any tips for making avatars???

Tartyrsause · 03-12-2009 06:31 PM

anyone have any tips for making those cool avatars?.. I need one and I need ta make Mr Awesome one too..

DerektheAwesome · 03-12-2009 06:44 PM

I personally find it easiest to draw something and then crop it and size it down to 80x80 for the avatar, but you can draw something that small if you really want to. I'm not sure what program you use, but in Photoshop you can hold Shift while using the selection tool to get a perfect square when you're cropping the image. If it's not a perfect square, or if it's too big, it'll prob'ly end up looking all squished.

Reyne_Maker · 03-12-2009 07:23 PM

Or you could get one of the many awesome artists out there to do it for you,
Heck I'd do it for you, send me a screenie of your ingame character and I'll work up a simple head/bust shot for you.

(but for anything larger, my regular commission details are in my sig)

FireBrandi · 03-12-2009 08:40 PM

what I would like to know is how to make a good animated gif. Only got this one because I found a website that could make it for you, with some limitations

FireBrandi - Champions lvl 50 Fire/Fire/Fire Blaster - Tier 4 Alpha
Kim Paler - lvl 50 Crab Spider - Tier 3 Alpha

My DA page

Toxic_Shia · 03-12-2009 08:47 PM

I used to use image ready from the adobe suite, now photoshop has a little animation window that lets you save images as animated gifs. They're really quite fun if you can figure out a short, simple, looping animation. Some people also use flash to make them.

Tartyrsause · 03-13-2009 12:07 AM

..yea.. think its gonna have ta be vector art ta scale down that small without fuzzing up

YuriFoxfirega · 03-13-2009 12:19 AM

I personally have found scaling down helps a lot.

One big tip I have, is sharpening the image a little before actually scaling it. It sort of helps with the fuzzing effect, though not all of the time. I tend to save at multiple stages once I get the crop I want.

Reyne_Maker · 03-13-2009 04:47 AM

Not sure what program you're using, but I use Photoshop, and yep it's pretty easy to make animated gifs with it, with it, fuzzing up shouldn't be a problem, (but if you're using more than one layer you will want to merge visible first, because it picks up the edges of linework in an odd way)
Thing is, there is often a very big difference between how Photoshop will displays the image as the initial raster .psd, and how it will appear after being saved as a jpeg, gif or png.
Gifs (and jpegs) are a really forgiving format, just make sure the original images have strong enough contrast,
and good luck

Wassy · 03-13-2009 06:15 AM

You shouldn't have a fuzzing problem while shrinking. This is a well-known and OLD trick of making art for print. Working big and then shrinking TIGHTENS work. Blowing up fuzzes.

Also, use the SAVE FOR WEB option. You'll get a smaller file than straight saving as a .jpg plus will be able to preview how it looks. You can tweak to the exact setting you want for exactly how large of a file you want.