I just want to a give shout out for Krita 2d paint and animation software - http://www.krita.org
Especially if you are on a Mac, there are not many alternatives for comfortable intuitive painting. Gimp is quite clunky, photoshop is good, but I feel that Krita is perhaps even better. And its free. I was blown away by the focus on painting, the focus on bitmaps (has vectors too), and also the focus on animation. It feels like the right tool for the job rather than a subset of some other tool.
Trying to do animated 2d pixel art for example it feels very natural and capable. There’s onion-skinning, layering, nice handling of exact-pixel drawing, and all kinds of good stuff. I own Photoshop also but being focused heavily on photo processing it just has a different feel and extra noise. Krita seems to do some things even better. It also has a ton of natural brush tools if that’s your thing.
This is my new favorite tool for 2d art. I had never heard of it before but it should be high on anyone’s list.
Krita is a hidden gem of the KDE tools - it used to be part of KOffice, and before that, more or less a GIMP wrapper made by one of the KDE founders. It got big enough that it now is a standalone app with plenty of developers improving it. It might be the new DPaint of the 3rd millennium
Yes it is the first modern/full-featured app that has reminded me of the beloved Deluxe Paint… the focus on the art/painting, animation, brushes, getting up close with the pixels etc.
For anyone wishing Unity would be compatible with Krita (.kra, .krz) or OpenRaster (.ora) files, you can now use this plugin from the Asset Store.
It allows you to import images automatically whenever they change, very similarly to the built-in texture importer. You can also auto-generate separate files (e.g. .png, .exr) as if you had manually exported them from Krita; it even supports generating frames from animations.
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