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Messages - Ashbad
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71
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] [C + C] Dude with Pizza
« on: December 13, 2012, 12:33:31 am »


I think you'd be best off picking colors with more value contrast -- some hue contrast is always nice too.  I would try defining the volumes of the face would be beneficial in describing your friend's apparent chubbiness more, which I touched upon a bit in my edit.  The dithering works fine with low contrast, but becomes noise with any reasonable spread of color value, hence I got rid of it.  The hair could use better definition, but I didn't have time to touch on that.  Finally, you're using far more colors than you need -- you have 38, I cut down to 16 easily, and I think my final result was at 14.

72
General Discussion / Re: Official Off-Topic Thread
« on: December 11, 2012, 11:16:20 pm »
I am currently on a quest to kill an evil dragon that is guarding treasure stolen from my kingdom's coffers.

Well, the dragon is more like a malicious piece of software on my laptop called "Sendori", and the treasure is access to the TCP/UDP ports that TF2 uses to access servers.

I'd much rather face a dragon, really.

- Used the uninstaller.  Nope.

- Ended the Services associated with Sendori, and set them to never start up on boot.  They started up anyways, and were set back to "start on boot."

- Slew the program right in its nest in the cave of the Program Files (x86).  Blood lay everywhere, and countless KibiBytes of the malicious program fell right through the Limbo of the Recycle Bin and into the void of Windows' internal garbage collector.  Forced the sun to sink and rise by restarting the computer.  All of the files came right back on boot.

- Did all previous attempts with the addition of clearing the registry of all entries remotely related to Sendori.  The magic spell faltered -- the entries reappeared on boot, along with the files.

- Did a comprehensive cleanse of the whole system; deleted all files with even the word "Sendori" in it as well as *sendori*.* files, and other names associated with the program I discovered on previous attempts.  The dragon still lives.

- Did the same thing in Safe Mode boot with minimum drivers/services loaded.  Nope.

- Used the magic bullet -- NortonAV, Avast!, MalwarebytesAV, McAfee, and more all got a chance to scan everything from the inside-out.  They only found one or two completely unrelated and harmless tracking cookies.

TL;DR: Being a computer knight is pretty shitty.

I have one last resort, which is to quickly back up everything in my home folder to my other HDD and use the handy-dandy OS reinstall utility that my laptop came with (which I've used probably 3 times now...)  It's a solution that will obviously work, but I'm a bit depressed that it's the only solution that can mend things.

Anyone else here run into this little bugger yet?  It's a pretty silent stalker, so it's possible you have it and don't even know it.


~~~


With that, I have a question -- at what age did you guys begin your serious artistic pursuits (as in, started practicing to improve at a vigorous rate?)  My age is soon to reach 17, and I've only been seriously drawing for at least an hour a day for at most a month; I'm somewhat happy with my improvement over this period of time, but I'm curious to see how many people started at an age around mine, how many people started much older, and how many people have been doing it for as long as they can remember.  (Perhaps a lot of "I was [15 to 18] years old" responses will reassure me that I won't be 30 before I reach many of my improvement goals I've set for myself, somehow.)

73
General Discussion / Re: Official Off-Topic Thread
« on: December 10, 2012, 02:28:58 pm »
Does anyone know why pixel art draws so much more attention from the general population when drawn in minecraft rather than just being drawn sanely?  Many of the revered pixels of the minecraft medium would barely even attract any attention in something like the pixeljoint gallery (assuming they weren't projected in a poorly coded time waster game -- otherwise, they wouldn't even pass into the gallery.)  It's not even like it's hard to build these pixels, too: http://www.diamondpants.com/spritecraft/ -- I assume it's because kiddies like 3-D vidya blocks or something?

Now, if many of these models were more 3-D, as in, not a picture simply converted into a 1-block thick viewing plane -- It would be a pretty neat phenomenon.  Voxels would actually be kind of cool.

74
Pixel Art / Re: Self Pixel
« on: December 09, 2012, 09:12:18 pm »
While you have a distinct and interesting style going on there, you could use less colors -- a LOT less colors.  On that first image, you had something like 28+, when you could drop to 9 and have it actually look a lot cleaner.  The anatomy is weird (for example, the legs), yes, but I can tell it's an intended part of your style.  And I like it, too.

75
Pixel Art / Re: [C+C] Platformer Character Sprites
« on: December 09, 2012, 06:04:27 pm »
Had 10 minutes free, so here's a quick edit:





I only really edited the girl on the far left well-enough to show improvement, so I'd mostly ignore the edits of the others.  With that in mind, these characters are a bit hard to read at this size -- they're better at a 2x zoom, but since you made no mention that they're going to be displayed like that, so:

  • Removed most of the really small details, since they read as noise (except for the eyes, which should at this size read more like eyes than what you had due to the higher contrast across the surrounding skin/hair/eye, but it's also a bit more of a style thing I suppose on my part to have them so JRPG-ish)
  • Reduced color count, made colors contrast more internally (I think you could contrast them even more than I did)
  • Kept the dark outline color to outline almost exclusively on the very outside -- makes things less flat, and also helps the character stand out more (I should have shown this more myself in this edit, but I didn't really think about it until now.)
  • Larger and simpler pixel clusters, reads better at 1x resolution
  • Skin is a bit too bright to effectly portray facial features like eyes well -- I might have gone a bit *too* dark, but something a bit lighter could work well.  You also don't have much room to effectively cast much light/shadow on most of the faces (the only ones where it could work is with the bros), so I'd go with more flat coloring.

I think these problems were most pronounced in the large blaster-master vehicle and the girl, and least obvious in the cape dude (He could go on his way with the least amount of modification, actually.)

I think when I have time again later today I'll try to modify the girl a bit more to better show what I mean with a better edit ;)

76
General Discussion / Re: Official Off-Topic Thread
« on: December 08, 2012, 11:42:04 pm »
Quote from: blumunkee on December 08, 2012, 11:37:24 pm
Statistically, people who drink alcohol -- even those who abuse alcohol -- have longer lifespans than those who abstain.

73% of statistics are made up, though.  ::)

77
General Discussion / Re: Official Off-Topic Thread
« on: December 08, 2012, 09:50:36 pm »
Quote from: blumunkee on December 08, 2012, 09:24:35 pm
I'm from the Dirty South. Nothing is sacred and everything is fair game for jokes. I call "Black Ops" "Black Cocks" and make fun of myself for being half black. I'm not sure a German could even begin to understand the kind of culture I was raised in. :lol:

And yes, using my Xbox LIVE headset has destroyed the higher functioning parts of my brain.

Very true of The South -- I'm just north enough to have been raised in a different environment (Northern Virginia, the Land of the Politically Hypercorrect, Rich and Insensitive, Overly Self-Centered Democrats -- or so it seems.)

I find that the witty comments I intend to make generally dissolve when I talk online during games, into things involving lack of dropped testicles and the such.  Afterwards, I always contemplate my wasted opportunities to crush the egos of 13-year-olds everywhere for hours, asking myself where I went wrong in life.

And then I go back to playing and making shitty insults  :yell:

78
General Discussion / Re: Request for old unused tilesets
« on: December 08, 2012, 03:57:31 pm »
Quote from: wzl on December 08, 2012, 03:02:25 am
no problem, i'm curious though, which platforms are you developing for? sounds pretty specific.

Old, household devices I've bastardized for fun's sake, notably two different graphing calculators of different brands/models.

79
Pixel Art / Re: Pumpukin
« on: December 08, 2012, 02:04:46 pm »
Quick edit:



- Your original colors did have some good color contrast, but it didn't seem to be nearly enough.
- Some of the internal, jaggy near-black lines were detrimental.
- Some noise at the bottom of the pumpkin.

Overall, pretty interesting pixel so far.

80
General Discussion / Re: Official Off-Topic Thread
« on: December 08, 2012, 01:31:52 pm »
I've been trying to draw for days now, but I've been constantly drawblocked by TF2 -- until today.  The latest update broke the game for me again.  I can't find any servers (and this time, doing an extensive system scan, forwarding port 27015, killing any programs that might be intercepting that port, etc.) all are failing.  It's amazing that such an innocent game is keeping me from studying and drawing, perhaps I have an addictive personality -- sounds like I'd better stay away from 'dem beers when I turn 21  :-[

Quote from: ptoing on December 08, 2012, 04:38:09 am
I think more than being politically incorrect it makes blu sound incredibly homophobic. Sorry blu.

Agreed, unless he's acting that way for comedic reasons as I suspect (calling everything "gay", because all of the 13 year olds who also play that game use it as an insult.)  If not... welcome to 2012, Blu!  :blind:

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