Hey, I have a particular fascination with neon, in particular 80s neon things, and most especially hot pinks, I think you have managed to capture both that 80s retro feeling and at the same time a good reference to the game this image is based on.

I would agree and say it needs "something" else, the truth is there is a ton you could do with it, but you don't want to end up guiding the lily either. Perhaps some neon-ish abstract wire-frame simple cubes going into the distance. I notice you have a darker line on most of the areas of the blue grid, I might suggest (if you have colors to spare) that you apply that on your grid on both sides, perhaps use 3 shades going darker, this might give the appearance of a slight glow, I am also curious if you could do it on the elements in the sun too.  A quick way to test how effective it might be before committing to painting is bring the image into photoshop(or whatever), color pic all the  blue grid lines out, and pop it on its own layer, then simply experiment with layer styles/glow/gradients.etc , might be worth doing also on the sun. 

But hey I am a sucker when it comes to glows , hazes, neon.. this image could work just as well as you have it but with a bit more feature on the left and right sides.

good luck with it,, I would be interested to see it if you ever complete it.

maybe also cast your peepers over these for inspiration.
https://www.google.ie/search?q=wallpaper&hl=en&biw=1360&bih=652&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=Vb7qUrygForF7AbvkIGYBw&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&gws_rd=cr#hl=en&tbm=isch&q=80s+neon

Hi there RealestEstate

I assume your creature is fantasy/alien in theme? in that case I think what you have is pretty darn impressive as is, I mean if it were a horse there could be some form improvements sure, but I don't think your idea is to have it like that?... anyway I cant really see much wrong with the form in my humble amateur eye other then to perhaps move the back right leg back a pixel or two, but regarding trying to get a fur look, i think that could be done with just a few pixels in the right place outside of your boundary, then build it up a bit as you go into the chest.. I say chest since I assume by the look of your images that the chest region was the place you wanted to look a bit furry?..   also your pixel density and pallet made it a bit tricky to get it looking ideal, but perhaps you can use what i have done and improve on it or cover the whole body.

One thing I would note are the grey hairs?.. I really think they needed something , and my thoughts on that where to use it as a feature of the design by simply changing its color to a more exotic feel.  I am not sure if you are using a restricted pallet but i used gradients just to make those a bit stronger,  but they could be look just as effective with a solid color. But the grey you used was I think way too flat, and it almost looked like it was an area you "forgot" to color/shade



I gave you those strands of hairs separated so you can easily experiment with tinting on an layer above, without having to repaint anything.

Anyway most certainly do not scrap this, it is so very imaginative and even if you don't use it in an application, be sure to add it to your portfolio I would say!...  its really fine work all in all.

Hello everyone,

I thought to repost this from another forum I posted into.

A quick tutorial on how to get a nice effective old school CRT look.


Ok so I really like that old CRT  look, in particular when it comes to pixel art. Over the years I have seen various games and emulators try to simulate various styles of scan-lines and CRT looks, however I have rarely (if ever) seen ones that try to simulate the actual RGB component to each cell on a CRT screen. This style may not be to everyone's taste though.

Anyway I thought to try come up with something effective and thought to post my method here on the AGS forum since many of you are working at the pixel art level.


For this method you must upscale your artwork to at least 300%. This means for every pixel of your art work it will now have 9 pixels of detail, this will be needed for 2 reasons,  the first reason is to get Red Green and Blue going horizontally across each of your pixels, and the second reason is you will simulate the CRT cell beveling at the top and bottom of this 3x3 pixel.

This up-scaling of art work may not work with some projects  in particular low res games, but it might be nice to use on static images, or other contexts.


Ok here are the very simple steps, and underneath are images of the process and underneath that is another image demonstrating how effective it can be.


Step 1:
Up-Scale your raw pixel art work up by 300% using nearest neighbor scaling (to avoid aa/blurring)
then zoom right in on one of your artwork pixels (which is now 3x3 pixels), then simply paint 3 vertical lines of 3 pixels, Red, Green and Blue. (Make sure to keep neatly inside your art work pixel)

Step 2
Now to simulate the slight bevel you see on CRT cells if you look close enough. Either apply a bevel or just paint lighter shade of Red,Green, Blue on the top row of 3 pixels, then at the bottom row of 3 pixels paint in darker R, G, B colors.


Step 3
Now you simply (but very carefully) copy and paste this to make a row,, then copy that row to make a block, and copy that block.. and so on. But its very import to take care that in each of your art work pixels the RGB cell is sitting in snug, with the highlight of the bevel on top and the dark part on the bottom and the Red component starting first.

Step 4
Once you have the whole of your image covered , simply use a "Soft Light" layer blend and your done. No need to touch Opacity settings. In this example I am using PS, however most GFX software that has layers will have a close equivalent to PS Layer Blends.

Step 5
On zooming right in you can make sure you didn't go wrong with the copy/pasting of the cells/rows..etc





And here are some examples of how effective this overlay filtering can be. , I have also provided you with a strip of overlay filter at the very bottom that's on a transparent background so if your too lazy to make it your self, just grab that and copy/paste until you have your image covered. (you will still need to apply a layer blend such as Soft Light)
You could bake this overlay effect into your image, or in theory it could be used as a real-time screen overlay filter in a game engine however I am not sure AGS could do that.




There is one disadvantage to this CRT effect in that it darkens the image slightly. It is a bit unavoidable. You can try play with the contrast/color balance of art work to compensate. In the example images I could have de-saturated the red component a bit, but you can mess about with the 3 colors, and how its blended to get some really interesting results.

Anyway have fun with it, hope it's useful to someone out there.

How do MysteryMeat ... Sure I am not even sure how to ask the question.. um perhaps a few pics to show.  what i said before about "confusion".. well its not so much confusion more of an awkward thing.

And this is in specific context to following walk cycle sheets you see people post so other can use them as reference, they mostly use either frames, or second intervals. The annoyance with spriter is not that it displays milliseconds, its more that it displays that by default, and seems to be no other options to change what mode/scale the increments are.
So in effect when I am looking at a picture of a walk cycle sheet someone posted and I am looking at their "frame 7 pose", instead of my eye easily finding that on the timeline in the editor i have to bring up a calculator to do the conversion so i know what milliseconds i should be on. This minor annoyance also applies to people posting their stuff with relation to seconds or fraction of second, but I guess its easier to workout that way without having to bring up a calculator.

here are a few pics to emphasizes that spriter seems go contrary to what other software are usually setup as "default" .

Typical cheapo video editing software (easy on the eye to quickly identify ranges of time on the time line because it uses fractions of seconds/mins and not "Just" milliseconds.




3ds Max (out of the box) easy and practical "frames" intervals


Flash (out of the box), set up to display frames, again practical for what its used for


Unity (out of the box), easy to identify seconds, and fractions of them on zooming in..etc, again the obvious choice for its use.


and lastly we come to spriter which for some odd reason has chosen to display milliseconds (out of the box) and with no apparent options to change it to frames, or seconds, or anything other then milliseconds.


I mean even the various music (daw) , midi etc I have used don't use milliseconds "out of the box".. sure most of them have options to change to it which is find and milliseconds come in useful when working at certain levels.

The only software I can honestly recall ever using that had milliseconds as a default option where audio editors, i am sure there are others, but those had options to change the increments to another scale or type of measurement anyway.

Anyway, its just a minor thing to be honest, as i said i can do the conversions when following tutorials online, but it would have been nice to have an option, or a zoom function that changes to seconds on at a certain level, i dunno, seems like an odd choice for spriter to go with.  I can live with this at least, its no biggy
.

btw I am dead curious as to your nick there?  lol