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Comment by KaiserPister | Hacker News Reader

I'll shill this project again: I built myself a small sprite generator because I'm a terrible artist.

If you're looking for pixel-art sprites, check out 8bitsmith.com. Or you can just ask Nano-Banana for sprite sheets and it does a pretty good job!

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You still have to do some post-processing work around NB, since you’ll often end up with non-aligned pixel blocks, much higher color depth, and so on.

I actually did some testing of spritesheeting with Nano Banana Pro a while back:

https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-sprites

If you use the editing capabilities and send in a grid of 32×32 cells on a 1024×1024 image, you can get it to flood-fill in each square, so you end up with properly aligned 32×32 tiles. Then you can squash it via nearest neighbor to pull the lines back out, and reduce the palette using something like unfake.js:

https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js

Exactly! On my tool I specifically use 4x4 grids which is limiting and I use canny edge maps to help enforce consistency. A very fun problem to solve!

Most of the purpose of pixel art is that it's hand crafted and every pixel matters. Not much point to pixel art if you drop that aspect.

I've been pretty happy with the little bits of AI pixel art I've generated. They bring my joy. So there's a point to it for me

Sorry, the point? isn’t the point of art pretty much what a person wants it to be?

Not OP and I won't dispute your point exactly but I'd like to point to a book called Pixel Logic wherein the author makes the same point regarding pixel art. Even though you'll be using stuff like the Lasso and Paint Bucket tools the big thing about pixel art is the manual control and precision of pixel placement (by hand) where you employ techniques like anti aliasing (again by hand). Advanced techniques like sub-pixeling when doing animation frames are another thing that makes sense only when you can place pixels one by one.

This is 100% true for artists. But I am not an artist, and I like pixel art stylistically. So when I make sites or games, I need to either: use my bad art, hire someone on fiverr, or use AI.

I have really struggled to get nano banana to follow size/proportion ratios for sprite art. any tips? I fed in a bunch of examples first and tried to write a really strict prompt. I wonder if any of the sw being discussed here can be programmatically controlled by claude code or similar to do sprite work

Like the comment above I split sprite sheets into grids with edges for NBP to follow. I have the option to add the canny edge map to the grid to enforce a lot of consistency as well. Then I specifically tailor the prompt to the task.

But even still it has issues sometimes.

The art on header of 8bitsmith.com looks bad. More than art, the animation is very janky.

Thanks for your opinion

Do you really just not get how you come off shilling this kind of stuff on a discussion talking about an aseprite fork?

The intersection of people interested in Aseprite and people wanting to just spawn this stuff out of thin air is fairly low!

That’s probably fair which is why I tried to be upfront that this is shilling. I figure some people might be like me, interested in sprites but not artsy enough to make them. You might start with an ai sprite and fix it via LibreSprite or another tool.

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