What would you recommend to use for creating simple 2d pixel characters and other environment arts, like in chicken or starbound/terraria ?
Would that be easy to handle with blender or even possible?
the chicken assets are just plains with textures applied to them, yes it is easy to do with blender, I used blender to make my own versions of the chicken assets.
hope that helps:)
I like this free app for pixel art, Graphics Gale:
http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/
Not a specific ‘pixel art’ app but this one is nice also, ‘Spriter’:
http://www.brashmonkey.com/spriter.htm
Good luck.
thanks alot for your answers. ahh ok so chicken was completely build with the unreal engine only!?
im gonna check your links!
Hi apfelnymous,
No, Chicken was built using UE4, 3DS Max, and Photoshop. In a future release, Shane is going to redo it using Paper2D and demonstrate how to do it without need an external 3D tool (3DS Max or Maya or Blender), but that hasn’t happened yet. You still need some sort of painting program to do 2D artwork, like Photoshop (the industry standard) or Paint.NET (limited but free). There are a nearly countless variety of painting programs out there, some of which focus on retro 2D pixelated artwork / animation.
Cheers,
Michael Noland
Nice! Im looking forward to see this one! I wanted to start building a 2d sidescroller because Im afraid to loose my last breath on 3d animations. The question is how much animation does a 3d sidecroller need to not look cheap? I dont know. So I guess Ill rather keeping it as simple as possible and focus on the more important parts of a game.
Why not adding also a 2d sidescroller template to the projects menu? 
We’re working on it actually! It’s coming in extremely hot, so it might not make 4.3 though (we’re branching for 4.3 on Monday).
Cheers,
Michael Noland
Wow, you’re right - the web is overfloated with pixel creation software. 
so what would be the order to go on if you can use blender and photoshop to have your painted environment finally in the unreal engine?(what gets where exported or imported). I couldnt find a video telling me that.