Best Free Vector 2D Art Software

Hi everyone. I've been recently searching for a free 2D vector art software, and the results for the websites I've seen are very different. I'm currently between this two software: GIMP and Krita. Which one I should choose? Thanks.

 

Krita's illustration features and interface are both far more well implemented than in GIMP, imo, even including the GIMP variants that improve the interface.

 

Thanks for your reply. I'm going to wait and get more replies before I make my final decision.

 

You could always just download both and give them a try. They're free.

 

I prefer Krita for freehand drawing and painting but I prefer GiMP for things like editing 2D textures/sprites and other image manipulation of existing images.

 

So of the 2, which is most similar to Photoshop?

 

I find Krita the best by far

 

Okay, thanks, everyone. I did some more research online and Krita is more for painting, and not for really making graphics. I dunno to be honest. I just downloaded GIMP, because, in my research, I see many websites saying GIMP is good. I just downloaded it, and I'm trying it out

 

I use affinity photo or clip studio paint currently, however during my time of having no money i used medibang paint. I like it because its brush stabiliser was the best i liked among the other programs.

 

If you were more specific about the type of art you are looking at, people could offer you better suggestions. I wouldn't use ANY of the programs mentioned so far for pixel art.

Due to lack of information, my vote goes to BLENDER!!!! You can easily make 3d models and animate them, and then render them out into sprites.

 

I'm doing this right now for a project I'm working on in gzdoom, in fact.

 

It's actually a viable technique, especially if like you are you better(more comfortable in 3d). There are so many tricks and things you can do in 3d space as well, and in the case of pre-renders it is even better since you have to worry so much less about poly counts and then you have full access to the software, like hair particles, ALL the animation tools and modifiers, etc...

 

It's also handy if you have a complex rendering system and existing imposter systems aren't robust enough and you don't want to make your own. With blender, I just slam down a python script I've had since forever and output every channel.

 

The poster asked about 2D art and didn't say a thing about pixelart.

While blender has its uses and has some 2d capability, it is not geared towards that.

For 2d art my suggestion would be Clip Studio.
For pixel art my suggestion would be aseprite.

Neither is free, but the prices are accessible.

Gimp is decent for processing, altering and butchering photos. I wouldn't use it for painting.
Back when I looked at free software, mypaint was decent. However, at some point they broke windows build and I'm unsure if they fixed it since.

 

I believe ASEprite is still free if you have the skills to compile it yourself. This is also my preferred choice for pixel art. Though, I shelled over the few dollars to support the team.

Another couple of honorable mentions are InkScape and OpenToonz if you would like to use vector graphics rendered for 2D. Again, the OP is not very specific.

 

With regional adjustments in play, aseprite was very inexpensive for me. Also, auto-update is convenient.
Regarding compiling it yourself, as far as I can tell, the license is not opensource.
https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/blob/main/EULA.txt

Those are good tools, but it is worth mentioning that OpenToonz is likely geared towards traditional animation and not producing video game assets. Ghibli used it.

 

Affinity Designer and Photo is what I use.

 

Definitely. However, I mention it only because I'm going to introduce it into my own pipeline for cutscene/story authoring. I used to use ToonBoom, but with OpenToonz, their project file is in xml, which makes it easily parsable for any markup you need to add for your game. OpenToonz also has a render farm server setup (I haven't figured it out yet though), which can be used to automate building renders. This can be a boon if the OP is considering creating 2D sprite animations like Alien Hominid / Castle Crashers / Don't Starve.

These are great tools, and I personally use Affinity Photo over Photoshop now. At <50US, you get a lot of value, but unfortunately, the OP was asking for FREE.

 

You are right, they didn't say anything about pixel art. I just said that for pixel art I wouldn't use what they mentioned, basically as to make the point that I really don't know what type of art they are getting at(which I then elaborated on adding Blender as a suggestion, as technically it can produce 2d art via pre-rendering, though it also isn't likely the style the OP is looking for). The topic title doesn't mention free either, though they did mention it in the actual post(I was all about to mention Pro Motion ).

On this we 100% agree, though I get better art out of it than with traditional 2d pipelines since my mind wraps better around 3d space in a general sense(plus all the tricks, etc... I mentioned).

 

Sorry, people for having confusion in my post. What I'm looking for is 2D Vector Art and I want to use Free Software.

 

Okay, I agree I had some lack of information, but I disagree that I wasn't specific about the type of art. When I first posted this, I clearly said 2D.

 

For painting, is Inkscape or Krita better? Also, do I need a tablet for any of the two?

 

If you don't specify a type of art, just saying "2d" doesn't cover it. There are many styles(pixel art, vector art, hand drawn, pre-rendered 3d models(yes, this is a style of 2d art), painterly, and still more I haven't mentioned). So yes, my mention of Blender is valid based on the previous lack of information because you CAN produce 2d art with it.

So you changed to topic title to say "Vector Art" but then you ask about painting.....which is it? Or is it both that you want information on?

For Vector Art, Inkscape is considered the best free option by many people. It doesn't have any animation features though. And as it is specifically for Vector art, it doesn't have any features for "painting" either.

Krita...likely the best "painting" software you will find for free. It has a great brush system, though some would say it can be outdone by paid software like Corel Painter and the like. I'd say the brush system itself is better than Photoshop though, but Krita is very much dedicated to exactly that, "Painting." If I remember correctly it doesn't even have a full undo/redo stack.

As far as a tablet...I believe if you are just starting out, you don't necessarily need one. If you already do things like draw or paint in the physical ways(not digitally), than a tablet can make sense to directly transcribe what you already know into digital form. But if you don't already do art like that, I would wait until you learn some, and then you may run across situations where you actually notice and feel that you need a tablet. I wouldn't want you to get one just to find out that the art you are doing doesn't need it, or worse, that you decide to skip learning art and focus on other disciplines. Furthermore, I don't think a tablet can help much if at all if you are using Vector software.

 

That really depends on the art style that you want for the paint. Is there an example of what you're trying to achieve?

It's not necessary, but it significantly helps those that are strong with traditional art pens and brushes. There is still a learning curve for traditional artists to get used to digital tablet painting. But for those that are not artistically inclined, it will not magically improve on artistic output.

 

So, everything in @kburkhart84 wrote I'd agree with except for:

OpenToonz and ToonBoom are vector animation software, and digital artists can take advantage of tablets for frame-by-frame animation. As I mentioned, this would be used in the art style of Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers, Invisible Inc, and Don't Starve to an extent. As already mentioned OpenToonz is studio Ghibli's software suite. And ToonBoom is known to be used for shows like the Simpsons, Bob's Burgers and Family Guy.

 

OP 2D is not a style. Explain the style, or you will only get very generalised support.

 

I've just noticed that the thread title now contains "Vector". 2d vector art.

In this case neither GIMP nor Krita are vector software. They're raster editors.

Your choice would be pretty much Inkscape. Looking through online suggestions, apparently Synfig might be worth looking into.

 

In that case, inkscape is what comes to mind https://inkscape.org/

 

From non-free options, clip studio currently supports basic svg export, but it is definitely not geared towards this, and plenty of data is lost on export.

 

Well, without knowing the intended usage, I'd still say either InkScape or OpenToonz. If the game is made up of mainly images, you can probably get away with InkScape. If you're planning to create animated sprites, I'd go OpenToonz. For my project, I'm just creating still frames a la comic book, and I'm using OpenToonz for this. I love the fluidity of laying down strokes and rapidly scrubbing through the frames, even if they're just still images. And the pipeline more easily lends to producing spritesheets. Another reason to go OpenToonz over InkScape is performance. Whenever I use InkScape, it doesn't take very long until it starts to chug, and pan and zoom suffers significantly.

This also all depends on whether the requirement of 2D Vector Art is for authoring or output. I couldn't imagine using vector art for the output for use in the game engine. I know it's possible, but I have no idea about performance.

 

So is InkScape used to make vector art, and OpenToonz is used to animate the vector images I made?

 

Something like the visuals in Neversong

 

Inkscape is what you need then. Dont worry about animating yet, it will take some time just to learn the software. Come back to animating as a new problem once you are able to draw something static to the quality you want, in inkscape.

 

Okay, thanks.

 

No it's more like, InkScape can make vector art, and OpenToonz can make a series of vector art images.

 

Got it

 

That's true. I was just mentioning them because the OP may have been working from the assumption that the paid options where expensive. The Affinity products are occasionally on sale for $25 each.

 

I agree. I got my Affinity licenses during the pandemic sale last year. While the circumstances were unfortunate, it was a great opportunity to pick up on excellent software at half price.

 

+1 for using 3D to render your art.

I used 3D to create sprites for a 2D game and in particular hair worked really well for tentacle type animation. I would even just render the sequence as .png file directly to a folder in the Unity project and each time I tweaked the 3D animation, I'd just render the sequence again.

The particular animation I did would have been impossible to replicate in Unity as 3D, and very trick to do by hand.