[WIP] Rotating ship

[nefaste]

Hello, I've found this forum a few days ago and seen many good art here so I hope to get usefull advice

I've been working on a sprite for a little game. It's a ship that should rotate in any direction (asteroid-like controls).
First, here is the initial frame. I post the process too so it can be critizised.

1) The first pic is the hand drawn version.
2) The flat version, to get the shape (not really line art... maybe cell art ?).
3) The shaded version (11 colors used, lit from top left).
4) It's intentionnaly left gray, some tint will be added by the program, as shown here.

1)

2) -> 3) -> 4)

The wings should be like plates with a small gap between them, I think it looks ok. The joints in the central part are more like sharp angles, it's more difficult to convey while keeping enough contrast...

But the main problem I have is to make it rotate. I'd really appreciate some advice on how to do it correctly.
(Warning : the following is not 100% pixel art, let me know if that's not ok.)

So far I tried different approaches :

1) The lazy way :
its rotated in real time by the program. Problem : looks ugly...

2) The not so lazy way :
I could generate a few keyframes by rotating in photoshop (with anti aliasing), and use those in the program to keep rotations at a small angle from the closest keyframe. The keyframes look ok, but blurry...

3) The grunt way :
Same idea using keyframes, except they are made manually, like a real pixel artist should do  .
That's difficult, even though I only rotated the flat model so far, to have at least the shape correct.
It doesn't only have to look good, it has to look exactly the same as the other frames, and some problems only appear when animating. I realised I need to keep i mind sub pixel accuracy of the shape when drawing to get good results.

4) The vector way :
I tried making a flat model in illustrator, rotate and save it, this eliminates most rotation artifacts (since it's vector, straight lines remain straight), and there's no antialiasing. Then I do the shading manually (doing it in illustrator doesn't work well at this small scale).
Problem : I didn't manage to save at the exact desired size.

There's the flat model, rotated by steps of 22.5° (1/16th of a turn) :


Generated at runtime by the program.


Hand drawn.


Hand drawn corrected, after using the generated ones as reference.

[TrevoriuS]

Your shading is not going according to your shapes. Here's a little edit, with less colours, and more convincing definition:

I hope it helps, can't really explain much more than I just did. Please note that the back 2 wing points (son on the sides) are noew sleeping down also in shape.
TS~

PS - Hint hint: openGL for well interpolated rotations

[nefaste]

TrevoriuS, thanks for your reply and the time you spent editing.

In your version you misinterpreted the shape I had in mind, which shows that my sprite lacks readability... Maybe I'm trying to cram too many details in a small picture, and my explanations were probably not clear.

Your wings are pyramid shaped and the cockpit appears concave.
Here's a quick sketch of what I had in mind :



The lines in the wings are just separations (I thing the english term is "groove").
I like your idea to use perspective on the wings, I'll probably use it.
About the palette : is there a reason you diminished contrast ? And I don't think dithering works well with rotation, so I prefer to use more colors (I will use it in true color mode anyway).

In the meantime I continued struggling with Illustrator, and I came to the (astonishing) conclusion that... It's not suited for pixel art !
I managed to work with a pixel sized grid, but when converting to a bitmap (AA disabled), I figured out it chooses for each pixel the foremost object that partially overlaps with this pixel, instead of taking the object that covers it mostly.

Anyway, I'll try to fix the shading and see what I can do for the rotations. Might give a try at OpenGL, thanks for the tip.