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Messages - astraldata
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361
General Discussion / Re: Color ramp generator for Dawnbringer 32 palette
« on: December 24, 2013, 05:06:47 am »
This is an excellent addition dude! Thanks a ton! I'm getting a lot closer to being able to manipulate colors the way I need to.

Unfortunately the one thing I've been having trouble with after this update (and didn't notice before) is that I'm having difficulty maintaining control over an individual color because the Tint/Highlight/Ambient Color Wheels don't affect ONLY the currently selected color, but rather ALL colors together. I admit, when I realized this, I was both happy *and* disappointed simultaneously.

I was happy because you essentially did lighting for me, but I was disappointed because I realized there are entries in the palette I'd rather NOT have controlled by the global ambient/highlight color (i.e. lighting in a level such as a glowing yellow lamp-post light in an otherwise pale moonlit scene).

As amazingly useful as your global lighting system is, stuff like multiple light sources just isn't possible yet and greatly limits the variety of your palette options since you can't choose to have absolute control over the lighting of a single standalone color entry selection (such as the yellow lamplight on a street and grass of the otherwise moonlit level). To combat this, I suggest allowing the *option* of setting the ambient/highlight/tint colors for each individual color selection (a simple checkbox maybe?) so that you can use the *local* (ambient/tint/highlight) settings of the selected color *instead* of the global (ambient/tint/highlight) lighting settings for the entire "rainbow" so one can generate a special, individualized, ramp for any selected color. It would require at least three more color wheels of course + a checkbox or radio-button to determine whether to use the global/local lighting, but if you added them, they would put the cherry on top of this already amazingly-useful tool! :D

362
General Discussion / Re: Color ramp generator for Dawnbringer 32 palette
« on: December 21, 2013, 06:49:16 am »
Awesome man! Thanks a lot! :D Unfortunately though, I think I found a bug... For some reason you can't select the first color, though all the rest appear to be selectable...

Aside from that, I have a slightly more complex, though definitely more useful feature request -- could you let the user change the reflectivity/highlightmultiplier/darken, etc. of JUST the currently-selected color OR all the rainbow colors at once? It'd just require a few more sliders, but it'd make it a LOT easier to control an entire palette as well as individual ramps simultaneously (so you can look and see how they play together side by side as you create 'em).

Also, is there any way to adjust the contrast between the colors on the ramp? If not, I would suggest slider(s) for that as well for those of us who want a little more manual control (both for an individual color, OR the entire rainbow). If you needed to, maybe a toggle switch could work to lock the contrast for the selected color (and use that base contrast to generate that color's ramp using all your other sliders.) This would be ideal when you need some gradients to be 'soft' and others to 'pop'. You could generate a 'hard' OR 'soft' contrast ramp with the Add/remove color command -- but a "duplicate current color" command would be helpful there in the case that you had to have both a soft and a hard version of a color ramp in your palette.

Color selection is a hard thing to come by any good tools for. Even without my new suggestions, this is already shaping up to be an amazing tool for pixel art! If anyone hasn't tried playing around with this yet, they really should. It can almost create any kind of palette they wish. With my new suggestions, it really would be able to! I definitely want to know about any future updates on this! Thanks again for making this dude!

363
General Discussion / Re: Color ramp generator for Dawnbringer 32 palette
« on: December 19, 2013, 07:05:34 pm »
Nice! Thanks dude! It seems to work fine locally in Firefox for me. :D

If you update that rainbow version to work with manipulating multiple colors, I would appreciate it if you PM me a zip like this or something because I'd like to use that one locally even more.

It seems like the rainbow thing'd be even more useful to me since the one thing I find tedious in game pixel art is coming up with one general unifying palette to use for everything in a game. Something like this would be awesome for that! At most, I'd just have to do minor tweaks to just a few colors (instead of most or all colors) to get them to exactly where I wanted. That would me save a ton of work dude.

Thanks again for creating this! I can't wait to see the progress you make on the rainbow side! :)

364
Pixel Art / Re: Just another walking monster [CC]
« on: December 19, 2013, 06:51:20 pm »
Yup, NBA Jam rocks lol.

Anyhow, the biggest problem I think is the fact that he appears to be looking at the ground rather than straight ahead. Even if he is hunched, he should look like he's walking with some purpose (unless he's a zombie dog-wolf of course, but I doubt he'd have the coordination to use swords lol). If you angled his chin a bit upward more, you could both turn the head a lot more easily as he walks (by shifting pixels a little left and right) as well as give him a bit more fearsomeness since he looks like he'll look more like he's coming for you.

I think the only other issue is that his neck may be too long -- it kind of looks like a man wearing a dog-mask rather than that being his actual head.

Finally, for the sword swinging animations, give the guy a little arc in his motions -- as I mentioned before. Lean him in and make his arms and legs swing the sword together while following the arcs that you think will make the attack look more powerful.

Also, add some blur on the blade between such a long swing of the blade in such a short amount of time. This blur will help you visualize the arcs better too, and, in addition to that, it will pull the frames closer together, making the swing read more clearly on such a small amount of frames.

Hopefully that helps clarify some of your issues.

365
Pixel Art / Re: Sad Clown [WIP] [C + C]
« on: December 19, 2013, 06:11:59 am »
Not a problem dude. I've enjoyed playing around with this guy. He's such a unique looking character. He looks sooo agonizingly miserable. :D

And remember, the unimportant characters are usually the ones people remember the most in games -- so keep that in mind! They add the mood and flavor of a particular game, perhaps even moreso than the main character!

Also, one last suggestion before I move on too -- for animation's sake, you probably should be careful with the amount of shading you add (such as with Agent K's recent edit for example) because such detailed aa requires a lot of time per-frame to get looking right (this of course matters a little less if you have a lot of frames, but still, it's an important point to remember).

The contrast, however, doesn't require a lot of aa, so that should be possible to add pretty quickly/easily if you want a darker styled sprite. The main thing to remember is to put the shadows beside/beneath/around the parts you want to "lift" or "push/pull" forward and in different directions. Agent K did a lot of this pulling/pushing/lifting in his edit with the dark shadows.

Hope that helps. Good luck with your game. I'm loving the character concept for this guy lol. Can't wait to see others you come up with.

366
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Charadesign | Plateform Game
« on: December 19, 2013, 05:46:21 am »


I took out the massive amount of white highlights and gave the armor a more rounded, striated form (which I believe is what you appeared to be going for).

I removed an extra color from the blade, which made it just look dull (metal is reflective so why would it cast shadows on itself?) and that single color makes it appear as if there's something reflected on the blade from the environment.

For the most part, otherwise, minus the overuse of white to make the armor appear metallic, I didn't need to tweak much other than the general lighting on the armor a little (darkening/blending values that receded into the distance) and I fixed the scarf just a tiny bit.

I also shifted the chest over to make it appear less crunched into his shoulder.

367
General Discussion / Re: Color ramp generator for Dawnbringer 32 palette
« on: December 19, 2013, 05:12:43 am »
Is there any chance of an offline version of this? Or at least a version that works on a local hard drive?

This is a really useful tool -- I especially like the rainbow tinting ability (I just can't figure out how to select/change other single colors on the rainbow ramp individually).

368
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Charadesign | Plateform Game
« on: December 19, 2013, 04:27:29 am »
The armor and face scarf needs some indication that they recede into the distance. You should add some form of shading to the bottom-right to indicate this. Also the yellow on the staff rings needs more contrast with the shadows. The bottom end of the staff looks like it's separate from the rest of the staff without it, for example.

369
Pixel Art / Re: Just another walking monster [CC]
« on: December 18, 2013, 10:56:28 pm »
lol, he's got a sort of NBA Jam pasted-head thing going on there it looks like with his body turning and wobbling so much. I do applaud your lighting though. Very well done. If this is going to be a game sprite, however, you might want to consider some sort of overhead lighting instead since the sprite will likely be mirrored.

As far as the animation goes, the arcs of movement for the arms are definitely wrong. After all, everything in nature tends to move in circles and arcs. This is something you should trace out in your animation. One glaring problem is the height of his left hand when passing over his body going forward.

Most other stuff I'd critique has been said though.

370
Pixel Art / Re: Sad Clown [WIP] [C + C]
« on: December 18, 2013, 08:17:11 pm »


I edited his colors to show you what "hueshift" means as well as added in a nose that looks like it belongs, fitting to the original concept a little better. I also tweaked his body shape as well as the balloon a little to make it work better as game art on multiple types of background colors. He could still use some more work in that department, but overall, he looks okay. I didn't add in the arm/leg cast or crutch (although I was tempted) so that you could see your original in contrast to the new image. You should still attempt those just to practice imo.

One other thing I did was bring the values closer together and desaturated the hell out of them (without overdoing it and making them dull-looking). Even if they're supposed to be primary colors, nature rarely ever displays them without some form of desaturation (otherwise, they'll burn your eyes lol), whether that's from the atmosphere, ambient/reflective light, whatever -- almost no color is pure to the eye -- even in the most baby-friendly cartoons out there.

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