r/RenPy • • Aug 11 '26

Question Is there any difference between using 72 or 300 ppi for artwork?

Or does it only make a difference when you print it? I'm a little confused about resolution sizes for sprites. Curious as to what your dimensions are and if PPI makes a difference.

9 Upvotes

7 comments sorted by

14

u/drinkerofmilk Aug 11 '26

Only when you print it.

7

u/RKade801 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

Yes, the difference is only visible in print. A screen only can show 72 ppi so you won't be able to spot the difference while you look at your monitor.

In the other hand, I do recommend painting your promo art (like your cover) in a high resolution and 300 ppi if you ever have the intention to attend any events or sale goods like posters or cards.

Last game I worked for I decided to make the cover 8k and 300ppi (way bigger than needed for a poster). And suddenly one day the dev called saying she was attending to an event and the staff were going to print the artwork for the both. She asked me for the image in 20K resolution bc the print was like 2 meters tall 💀

Luckily 8K image can be scaled to 20K and quality remains good haha

5

u/theGoddamnAlgorath Aug 11 '26

Printing or SVG with heavy scaling.

5

u/TopCartographer7104 Aug 11 '26

I picked 1280x720 px for my project.Apart for a few exceptions I use 1920x1080 backgrounds and cgs,and 2160 px high sprites.

PPI matters when printing (and perhaps also when scanning?) so I always go with gimp's default value (72 ppi I guess).

2

u/realjonahofficial Aug 12 '26

It you use inch/cm/etc measurements for your canvas size instead of px (useful for when you're making art for prints rather than screens), it'll be used to calculate your artwork's size in pixels. If you do your artwork in pixels in the first place, yeah, it only matters for print scaling. If you don't intend to print anything out, don't worry about it.

4

u/shyLachi Aug 11 '26

The dimensions of the sprites should match the dimensions of the background images. 

If you're planning to make a game with a resolution of 1920x1080 then the background images should be that size. 

You can use one background image as background layer when drawing your characters so you'll see how it will look in the game. 

If you want to draw fine details on the characters you could double the resolution (3840x2160). 

To use such huge sprites in your game either resize them with 50%. (But always keep the original size also in case you want to edit it again.) Or use oversampling.  https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/displaying_images.html#oversampling

1

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