Dithering options for the pixel tool for real pixel art

[DAD]

Hi team Serif,

I am real happy about Affinity Designer. Currently I am working on pixel art.
Affinity Designer supports every needed tools like raster, grid, pixel tool and so on.
But I absolut would love to have more options for dithering!
Now all my dithering are hand made, it is time consuming.

Dithering options like a pop-up menu under the pixel tool for may, Windows and iPad would be really lovely!
What you you think?

The dithering options could be like a brush texture and should be conform
with the magnetic and pixel exact placement. Would that be possible?

Best greetings Anke Goldbach

[DAD]

Bay the way... PIXEL ART is just famous – and dithering would bring
Affinity Designer even more on a really higher level of fun and supporting artists!!!
Thanks in advance  –
 

 

[SrPx]

Hello...

At the risk of you knowing every single bit of the following.... 

I've worked as a pixel artist (making several entire games on my own as we were a small startup, worked at other game studios too, but those were all 3D based), and is surely a bad habit of mine, but I always did my dithering pixel by pixel. I was never too "rules compliant" in pixel art, anyway (but bosses and the distro loved it, so...  . People think every CEO is gonna be a pixel art old skool purist... rarely the case, IMO, in reality). But in any case, I'd recommend to use specialized tools for certain specialized tasks, instead of a general tool, today. That said, I used Photoshop for all, back in the day, lol.

My favorite is Aseprite. For specially animation, but also for tiles. It has a ton of power under the hood. The flexibility for pure pixel pushing is crazy. And its timeline and skin onion (to see previous and  next frames character pose while you draw current, as u have it in gale and Pro Motion), THE tool for me for making animated characters, and other types of sprites. And way more advanced than it seems for tiles. Although always depends on your projects technical requirements. Indy scene has gone WAY beyond the tech limits that hardware had in the day, it is being used it now as a form of art by its own right, and as indies have been clever, and discovered pixel art makes production affordable for tiny indy teams vs expensive 3D production (heck, I jumped into 3D to get better jobs, the dinosaurs were on earth yet, and I thought the indy scene would ALSO be taken by 3D, and pixel art would finally disappear,  fully vanish for ever, and all that skill, for nothing. But it's freakin' resilient, the darn thing, haha...since the 80s, kicking... ).

Cosmigo Pro Motion, tho not my preference by any chance, is the most professional and more featured. As a plus, is still requested to get a job at some mobile games studios, so there u have it, you learn a skill that can make u even more employable (if that's to consider). GraphicsGale has gone fully free since some time ago, and is quite a nice tool to have, too. Piskel is for animated sprites and also tiles, has the dithering paint tool you want (a simplistic one, tho),  is VERY good though very simple, is an online, browser based editor, but you can download a native version, and should if plan on working in bigger files, for performance. Then there's map editors for actually building tiles based game levels and better exporting tilesets, and if so, the needed code.  Like Tiled (most recently maintained, might have longer life),  TileStudio and Mappy. The latter two, I've used them at some companies. Many years ago, Tiled was not yet a thing, I believe.

My doubt is what of all these do run in Window 10. (of course, only a few can run in a Mac). I know Mappy runs fine in Wine.

I ... would rather use all of these, indeed, have them all installed, is helpful to do so, and would probably work mostly with a combination of Aseprite and a map editor. (I'm a pixel pusher, tho, anything with a 1 px tool works for me, be it Photo AD's pixel persona or PS ). 

Sorry if you knew all these, is just that in one part, I doubt there's UI room, space to add all what a specialized tile and sprite editor needs in AD or AP,  and besides, that I've found many artists not knowing several of these tools, to my very huge surprise.  Also, kind of find strange IMO to be using Affinity for this, although yep, is perfectly capable already for some of us more....er... rustic. The only thing is that, for example, having a frames timeline with onion skin in Aseprite makes it tons better for sprite animation than using just layers in an illustration or photo retouch software,  and an anim previewer external tool (or a tiles background checker, for tiles), which is what you'd have probably to do to create animated sprites of some complexity with A. Designer, AP or PS.

In order of my own preference (although piskelapp and graphicsgale have each one so many advantages that u could consider them equally important) :

Tile and sprite editors :

https://www.aseprite.org

https://www.cosmigo.com/pixel_animation_software/features

https://www.piskelapp.com

https://graphicsgale.com

Map editors :

https://www.mapeditor.org

http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net

https://www.tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php

 

Again, sorry if this sounds as an scratched disk to you, is old news and etc.

 

[DAD]

Hello...

and thanks for your kind reply.
I think it is always good to spreed good information!
So, I am really pleased about your added content!
Keep it up  – knowledge and great content makes this forum way better.

Best greetings