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Messages - Rylan
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Pixel Art / Re: Metal Is Hard! (WIP)
« on: November 22, 2013, 01:23:18 am »
I can see that a plenty of work went into the metal, however the rest of the soldier (the face is okay) looks a bit under the standard. The arm and the leg look pretty flat, bevel shaded (bevels are the little highlighted and darkened edges, say around his leg, that give it a more 3D feel). Unfortunately, the bevels make stuff look flat, which is good when you want to achieve flatness, but this is not such a time.

My suggestion is to create a small palette by the side with 3-5 colours on it, so that you can easily repick colours from it, if you dont have one already. I usually have a layer with just palettes, something that I can quickly turn off when I need to save a version and something that I can move closer to the area where I draw. Then just paint around, and see what looks good. Remember that you must decide from where all the light comes. Johasu remarked that the armour has a slight blue tone, which may be because it is surrounded by open blue sky. It would not work if this soldier was in a room lit with red alert lights.

The belly, armour, and head, are all pushed forward very much. This amount of weight would make him fall forward unless someone holds him or he has a heavy backpack. You can make a copy of this image and try to draw him without armour just to practice correctly positioning him. Try to imagine where his center of weight is now, and consider that we rest most of our weight on our heels, and we use the rest of the foot to make balance.

Also, it's hard to imagine that the legs are so directly behind each other that you can only see one of them. This is how a soldier could stand when lined up, but not when on guard, on patrol, and so on.

I'm sorry that this is not about the metal, but the metal armour turned out to be one of the best sides of this sprite and you need improvements elsewhere. To improve this sprite further, you'll have to create a more natural posture, or add a heavy backpack if you are lazy or rushed, and you will need to improve shading on the pants and sleeves (and other clothing that comes) up as well.

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Pixel Art / Re: Health Bar
« on: November 21, 2013, 07:14:10 am »
@Tidbit
I like the gold frame. I feel that it looks a bit thick which makes the gem turn out smaller, but maybe this would not have been an issue if you had gone through with the 32x32 size. I dont like that the golden frame crumples with the rest of the gem, though; looking at 100% zoom, it feels like the whole thing was either chewed up or ran through a noise/wave filter. The gem looks fairly opaque and has a plastic shine. Also, your darkest blue is only a mid-range azure, whereas I would encourage use of a larger brightness range.

This is my little take.

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Pixel Art / Re: Health Bar
« on: November 21, 2013, 03:37:49 am »
The problem is that these grey lines are too thick and thus too pronounced. In the example photos, they are very thin and only appear on the sharp edges. More pronounced would be the shadow visible through the cracks, and would have more justification to be wider and thicker. Additionally, it is true that plastics return white light as white (metals return coloured light), however this refractive plastic is specifically designed to return coloured light. You have both inner reflections (red) and outer reflections (white). I would suggest to do cracks either dark red with (slightly) pink highlights on edges, or do them the way that r4c7 suggested, which is similar but with tighter cracks with no room (holes) between them. Also in r4c7's example the grey is variably mixed with red, giving a bit of irregularity as well a feeling of subpixel precision.

4
Pixel Art / Re: Creating a 64x64 platforming animation. [WIP]
« on: November 21, 2013, 01:30:05 am »
Okay, let me address these one by one.

@AgentK
These would be very helpful and perceptive remarks, if that was the type of a girl that I was going for. Rather than being a damsel in distress, this would be a gal who adventures and does not have to worry whether all the eyes are on her. Think about often mistakenly mixed practices of parkour (which is about efficient movement) and freerunning (which is about showing off). I like big boots (and boobs, before anyone asks) so I have drawn them especially big; although I probably would not have settled on that design after a few revisions.

@Ymedron
Thank you for your remark, on treatment of females in games. You have spoken my thoughts a bit better than I could if I tried. As for the pose, I would like to clarify that this is an older drawing from my previous failed attempt, and not of this skeleton; I specifically did not draw a sprite for this skeleton yet as I dont want to lock myself into an end-result yet, this is exactly what I have done the last time. By the time I had all the desired animated frames, there was too much work to redo for what is a fundamentally flawed animation that could best be fixed by starting over. And as for the sideways head, I indeed wanted the focus that this glance achieves, but I also am not feeling confident that I can do a 3/4 glance consistently yet. I will give it serious thought once I start drawing the form, and I will map out at what occasions I need what look direction.

@PixelPiledriver
Thank you for the edit, a progressive one too! A lot of blockiness is taken from the figure, especially torso and legs, and I can see how the eyebrows were changed a little bit by the last frame too. The lips fit in as well. My only complaint, if I may, would be that the end result made her head look a bit big to me, or the hair is rather voluminous, the back in particular. More importantly, the animation. I see what you mean by the bounce of the whole body. Worth a try to add it to my skeleton. Though I dont think that I'm ready for sub-pixel movements, and (if the head is an indicator) two pixels up and down is a bit much. Maybe just one pixel down, on stomp. I also know that the spine is not moving in that animation even by a bit, but I need it like that for the time being, lest I got confused by what is aligned to what. You could say that it's... the backbone... of my animation. Also, I dont want absolutely realistic movement. I do want a character with above-average physical abilities, such as jumping multiple times own height, quickly and effortlessly climbing ledges, and using moderately fast running as the default means of movement. Finally, rather than rotoscoping, I used this as my reference, with slightly less pronounced movements for a slightly lesser running speed.

The blog page:
http://atingey.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html
The actual reference:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lAMFfvtm_sk/S7vGCN3EmZI/AAAAAAAAAUk/_r7aqiPsyBw/s1600/hotfuzzrun.png

@tehwexxl0rz
I agree about the texture. I like to sculpt my pixel art overall, so I guess that several more iterations would do well for my model, as well as the practice of my sculpting. I agree that the exclusion of internal outlines (ok that sounded like an oxymoron) leaves more pixels for details, however there is a deeper underlying reasoning which I am about to, yes... outline.

I was going for a fairly ambitious solution here. Since my main programmer is experienced with arrays and data structures, I have considered my option to represent the character in layers rather than as a single sprite, in the make-your-char style. The character would have a single body model, over which desaturated apparel would be overlaid (top, pants, boots, and the like) and then coloured by colour blending. This is mainly why there was no shirt underneath as well; it is not set in stone, and would be worn separately from the jacket. I have not seen many games doing this, for example virtually the entire Final Fantasy series lets you see the different wielded and used weapons, but always the same armour. Terraria definitely comes to mind, where every wearable is visible, though animation is very scarce. They handled the genders by having the default bodies and armours look the same on both makes and females, but the appearance could be biased either way by choice of different hairstyles. There was also a definite male/female choice, but it only changed the character voice, and the only (ever) voiced sample was the grunt upon being hurt. On another hand there is Elona; also scarce on animation, but it gave distinct male and female bodies (burly and slim) and numerous pieces of (visual-only, no actual armour shown) apparel noticeably meant for a certain gender; you could equip any item on either gender, but they looked off by a few pixels in some cases if used on the wrong body. If I went either of these two routes, I clearly will only need a few pieces to get the character going while more clothing choices can be added over time with no penalty. There is of course the third option, that I chicken out and make a static gender character with a static set of worn clothing and a static colour set. Am I biting more than I can chew?

All of that said, PPD most accurately addressed my plea by briefly discussing the animation that I have presented in the first post. I have intentionally specified that the standing lady sprite is from my previous (and specifically failed) attempt, and that I will mearly use this style as a rough goal that I find functional and doable yet visually appealing. Before I draw any of that though, to avoid errors from my past, I want to animate a credibly moving skeleton first, and my next animation (current tweaks aside) would be the vertical jump one, about which I am still rather clueless. The above comments will come in quite handy once I get to that point though.

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Pixel Art / Creating a 64x64 platforming animation. [WIP]
« on: November 20, 2013, 08:38:46 am »
Hello!

My team is designing a platformer game, and I am in charge of the graphics, including their animations and composition. I have worked on various personal projects where I have made platformer characters, however I have let many mistakes slip with them; this time I want to treat my project more responsibly, and to boldly step forward and improve my skills instead of cutting corners when things become hard. This main character needs to turn out particularly well, because, this being a platformer, the character will be in the center of the screen majority of time regardless of other surroundings.

I have only gotten as far as this running animation.


Once I decide to start sculpting the character, I will head towards a style similar to my previous attempt.


I am not under any animation restrictions other than I would like to keep it down to a manageable level. I would like to aim for relatvely generic and fairly natural human animations rather than exaggerated and cartoony. Some of those animations will have to be jump, leap, crouch, several sword slashes, digging, and perhaps edge and wall climbing as well.

But first things first. The running animation started out pretty abyssmal, tho I smarted-up and looked up some running references, and got the current look. I decided to do the most essential animation next, the vertical jump, but my google-fu did not discover any similarly useful references. I mostly found occasional references of a short forward leap, and I cant remember ever making a satisfying jumping sprite or animation yet. At this point, I am clueless as to how to start.

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