1.Totally not my fault in any way if people don't read the full post. The '-----'s were meant to separate the note from the rest of the post as I know that a lot of people dont bother to read descriptions. How would you suggest I make it more noticeable next time b/c doing SOMETHING LIKE THIS just to get people to read something is ridiculous.
My problem is not with the note not being noticable. It's with it being misleading.
2.How is it not based 'loosely'?
Lets list the similarities and the differences, okay?
Similar:
Trees
You can stop right there. It only takes a single element that is way too close. Why are the trees lifted? What are you learning by copying the MC trees? This reminds me of a recent article about how the Final Fantasy games have made a whole lot of young artists that want to be 'rpg character designers' when they grow up (you can see a lot of them in deviantart) whereas the article says - and I agree - that you should strive to be a good artist generally and
then maybe go into the game art field if you so desire. By making a shortcut and lifting the zelda tree you're neglecting what you
should be learning, you are picking (borrowed) style over substance. What you should be doing is looking at real trees (and after drawing them lots) trying to engage your own judgement in how you should go about stylising them. That's the learning process that will give you the experience you need to do stuff like the current mockup without any problem.
I agree that the trees are too similar and will work to improve that.
That's all I wanted.
However I do not agree with how this was all dealt with.
Me neither. Not mostly my own approach, I am unapologetic about how I deal with rips and near-rips. That that tree is in that nebulous area of 'rip in spirit, while not in action' is the reason you got the worst end of it verbally and not in terms of action (actual rippers are banned and forever forgotten asap). However I still feel compelled to apologize about the tone of my original message. If you're to keep something from all of this I wish it to be the learning fundamentally before stylizing thing. What I'm really not happy with is the TakaM reply, and you will understand why a bit later.. However there was ganging up, and there was something of an overreacted attack towards this practise of sticking too close to one's references which pushed the 'Helm destroys stealers' button way too hard. What we're going to do is this:
Everybody: There'll be no further internet drama about ripping. If people want to discuss with you the reasoning for and against keeping to close to a IP style by all means, make a thread in the general forum and I'll meet you there. In fact that's a conversation we should have had a long time ago. However there's much critique to be posted on the more original parts of Jericho's art and I'll get to that myself on a latter post. I hope the thread can be redirected towards this. If not it will be locked.
Jericho: If you pixel something this close to original IP you're setting yourself up to be hated. This isn't because pixelation is a place full of assholes.
It's because we greatly frown upon ripping. You'll always be able to get constructive critique for your art here and I think it's super unfair to criticize the collective demeanour of the place and telling us we're all assholes after posting near-rips. What did you expect people to do, be overjoyed that you're matching that Zelda style so close?
Takam: be patient for a while...