Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - EyeCraft
Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 60

1
Pixel Art / Re: Sandy desert rock tiles
« on: April 24, 2016, 11:15:43 pm »
"Colour" as a tool involves a few different bodies of theory.

The first is light and its behaviour in a scene. I would suggest reading up on light (link), what happens when it bounces and how its colour changes. Playing around with 3D engines like Unity can be a great way to quickly experiment with lights and see how they affect shadow and object colour (video).

Particularly the matter of ambient light from the sky, bounced light from the scene and scattered light from the dusty air are elements that were central to the edit I performed.

The second aspect is mood and composition. Colour provides cues for warmth, emotion and energy, so knowing when to "cool" or "warm" your scene's colours, or when to "excite" or "relax" your scene with colour can make a huge difference to the conveying a mood for the scene.

Unfortunately I cannot really point you to good resources on colour psychology. Perhaps someone else can jump in. Googling "colour psychology" could otherwise be your starting point.

The third aspect is contrast. Neighbouring hues will have differing levels of contrast to each-other depending on how distant they are from each-other on the colour wheel, with complementary colours having maximum contrast and "excitation". Different hues also have different brightnesses, with yellow being the brightest and blue being the darkest, so as you change the hues of your shadows you need to tweak the value of the colours to keep the contrast of your scene the same.

I hope that helps give you a basis for colour.  :)

2
Pixel Art / Re: Sandy desert rock tiles
« on: April 21, 2016, 09:44:22 am »
Your image still has a subtle filter over the tiles that makes it difficult to edit.  :yell:

I still feel the contrast and the cool shadows are holding back this piece. I've attempted to fudge an edit:



Do like that skybox first pass!

3
Pixel Art / Re: [CC] Medusa and her hair
« on: April 18, 2016, 12:46:02 am »
I would encourage you to investigate references a little more regarding ancient greek style. Silhouettes seem a lot more simplified than your current executions for the snakes.

Try consolidating the snakes into a more cohesive form... the bodys merging into a mass and only the heads really splitting off.

4
Pixel Art / Re: Stone pillar
« on: April 17, 2016, 01:53:39 am »
Hi pentaSTAR, welcome to the forum :)

I think this is quite a nice start you have here with this piece. One thing to be aware of when working on something with a lot of texture is to think of the most significant forms when lighting. The large, overall shape of the structure will dominate how it is lit.

In this case the shape of the pillar is a tall rectangular prism, so each face (we can only see 2 here, the top and one side) will receive different levels of light. Depending of the positioning of your major lightsource either your wall will be brighter or the top will be brighter.

So with your piece, if the pillar was in an interior, such as a dungeon, the walls will be brighter and the tops almost total darkness. If it is outside, the sun overhead will light the top more. I've assumed the later and made a quick edit to show you what I mean:



So in summary: don't let the textures steal your focus when lighting!

Other points:

Grey subjects such as stone are excellent opportunities to play with tinted light. In my edit I added blues and greens to the shadows to imply bounced light from a blue sky and green field. The yellow tint you have present already works well in the brighter tones, where the yellow sunlight would be striking.

Always try pushing your highlights all the way up to near-white. This will help you to fight washed-out contrast and give vibrancy to your lit surfaces. Note the bright specular points on the corners of the stone in my edit. These parts are directly facing the assumed sun position.

Finally, regarding your pixels, be careful which colours are neighbouring which other colours. There are a lot of instances in your tiles where a very bright tone is directly against a very dark tone. This has the effect of implying an incredibly sharp edge - something that clashes with the rounded silhouettes of the stones themselves. Have a look at the stone work in my edit and try to find places in the tiling where I softened the edges. Though don't take what I've done as a finished state by any means, I did a very meagre pass on it :)

Also be careful with creating pixel noise when add rough texture. Spattering some pixels here-and-there can disrupt larger, clean pixel clusters and confuse the forms your are setting out to imply. With pixelling its often better to work in larger clusters rather than small ones where possible (single pixels of course being the smallest cluster possible!). I hope that makes sense.

5
Pixel Art / Re: Sandy desert rock tiles
« on: April 17, 2016, 12:39:24 am »
FYI your image has some kind of subtle image effect over the tiles, which is messing up the palette and making it difficult to edit. Nevertheless I played around:


  • The contrast of the darkness of the rocks against the sky seems too extreme to me. I think lightening the scene will relieve the eye a little and also contrast it nicely with the darker forest scene.
  • The purple shadows cool the scene too much, imo. The desert is a great opportunity to create a sense of intense heat and brightness. Try using something redder or browner.
  • The uniform lighting on all faces kills the feeling of intense desert sun. Try lighting top-facing tiles and leaving underhangs in shadow. I added bounced light on the undersides, once again thinking of intense sun bouncing off everything.
  • The vertically striated rock texture you're going for is tricky to execute without causing banding. I'm a little stumped on how you can reconcile it, however.  :-\

6
Pixel Art / Darkest Dungeon NES Demake
« on: April 16, 2016, 03:10:58 am »
Hi everyone, it's been a long time since I've been in the pixel scene. It's really good to see the forum is looking better than ever! I'm back with something that's been gnawing at the back of my mind for the last few days - a darkest dungeon NES demake! Haven't done any art or pixelling in a long time so I'm pretty slow off the starting line... bear with me :)

I can't emphasise how much I adore this game. I felt that the prevalence of black inking in the game's art style would lend itself well to NES's requirement for tiles to share a common colour, so I began playing around. This is all very much WIP, but here's where I'm currently at:



All the sprite palettes are used, and 3 of the background palettes are used. There's also a silly amount of sprite per scanline... but I guess it would work if we rendered each pair of characters once per 4 frames?  :lol:

Here is the background in isolation. This is really the part of the piece I am unsatisfied with. I began by painting the piece as a whole and then began merging sections down into tiles. It is currently around 180 tiles I think; ie too damn many.



Link to the reference I've been using. Not all the player characters are the same, I've grabbed some others from other places.

So what are your thoughts? How you all doing?  :)

7
General Discussion / Re: Official Off-Topic Thread
« on: November 10, 2012, 12:45:48 am »
Hello everyone.  :)

It's been a long time. How have we all been?

8
Pixel Art Feature Chest / Re: Apocalypse Junkyard (UPDATE!)
« on: August 19, 2011, 01:13:37 am »
Scrap the hazard line for the bars in the HUD. Hazard lines are ULTRA CONTRAST because they are designed to catch people's attention and they are absolutely dominating the priority hierarchy of the piece at the moment. Not something you really want for a HUD; if the player wants to check something there, they'll deliberately glance at it.

I agree about losing the white outlines, as well, for similar reasons.

The background is very patchy/blotchy, which kind of gives it the effect of noise. Perhaps try a more composed arrangement for the clouds.

The mix of cool and warm speculars on the sprites and tiles is disharmonious. I do like the priority gained on the sprites by the temperature contrast, though. One thing that could work is to not make the ground tiles so... specular-y. Shade them more according to planes, rather than edges and corners. This will make the warm light appear to be ambient, rather than direct, "sort of" explaining the temperature difference. Or you could match temperatures on the sprites and tiles, but hue shift them in opposite directions.

The floating stone blocks don't really fit at all, imo. The fact they differ so drastically in both theme and shading approach to the ground tiles is a prime reason for this. Also the fact that everything else in the scene has some physical explanation for its state (jets on the mines, junk in realistic piles) whereas the stone blocks are inexplicably floating. Oh I guess the missile pack pickup is floating too... I actually didn't even notice that was there until just then. Might want to increase it's priority a little by differentiating it's palette from the other elements (similar to Batlorder's suggestion on the player's ship).

Keep it up!  :)

9
Pixel Art / Re: monster hunter bosses
« on: July 26, 2011, 04:45:35 am »
Hello and welcome to Pixelation!  :)

Looks like you have a great grasp of clean pixelling, very nice.

Few things I see:

Main issue I see is wonky perspective...



Yellow shows mid-lines of forms, magenta lines show axes (as far as I can see them). You want axes being generally parallel (in a neutral pose) in orthogonal view, or converging to vanishing point in perspective. Mid-lines should be off-centred from the middle of the form based upon the incident angle of the viewer to the primary spatial axes (wow, sentence!). I know that sounded like weird abstract babble... even to me... what I mean is, if your view angle is straight-on to the side platformer-style, then your view angle is at 90 degrees to the plane the monster is on, so the midlines cannot be seen at all (they are sitting right on the outline). The fact you have midlines showing (ignoring the tail, since its wavering around in is own direction) means either the monster is not alined to the plane that the game is set on, or your view angle is not meant to be 90 degrees. But looking at the spines on the body of the monster, we cannot see the far spines (since there two rows of them in the reference), which implies a 90 degree view angle.

SO! It's a mixed perspectve! Wow that was long winded. Either you need to reorient the neck and head so their midlines aren't showing, or you need to reorient the body to match a kind of 3/4 platformer perspective. I have done a kind of mix of both in my edit below.

Next thing is contrast or pop. Feels like there could be more brights in there to keep the sprite out of midtones territory.

Actually I think that's all the points! Here is my (very rough) edit:


10
General Discussion / Re: Best Color Pallet for Skin tones?
« on: July 25, 2011, 02:45:55 pm »
Another consideration is setting; what are the lighting conditions the skin exists within? This will have a dramatic effect on the palette. For this reason I agree with NickZA that reading up on the "mechanics" of skin colour is the best course of action.

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 60