potentially stupid question about limits when making mods?

[bananadew]

So i have a question in regards to making mods. When making sprites for mods, are you allowed to alter vanilla sprites to achieve what you want or do you have to make a new sprite from the ground up? I assume that technically speaking it's possible but I'm asking because I thought there might be some terms of service/legal limitation that might be relevant here. I'm sorry if this question seems stupid or obvious but I'm new to mod-making and felt I had to ask.

 

[Lenora Rose]

So i have a question in regards to making mods. When making sprites for mods, are you allowed to alter vanilla sprites to achieve what you want or do you have to make a new sprite from the ground up? I assume that technically speaking it's possible but I'm asking because I thought there might be some terms of service/legal limitation that might be relevant here. I'm sorry if this question seems stupid or obvious but I'm new to mod-making and felt I had to ask.

It needs to be different enough that you obviously put some thought and art of your own into it, but nobody has said you can't start from vanilla sprites/portraits. You can see a lot of mods that are "same person, change hair colour". They're not necessarily as popular as ones which do more to make themselves distinct/creative, but they exist.

 

[bananadew]

It needs to be different enough that you obviously put some thought and art of your own into it, but nobody has said you can't start from vanilla sprites/portraits. You can see a lot of mods that are "same person, change hair colour". They're not necessarily as popular as ones which do more to make themselves distinct/creative, but they exist.

Thanks for replying and helping me out =)

 

[veronicaab]

If you aren't making money off of it or claiming that you created assets from scratch when you didn't, it should be fine. Recolors are a thing and some of them can be pretty popular! I think it's a bit different if you're using sprites from someone else's mod - in that case you need to ask permission. But when it comes to the vanilla assets, youre essentially making a fanwork for the game itself. Fanfics sometimes use real lines of dialog from the source text and imo altering existing sprites in a mod isn't all that different

The amount you modify can also vary a lot! Here's some examples from a mod I'm working on

Keeping mostly the same and just changing a little, we have Charlie the chicken being transformed into Charlie the duck

Then there's this, which was the art for the crab pot bundle, recolored, chopped up, and tweaked to look like the crayfish instead

And finally there's this clam, which I made from scratch, just using the actual clam sprite as a visual reference + color picker

Point is, there's a pretty wide range of what using the vanilla assets can be!