I’m decently familiar with Illustrator CC, but I don’t really know what the purpose of Photoshop is compared to it. Seems like most people use Photoshop for creating things like textures for their Unity projects, however.
Any experienced or professional enlightenment to save me some digging is greatly appreciated.
Illustrator is vectors, Photoshop is bitmaps. Unity doesn’t use vectors. Importing vector files requires converting to bitmaps.
–Eric
I love a simple answer. Thanks a lot!
Not to complicate a simple answer, but even though Unity uses bitmaps, you may still want to develop your source art in vector format since it scales without degradation. You’ll eventually need to convert it to a bitmap somewhere along your pipeline, though.
That seems like good forethought. I haven’t checked yet, but I’m pretty sure illustrator can easily convert image types. I am just not sure if it does everything that photoshop does, at least what is pertinent to game development.
It depends on what kind of art you’re making. Pixel art, for example, is not a good fit for Illustrator. But clean shapes like UI elements often are, since you may end up needing to scale them to different sizes.
Illustrator definitely does not do anything at all like what Photoshop does; there’s a bit of overlap between the two, but only a bit. As TonyLi mention it’s good for certain art styles.
–Eric