you have to define the size before substracting which becomes a problem when you want to scale images 1:1. For example, I can't take 1022/2 = 511 and then take that and divide it again, you get 255.5. In fact, if you subtract any even number from a number of base 2, you can divide the result.

With a base of 2 you can continuily divide or double a number without running into any half-numbers, it's more error-proof. I do understand what you're getting at though since the way the C2 spritepacking works.

it doesn't matter, if you have 1024 - resize to 510x510, or resize to 254x254. aspect ratio is still 1:1

I mean scaling in-engine, not resizing in the image editor.

Ashley says that the most efficient is 2 pixels less than power of 2.