Pixelation
Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: breakfast on March 26, 2013, 02:17:37 am
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(http://i.imgur.com/YQrrMNq.png)
I'm trying to draw a puddle on some cobblestone, but it is looking awful and I don't know how to make it any better. The puddle doesn't animate (so no ripples) and it can't have reflections in it because it is to be used randomly throughout a game's city. It should just be a leftover puddle from the previous rain. Because of this I am having a lot of trouble making it clear it's water... Any ideas?
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Whelp... here goes nothing.
(http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/4041/image1tn.png)
I think this should mostly work assuming cloudy weather. In this case the puddle should have a flat surface so no point in trying to shade it. I made it a solid color but added lines to show where the rock pieces are under the surface. I also gave more depth to some of the rocks to show that the submerged rocks are lower than the rocks not covered up by the puddle.
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the more cracks you have in the ground, the more likely the water will snake into those cracks to the underground. A puddle is a bit abnormal in that context.
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(http://i.imgur.com/DjntpRQ.png)
I took both your advice and this is what I've come up with... Any more suggestions or critiques?
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Your last edit makes it clear it's a puddle, so you've accomplished that part.
This is just an idea for another direction you could go with it:
(http://i45.tinypic.com/iqy9dy.gif)
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Hello,
I feel like putting the blue color -at all- makes the puddle look like blue slime. We intuitively want to make all water blue, but I think water should only appear blue when there is a lot of it (depth like an ocean), or a large and/or smooth enough area to reflect the sky. When gray rock or concrete/cement gets wet it just turns the surface darker.
I'm not a wonderful artist so I might fail at illustrating my point well enough but you can try something like this?
(http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/4843/10601646.png)
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The color of the puddle depends entirely on the angle you are viewing it from. The closer it gets to an 90 degree angle from the ground, the more transparent the water becomes.
Now making the water entirely transparent has the problem of making it also difficult to see what is going on in a 2d environment, since you can't show the player the depressions on the ground. I'd be more inclined to think that it's a discolored spot or a slight depression, rather than a puddle.
I've seen some puddles on a cobblestone street, but depending on the depth the cobbles would naturally peek out of the water at some points. Making the puddle large would make it reasonable to understand it being deeper, since usually streets and others don't have small deep depressions (unless they have been broken for example by the ground frost as is the case here)
Parkerbaby's puddle looks the best out of the options presented here in my opinion, since it has a different texture. Humans pick out texture changes easier than color changes.
I will forever wait for the style of puddle that happened in Pokemon Ruby, where in a certain area you had clouds move in the puddle's reflection. That was a delightful moment, since before that the puddles were mainly a flattish color with a reflection of you if you walked over it.