If you love indetails, be sure to subscribe
here and on Twitch where I'm live most weekdays. You can also show your support through Patreon or on itch.io where I upload assets
and games shown on the channel. Hey, hey. Welcome pals to a new video. Today we're going to be covering Aseprite. And how to use it. Specifically how I use it. So, that's pretty much all there is. Let's get straight into it. So, the first question is what is Aseprite? Aseprite is a graphic editor, a
raster graphics editor, specifically. That is written for pixel art. It can be used to make all kinds of things
like this beautiful scrolling background, or your own portraits, Or tilesets for your video games. Literally, anything that is pixel art related, You can make it here. Even make animated gifs to upload
and share with your friends as well. The first question you're
probably asking is why Aseprite? As opposed to saying something like photoshop
or Microsoft paint or anything like that. Aseprite is a dedicated piece of software that is actively worked on all the time. There are new features
releasing, you know, routinely. And it's dedicated to pixel art which means
that it doesn't have a say in photoshop's case. A whole lot of features that
either work against pixel art or need to be disabled or get in the way of features that you want when
you're creating pixel art. So, because it's so specific
to this kind of medium, It gets out of the way pretty quickly and
lets you just do the stuff that you wanna do. Let's now talk about the workspace. So, when you open up an Aseprite
file for the first time, The first thing you see is this new sprite window. If you press new sprite, And here is pretty basic. You just have your options to type
in the values for the size you want, you can choose a color mode,
this could be changed later. And some background options. I usually go for transparent. You don't have to worry about
this pixel aspect ratio. These are basically for recreating
pixel art that was on very very old monitors that may not have had
a one-to-one pixel aspect ratio. Some systems have, you know
wider pixels or taller pixels, But not really relevant. So, once you get past that window
you agreed with the workspace, The workspace is really straightforward. You have your canvas, you have the toolbar on the right, these are all of the things that you
use to manipulate what's on the canvas. Above the canvas is the context bar. This shows all of the options
for your currently selected tool. So, in this case, we have the pencil tool selected
which means that these are all the pencil options. The other thing that changes the way
the pencil tool works is the palette. This is what color gets placed down
when you draw and when you use it. If you're creating an rgb image, you can literally just pick whatever
color you want and use that. You don't have to use the palette, But I recommend using the palette because
it makes choosing colors a lot easier and is more consistent with pixel art. You can add new colors by dragging this handle. You can also copy and paste colors. You can add new colors by if you're in
indexed mode, selecting a color that you want and pressing this little exclamation mark. There's a whole bunch of ways to do it. This is the spectrum. This is where you pick the colors from. And this can be changed using the menu up here. There are some options there. You can also pick an entirely new palette
from the preset menu up in the top left. So, that's palette. Below is the timeline. The timeline shows us all of our frames
and layers associated with the canvas. So you can create a filled-in image of one color. You can make a new layer. And you can draw on top of that layer. You can swap those around. You can make them different opacity levels. You can have different blending modes. If you're familiar with what those are. There's a whole bunch of options there. And you also, of course, animated
your images by having multiple frames. That's the timeline. Above that, we have a menu which just has more
options for different aspects of the software including things like different
modes for the canvas and also extra features like the
preview window stiff like that. So, that's the workspace. Let's now talk about the workflow. So, the aseprite workflow, or at
least my aseprite work workflow is one that I've developed
over a long period of time. I've been using this software for over
seven years, I think at this point. And the way that I use it, it's not the only way,
but it's something that I'm most comfortable with and I think, can be attributed
to why I'm so fast with the tool. I know when a lot of you watch my videos. It kind of seems like I'm
going really really quickly. So, I am gonna try to explain how I
approach using the app so that you can make your work a lot faster and more efficient. My process is basically the
same no matter what I'm doing. Although there are variegations. If I'm doing animation or background or a
tileset, they're all slightly different. The basics are, I'm blocking in what I'm creating. I'm shading it, I'm coloring
it, and I'm adding detail. That's pretty much the process. I work with a lot of high-resolution
pixel art that is, it's not quite so specific in how I place the
pixels until the very last detail phase. I know a lot of people especially beginners
like to place pixels one at a time. This is something that I think
is not a bad way to start but the more you wanna build out your
work and create a high volume of work, the less feasible that is as
a technique and as a workflow. So, what I usually do is I stick to a
very small set of tools for the most part. And I use a lot of clever keyboard shortcuts and
tricks to produce a lot of work very quickly. So the first thing you wanna know
is how I approach using the toolbar. Basically, I never move my mouse over to here. I'm almost always using keyboard shortcuts
and keeping my mouse around the canvas. Because it allows me to place things very quickly. So the first shortcut you wanna learn is b. B is for brush in my case. The tool is called the pencil tool,
but it's easier to remember brush. Right, The brush tool is super useful. You can do so much with it. But I almost always stick to using a round brush. I've got pressure sensitivity turned
off even though I'm using a tablet. Sometimes, you know, if it works, I will
use the symmetry tool, but not always. I usually have pixel-perfect turned off. And the reason for that is if I'm
working and I want to draw a line, it's much more intuitive to know that every pixel
that I pass through is going to be colored in, As opposed to using the pixel-perfect tool
which uses an algorithm to decide which pixels you want to draw on. It can be sometimes inconsistent,
for example, you just saw then, you can see the pixels and then sometimes
they get removed as you move over. This is because it's designed
to create single-pixel brushes. So even though you touch a position, it can sometimes be erased as
you continue your line across. Instead, I prefer to think of it as more like
paint, so wherever I touch, that gets filled in. And then I will go back later
and tighten up the lines. That brings us to our second
tool which is the eraser. And I use the eraser mostly in the
first phase of my blocking stage. What I mean is my goal is to create a
silhouette, say if I'm creating a character. And I'm toggling between b and e just to define
the outlines of that shape that I'm creating. Right. So, there's no work or effort that I have
to do to think about which tool I want. I'm just going. If I want to see more, I press b. If I want pixels to go away, I press e. That's about it. It's not trying to take the brain work out of it. I'm not picking between
different colors at this stage. Once I have this though, I
then want to start shading. And there are two really really
special things that I do here. One is to actually switch to a different color. Plot it down. And then hold alt. This is the eyedropper tool. The eyedropper tool, if you hold alt, it will toggle to that took for
as long as you're holding alt. And the reason why that's so useful is
you can sort of plot down some colors and then pick and choose which
colors you want back and forth. Right? Just by toggling between alt and not
holding alt will give you the option to. Basically, just toggle between them. So I can just sample from
different parts of my palette that I've created here in the
canvas just like down here. And I can actually even up in this area,
right? I can click and drag here, I can, oh, I want some of this color, nope I want some
of this color, maybe I'll take some of that. This sort of picking and choosing, sampling workflow is one that I use a
lot when I'm doing this shading. However, there is another tool or at least a mode that I've been using much
much more in recent months. So, this is the pencil tool up here. And here I've got simple ink selected. This is the default option. There's another option, if you ignore
these middle three, called shading. What shading allows you to do is to drag a subset of your palette from, you
know, the lowest to the brightest color. You can flip this by pressing x. But by default, it's the darkest to the brightest. And whatever you draw, will be shifted
by one value in that direction. Okay. So what you can do is without even
worrying about staying in the lines, you can just start shading what you're working on. And I think this is so so useful. It's a bit of an advanced technique. Because it involves one setting a
slightly different keyboard shortcut. I don't go up here every time and
switch between shading and simple ink. But I switch between them a lot. So the way I do that is I have some
custom keyboard, shortcuts, set up. You can find those in edit. Keyboard shortcuts. And the way I set up is that b is the brush tool, D is simple ink when b is selected. And s is shade So, d and s toggle between the modes when I'm
in the brush tool, when I'm in the pencil tool. And that's something you can
set up relatively easily. You just have to go edit, keyboard
shortcuts, and then find your way to it. If you just type in shade, So here, shading is s. And that's set ink type. This only works if the pencil tool is
selected, so you can set that yourself there. So during this blocking phase and early shading, I'm usually keeping the canvas
about full size right in my view. And the way that I do that is with the z key. That's for zoom. You can click, so right click left click,
left click goes in, right click goes out. You can also scrub which means drag left and right And basically, wherever you place the pen down and drag, that's the pixel
that you're going to move into. So, I find this really useful if I'm just
trying to zero in on a specific detail and then if I want to zero away from that detail, you just move in the opposite
direction from where you want to see If I want to see bottom left, I
start from top right and I pull away. And so you can center the canvas by pulling like this, you know, in different
directions and I do that a lot. An alternative to that is by holding space. Space is the hand tool and you can
use it to pan around the canvas. So between those two, you can get really agile you can see me switching between magnifying glass and hand just to navigate
really quickly around the canvas That's really useful when you need to zoom in and
you're working with these single pixel details. And you just trying to get around So for the most part, those
are the tools that I use. There are a fair few times where
I'll use the selection tools as well. So, I'll grab the marquee tool with m
and I'll drag wherever I want to drag. Let's say I wanna do some shading
but only within this region. You know, I might do that. You can also get a lasso version
of that same tool with q. And then alternatively w will do a wand selection. So, that's everything that's
within the same color range. And you can make that all of the colors on
the entire canvas with contiguous turned off or just the region that you're
looking at if it's turned on. And those are bound by whether
or not the pixels touch. You know, if I was to take this and
put this here, now that's all one area. So those are the selections. If I happen to have multiple layers, Let's say I have a layer here with this pink
thing on it and a layer here with this on it. A lot of people often ask me how
do I toggle these layers or even how to I remember what's on what layer
when they're not even named correctly. And the way that I do that is I press the v key. And v is our move tool. But I use it more of a layer selection tool
with this button checked on auto selected layer. So, if I want to work on the pink layer, I can, you know, click it, go to the brush tool, plot something down, I can use the eyedropper,
you know, plot some of the stuff down, then I'll press v, click on a different layer and now with the eyedropper tool selected, I
can click it and start working on that too. So you can move really quickly
between layers that way. You can say v alt click b click v, I mean I don't think like that. I just do it. But once you get used to it,
it's very very easy to just toggle between different layers and
draw different thing on each of them. That's how I get around and those are
the tools that I use for the most part. So I wanna show you how I get around in
Aseprite when I'm doing the work that I do. Basically, I have my tablet
here. I don't use the mouse. Although I have the mouse and
I can do pixel are with it. I generally don't like to be drawing
with it because I just find it a little bit cumbersome to be
using my elbow the way I do. Instead, when I'm drawing, I
really like to use the pen. And so I use that the majority of the time. What I don't do is use any of these keys here,
their express keys or whatever they're called. I just ignore them because they are not in a very
intuitive place for me to put my hand, right? There's nowhere I can rest my hand to
give quick access to any of these buttons. Instead, the way more natural thing to do
is to just rest my hand on the keyboard. And you'll notice that the posture of my
hand, I can basically reach all of the most important things that I want to reach just with
my hand resting in the bottom left hand corner. So, if I wanna drag around,
that's space. Very easy. If I want to zoom, that's my ring finger
goes to z and I can drag left and right. I can press ctrl if I want to
change some sort of modifier. I can press b to go to my brush tool. I can press e to erase. It's all right here, right? And if I am doing things
between two layers, so you know, let's say we've got another layer here. I can just give you a little demonstration. So, clicking this g for paint
for the paint bucket tool. I can select this button here to get a color. Maybe I am doing a cool question
mark or something like that, right? So let's just shape this, erasing
there, picking the color here, going back to the v to make
sure I'm on this layer, b for brush and that's just kind of how it works. That's basically the, that's the
approach, I'm just whizzing about here, pressing the keys that I need to press. I'm not going all the way over
here, I'm not going over here, I'm not moving my hand back and forth
between the tablet and the mouse. Because all of that is just too much effort. And it's also like the reason why I don't move my mouse over here and click the
toolbars themselves, the toolbar tools. I literally want to keep my mouse my hand
here, I mean look how fixed brush hand is. I can reach either side of the canvas and
my wrist doesn't have to leave the table. So, for me, this is like, this range here is where my eyes are and when my
hand reaches the entire time that I'm drawing. Even if I'm drawing something as big as this, I just want to say one thing. I do use a kind of like a plug-in like a tool that
somebody wrote for me to change the brush size. So this d and scrubbing across this is
something that I've been requesting is added to Aseprite as an official feature but as of
right now it's just something that I can do. You can basically replicate that by dragging this. It's the same thing. But it's just one more thing
that I don't have to reach. And the way I'm doing it right now
is I've got this little java applet called ace brush made by a friend of mine, Wispy. And it just says when I'm selecting the d key and I'm dragging left and right treat it like I'm
scrolling with the control key with the mouse. Because I'm not holding the mouse, I can't
do this, I don't have any way of scrolling, with this and I sure as hell don't
want to be moving my hand all the way down here and trying to
dial this to make it bigger. So, that's my little shortcut here
of how I changed the brush size. And that's so handy for me. If I'm trying to work with something and then make something a little bit bigger, got
a bit smaller, I do that all the time. So I hope it gets added soon
because it's really useful to me. So, that's my workflow. That's how I plot pixels down. I want to tell you about a couple
of other features that Aseprite has just to keep your interest. Okay, so there are a bunch of little things
that I've come across when using Aseprite that you might stumble into
and not know what's going on or you might not know about and find useful. The first is tab. So tab disables or hides the timeline. There's another way of doing this that's
you might do accidentally and get stuck and not know what's going on. If you press ctrl
f, you can hide different parts of the ui. And I think the first time you do this, you will get some sort of window
saying 'hey, did you mean to do this?'. Basically, it lets you full
screen the entire canvas. And if you know how to, if you're in the
shortcuts, you know how to use them the way I do. You can use the app fairly
comfortably, still doing this, as long as you don't need the palette itself,
you can eye drop the colors that you want. And just work this way. It's good for viewing things at full screen or
if you're trying to just like show something off to somebody and like a zoom call or
whatever and you don't want the ui in there. That's how you do that. You can press ctrl f and it just
cycles through different variations. And then tab gets rid of this. That's disabling parts of the ui. Another thing that tends to happen
to me quite a lot is snapping. If you press shift s, what will happen is the
work that you're doing will snap to the grid. Right? All the lines you draw,
everything will snap to the grid. And first time this happened to me, I was 'what is
going on?. I don't know how to get out of this.'. There is a little thing that says disable step
to grid in the bottom right to make that go away. Another little feature that I think a
lot of you appreciate a lot more than I appreciate it because I don't use
it that often is the preview window. So the preview window, what is it? It's
just a version of the canvas that you can put in a window. I think in the next version of Aseprite, this is going to be able to be pulled
away from the actual Aseprite window. So right now, it's locked within Aseprite. But soon I think it will be its own window that you can drag around your desktop onto your
second monitor or whatever you wanna do. So you can actually even play animations here. And if you want to do that
with the keyboard short, its shift enter will play and pause
animations in this space here. So that's the preview. One that I use a lot for work like this, this is
huge canvas here right? It's repeating background. It's actually a lot smaller than it looks. I use tiled mode to basically
duplicate the canvas. So you can go tile mode in one
axis, in this case, x-axis. And what this does is just duplicate
the view of your canvas twice. So anything that you do gets
transferred across all three, they're not three different canvases
and it doesn't extend your canvas. All it's doing is duplicating
what's shown in this window twice. If you did want to make your canvas
bigger, you can go into Aseprite option, select canvas size, and you can drag it that way. Now another really handy feature that I think
makes Aseprite basically the best, one of the best pieces of software I've ever used is something
that allowed me to make this image right here. There's a lot of detail here. It's a very complicated looking thing. Looks like it's all rotating and
you know doing so in 3d space and I create this partly with the help of. Basically, the design pattern
that appears in Aseprite. So in Aseprite, if you have
something selected and that selection appears as part of a set, you can
perform operations across the entire set. Say if I have my palette and I want to
make an adjustment to the brightness, if I select multiple palette indices, I can change the brightness across
all of them at the same time. Okay? That's really cool. If I have a color or a
selection that appears across multiple frames I can change that
selection by say replacing the color. And that will work across all of them too. If I don't do that, if I have one frame selected and I change the color,
it will only appear on that frame. So you can make group changes to anything
in a Aseprite that is part of a selection. And this also works with the marquee tool as well. So if I select a portion of the canvas
but then select multiple frames, Right? I can replace a color within
that selection across all the frames. Right? So I can take this, create a selection, drag the layers that I want
select here, replace the color, And now it's replace everywhere even if
they are not the same contents, right? So we could draw, you know, something looks
like this on this frame, on this frame, on the frame, on this frame, you can
draw all kinds of different shapes. And then select the window, select every frame
that we wanted to apply on, replace the color. And that will play out across all of those now. So so powerful. And it doesn't have to be
all on the same layer either. You can make this change over things across
different layers as long as you select them. Right? I could select this and this and
this and this and this and this and this and do something specific with those frames too. The other thing that's really handy is you can
just drag things across layers if you want. You can swap layers. You can move an entire frame back if you want. Or you can move right forward. Aseprite's way of handling moving
these objects is a little tricky. Once you clicked it, you will see
there's a red fill with a yellow border. You have to grab the yellow
border to make this work. Dragging the red fill will
just change your selection. So instead, you wanna click and then
run to the edge of that rectangle, and now you can drag it around. So I've shown you replacing colors with shift r. But let's now cover outlines with shift o. The outline is such an easy tool to use. And replaces a lot of boring work by simply just clicking a color, dragging
the color that you want. You can choose inner or outer. And you can choose dense
you want the outline to be. That's it. Easy peasy. I believe you can also do this over
multiple layers and multiple frames. There it is. So if you have, say an animation, and you want that animation to be
outlined, you can do that just as easily. So I've shown you the workspace. I've shown you my workflow and some tips and tricks on some hidden
features that you might now know about. The last obvious thing that I
can show you is export options. So, let's say you've been working on your
pixel art thing for multiple hours now. And you're finally happy
with it, this time for sure. And you wanna export it somewhere, you wanna share it on twitter or put
it in your game or whatever it is. So there are two ways to export your work The first is with the export
options which is right here, export. You can do that by pressing ctrl
alt shift s as well on the keyboard. This option is pretty straightforward. You can pick a folder, you change
the name to whatever you want, you can resize it, this is especially useful if you're uploading to somewhere on
the web like discord or twitter. Often what will happen is if you keep
this at 100 and your work is pretty small, say 16 x 16, it's going to show up a very
tiny little window whatever you send it. And if it doesn't show up as a tiny little window, it will be scaled up with what's
called a bilinear filtering. So it'll become really blurry. If you're exporting your work and
you're getting blurry results, changing this to be much much higher
is definitely going to help you out. So, if you're working with like 16 by 16,
you wanna go to like 600 or 700 or 800. If you're working with something like 64 by 64 you only need to increase it
by like 200 or 400 percent. So, in this case, 64 x 64 is what I want. If you're exporting assets for
your games do not change this. Okay? Your game should be able to
scale the graphic in the engine. You don't want to scale them when
you're exporting your artwork. This is only for sharing on the internet. Then you have layers and frames. This is on what basis you
want to export this, right? Are we exporting the visible layers on this frame?
Or just the selected layers? A specific layer? And then which frames you want to export? So, this window is for exporting a
single image or an animated image, right? But it only shows one frame's worth of
content in the window when you export it. So you can export it as a png of just your work or if it's animated you can export
it with this window as well as a gif. And that will figure itself out if you've got
multiple frames selected, it'll figure that out. You can select from here the
file format that you want and if you select gif, it'll animate,
if you've got multiple frames, gif is the only format of this list that
actually can be animated on the web. You can export an animation as png files but
what that will do is export every sprite, every frame as its own png that's
just numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. If instead what you want is a sprite sheet. So one sheet that has all of the
frames on it for use in your game. Rather than pressing ctrl alt shift
s, you just wanna press ctrl e. This is the export sprite sheet option. You have all these options. and the first one is just what you actually
want the sprite sheet to be indexed as, you know, is it a horizontal strip? Is it a
vertical strip? is it a box of rows and columns? You can define that here pretty easily by rows,
you know, number of columns, three columns. And this will be, you know, three columns
split into rows left to right, right? Again, like the previous window, we
have these layers and frames options. So you can export just one tag or one frame
or whatever it is that you want to export based on the selection here. You can add some padding. I don't usually have these
but you can do them for sure. And then the output file. So that's been my rundown of Aseprite. If there's anything specific you want
me to talk about regarding Aseprite, that's not in my existing playlist. We've got, I think about 50
videos now on this channel. So the odds are that I've covered pretty much everything that Aseprite has
at this point across one video or another. But if I haven't and there's something
that you really like, then definitely suggest it in the comments below. And I will take a look at it. And see if I can answer there. Otherwise, I might even make a video about it. So let me know what you want to see next. And I will cover that in the next video. Thanks for watching pals. See you in the next one. Hey, pal. Thanks for watching and thanks most especially to
the patrons and twitch subs who support this channel and
my gamedev project insignia. To find out more, click the
links in the description below. And if you like this video, tell youtube by click
the like button and then youtube will tell me. And then I will make more videos. That's nice. Thanks again and until next time. Translator: jk36939@gmail.com
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