Poll: painting programs for developing Simutrans objects

[vilvoh]

Sometimes it's difficult to start developing stuff for Simutrans by the 3D way. Imho, it's better to start from pixel art and then move on to 3D. Some people is asking information about which are the best painting programs for developing pixel art stuff for Simutrans, so I think would be good to know the artists opinion about this issue. No matter if you use painting programs for full development or just for fixing details. We would like to know which one you use and the reasons why you use it.

I usually use GIMP, for fixing details and creating parts of the objects from scratch. I think it's advanced enough for my needs althouh I don't use all features, but I need some more advanced than Paint.

[VS]

I think this is not as much a question of "best" as "which do you use". The best editor for Simutrans must have the famous read my mind button

I use GIMP, even if only in finishing phase, because it has layers and I don't have anything else with that capability.

[jamespetts]

As well as GIMP, I also use Blender.

[jonasbb]

I use Gimp because it has anything I need. Layers, grids and a few more things.
And the other why I use it: It was the standard painting tool before Ubuntu 10.04.

[mobo]

I use GIMP from scratch to final image. Then eventually last touches in shades (for the special colors) and if necessary tilecutter afterwards.

For the p32c i only need very basic features of Gimp mostly the pencil, copy'n'paste, floodfill.
The pencil's extra functions are also very useful: shift + click does lines, strg + click picks a color from the image.

Layers are cool if you draw some parts first (maybe a house and a tree) and you want to figure out how to arrange them on the tile afterwards. Also if you add something, and don't know yet how it will look, draw it on a new layer and the rest of your picture won't get harmed. And of course to lay half transparent things on top of something opaque.

The Selection tools are also helpfull.

Sometimes you can use a gradient fill on some selected area if it shall look somehow curved. You should'nt use this too much otherwise it might look like some ol' vector-graphics from the eighties.

When i did images for 64 i used to "generate textures" by adding some monochromatic noise and then blurring it somehow. For example some noie + vertical motion blur + (maybe afterwards again some noise) can give a nice effect of a fassade that has been whashed by rain for a while already. There's a problem with the edges when you do the motion blur, so you need to apply this method on some larger area (on a different layer) and cut out the right piece afterwards.

Adjusting a or a range of colour(s) (like the bright and the dark side of a house) with the hue/saturation/brightness sliders is also easy to do and you can get a good result quickly, for example when you need to adjust your colours to make them fit to the look of the pakset.

Yeah, that's about it, there is a lot of tools in it especially for manipulating fotos, but you don't need them at all for creating simutrans objects.

[Sybill]

This is a nice tutorial how to make images with The Gimp. It should be added to a wiki.

[MoTw]

I use GIMP and nothing else for painting. The first thing I did after my Ubuntu 10.04 installation was to remove Pitivi (Who the hell needs a video-editoer  ) and to install Gimp.

Of course, after painting I use Shades to look for wrong pixels. 

[Combuijs]

For my (very little) painting work I use Paint (very ease to understand) and Photoshop (the very small part I understand of it).

[petter]

I use Paint because it was the standard in microsoft and it has everything I need.

[gauthier]

I used paint but now with the recent glitches in paint under windows 7 I use photofiltre, simple and powerfull enough.

[Gouv]

Hmm, I wouldnt call my usual Procedure 'Painting' and most of my Programs arent listed in the Poll.
Anyway, here's my lovely Software-Chart(with GIMP being the least used)

[Zeno]

After Blender, I mostly use a selfmade tool (composition+color replacing) and Shades (alignment). If I need extra processing with a painting tool, then I usually choose Photoshop, just because it's well known to me.

[Václav]

CorelDraw 9 - painting
GIMP - finishing (if it is needed) - changing background color, eliminating false pixels (probably it will be used more and more but main will be CD9)
Shades - occasional eliminating of unwanted night lighting pixels