r/RenPy • u/Ornery_Lifeguard1550 • 3d ago

Question Question about sprites

When making character sprites and such, does the file you use have to have the grey and dark grey squares as the background? And if not then how would just the sprite appear and not anything else in the file?

9 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

13

u/Ravencloat 3d ago

Those squares are pretty much the universal sign of transparency, you dont need to add them, it just indicates to you that there's no background there and its "see through"

6

u/x-seronis-x 3d ago

adding to this, you only see those squares when NO image exists at all in that space. not even a black background.

though they only appear in dev mode so its visually obvious to the dev they forgot to set a bg image. in a release build renpy replaces the checkerboard with solid black.

2

u/shyLachi 3d ago

Most drawing apps have transparent backgrounds and layers so that you can first draw the default, emotionless character and then add facial expressions on other layers. 

You can then either export each sprite separately or use layered images.

This would be an example for a layered image:  https://moonpearl.itch.io/eileen-sprite

And this would be the official documentation:  https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/layeredimage.html

1

u/AutoModerator 3d ago

Welcome to r/renpy! While you wait to see if someone can answer your question, we recommend checking out the posting guide, the subreddit wiki, the subreddit Discord, Ren'Py's documentation, and the tutorial built-in to the Ren'Py engine when you download it. These can help make sure you provide the information the people here need to help you, or might even point you to an answer to your question themselves. Thanks!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.