Pixelation
Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: Rybar on June 12, 2010, 04:38:36 am
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Current WIP:
(http://images.niklofide.net/new%20BA%20draft2.png) (http://images.niklofide.net/new-ba-idle.gif) (http://images.niklofide.net/new-ba-firing1.gif)
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ORIGINAL POST:
(http://www.niklofide.net/images/herodev1.png)
Working on sprites for a game for which I'm also a developer for; looking to the pros here for some initial critiques before I attempt any animation... which brings me to a few questions about spriter's methods..
When creating an animated sprite, do you move from finished frame to finished frame, or do you start rough and add details later?
When working out the motion do you pixel finished extremes and then go back and do in-betweens?
I know theres no 'right' way, just interested in what artists here have found to be most efficient.
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OLD STUFF:
(http://images.niklofide.net/herodev2.png) (http://images.niklofide.net/herodev2-gunready.png) (http://images.niklofide.net/herodev2-run.gif) (http://images.niklofide.net/herodev2-run2.gif) (http://images.niklofide.net/herodev2-run3.gif) (http://images.niklofide.net/herodev2-run4.gif) (http://images.niklofide.net/turret1.gif) (http://images.niklofide.net/herodev2-run-nofire.gif)
7/10 resolution change, first draft
(http://images.niklofide.net/hero-firing1.png) (http://images.niklofide.net/hero-firing2.png)
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8/15 In which I scrap the whole thing because I hate it, admit that doubling the resolution was a bad idea, and start over with a completely different style of sprite:
(http://images.niklofide.net/new%20BA%20draft2.png)
8/17 Idle animation
(http://images.niklofide.net/new-ba-idle.gif)
8/18 firing animation
(http://images.niklofide.net/new-ba-firing1.gif)
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I like your style Rybar, yearning to learn, wanting to get things right, if you really wanna tackle animation, its pretty tough to do, I highly, highly suggest you pick up The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams. There's gonna be quite a bit to learn but I can tell you in the end it should be worth it (speaking of animation, I should probably starting reading that book more myself and doing more animated pieces :-\). Anyway as for the initial sprite, it reminds me a lot of Out of This World or Flashback, I'm likin it, but I've tried to address a few issues as seen here in this edit:
(http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee166/manlygaming/soldier_edit.png)
I've tried to put down the color count down a bit, up the contrast, kinda give it a feel for an actual light source hitting it, "beef" things out i.e. try to give them depth. Hope this edit helps, good luck with your game.
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(http://www.niklofide.net/images/herodev1.png)
When creating an animated sprite, do you move from finished frame to finished frame, or do you start rough and add details later?
Start rough, definitely! Draw a stickman the size of your sprite and animate that first. Then, when you're happy with the stickman movement you can begin adding a solid colour on top of each stickman frame to sketch out the outline for your sprite.
The sprite you have is a good start but the gun is kinda hanging I think, like its melting or something.
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@bengoshia: I love your edit! Besides the flesh tones being a solid improvement over mine, he's a couple pixels shorter, which seems to have solved the issue I was having with his body proportions, and will also give me a bit of play for his run cycle (head bob). I see you have given him a nose as well; I was debating on whether or not the sprite's size warranted using a pixel for facial features, but it looks pretty good.
I actually already own a copy of Richard's book; have you seen his DVD set? The book is awesome, but seeing his principles in motion is amazing. Its very pricey, but if you don't frown upon help from pirates, it can be obtained elsewhere.
@ErekT: I redrew the gun like 10 times lol... this is his 'idle' pose, guns at rest, so he isn't supposed to be pointing it straight ahead, but I see what you mean about the gun. I kept struggling with making the gun's body appear straight without pointing too far down or 'melting' it as you put it. bengoshia's solid highlight along the top edge seems to solidify the gun alot.
Thanks for the help guys, I'll keep you posted on on my progress.
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Update: Reworked the first, kept the kneepads (I like them), did an aiming/guns-ready pose.
(http://www.niklofide.net/images/herodev2.png) (http://www.niklofide.net/images/herodev2-gunready.png)
What are your thoughts on idle animations? It seems everything I might do with a sprite this small would be too much movement.
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Update (Also in edited first post) - run cycle
(http://images.niklofide.net/herodev2-run.gif)
This is a 12 frame run, meant to play at 24fps, but the GIF plays awful slow in-browserin chrome for some reason. I'm using Pro Motion 6. Can anyone here shed some light on what I'm doing wrong? It plays fine in promotion, even when I reopen the GIF file. I guess its easier to spot errors when it plays slow.. let me know what you think.
*EDIT: GIF's apparently don't play at their correct speed in Google Chrome.
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Not bad. Two things i'd do were to lean him forward, and show the impact in the leg when the bodies weight lands on it. When you run, then you are essentially falling forward and catching yourself, over and over. The faster the run, the farther forward you lean, pretty much. As for the impact, you are sticking one leg out in front and then your bodies weight is falling on it, so the foot should be flat on the ground and the knee should bend. Currently, the heel touches, then the leg starts sliding back before the foot flattens.
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Id agree with salt...err NaCl. The motion of the legs has too circular of an arc, making it look very cartoony and removing any sense of weight from the figure or the mean looking gun he is carrying. its not very practical in the first place to be carrying a gun near your face if you were running. regardless if it were a light or a heavy gun youd still have a high probability of knocking yourself in the face with it quite often depending on how much upper body strength you had, but regardless you certainly wouldnt be able to hold a straight shot. if you were to bring the gun down from his face while he ran it might allow you to animate your run with more body expression and realism.
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Ok, I've added a couple frames just before and after contact, and moved his body forward a bit; I also added a bit of delayed motion on the arms and gun to show its weight a bit better.
(http://images.niklofide.net/herodev2-run2.gif)
@St0ven: I see what you're saying about running with a gun near your face, but I'm not too concerned with being super-realistic, it is for a platformer game after all. :D Lets just say he has super-human upper body strength and a steady-cam rig built into the gun.
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Looking good :y: The elbow could be pointier I think.
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pointy elbow plus shading.. it needs a lot of work I know.
(http://images.niklofide.net/herodev2-run3.gif)
When you are at the point where you are finishing an animation, how do you avoid the noise/jitter that occurs from the shading not being exactly the same from one frame to the next? The obvious answer being, make sure the shading is the same from frame to frame ofcourse, just wondering if anyone had any advice on how to go about doing that as efficiently as possible.
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I generally cheat and use a rotation tool on the previous frame (just the bit that's moving, to rotate it towards the new position) and then base my shading loosely off of that, with some variation for where the light would be hitting it (like if a leg is no longer getting shadow from something above it) by using a semi transparent layer with the rotated bit ontop. Obviously I dont use the rotated bit in the final sprite, as that would look horrible, but it helps keep my pixel clusters in fairly consistent spots.
That being said, your shading pretty much blows mine out of the water, so Im not sure how applicable that method is with all the subpixel stuff you have going on.
I think the two jumpiest bits you have on the legs, btw are right above the crotch, where the torso gains and looses a pixel, and the fairly intense jump from frame to frame on his butt. The butt seems to be constantly gaining and loosing 3 or 4 pixels. You also may want to ditch the sellout on his front leg and just use shading. I think those issues would pretty much fix it.
Also, welcome to pixelation! Nice to see more migration.
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Thanks zez! Its cool to see fellow flixelers over here. I've touched up the run cycle again; I didn't even notice all the extra pixels on his butt till you mentioned it. It's much more consistent now, thanks.
Also have a first draft of a pop-up turret:
(http://images.niklofide.net/turret1.gif) (http://images.niklofide.net/herodev2-run4.gif)
Next up will be to do a disarmed run-cycle, where he isn't aiming, and thus much much harder due to the torso twisting, arm movement, etc. Does anyone know where I could find some good reference for running while holding something?
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Next up will be to do a disarmed run-cycle, where he isn't aiming, and thus much much harder due to the torso twisting, arm movement, etc. Does anyone know where I could find some good reference for running while holding something?
You mean with a lowered gun like in the idle position, rite? In that case I think you can just use the same timing for bobbing up and down as in your current run-cycle. When the left foot touches ground and the arms go down to indicate the impact, simply move the whole right arm back one pixel for that frame to give the impression the whole torso is twisting. And forward one pixel for the right foot. Might be enough.
Cool motion on the turret btw :D
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7/5 gun-run unarmed cycle complete
(http://images.niklofide.net/herodev2-run-nofire.gif)
ErekT, that worked just fine for the most part! I added a bit of back and forth on the guns front and back end as well.. not nearly as painful as I thought.
Let me know how I can improve this.
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Did an edit on your turret animation.
Tried adding some stretch/squash to give it a more clunky, mechanical feel. Right now yours feels too smooth, too perfect. Lots of frames showing a smoothly tweened action does not equal good animation. Just means you have a smoothly tweened action with a bunch of frames.
I find that lots of quick starts and stops work really well to descibe mechanical movement. It looks efficient that way.
I changed the frame rate. Beofre you were animating at 60 fps. Now it's more like 20. At this size, it's kinda overkill imo to be working at 60 fps.
(http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/107/turret1.gif)
EDIT: made a couple more edits.
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@crab2selout: Yes, your 2nd edit looks much better. The first one looked too rubbery, too much springy action and deformation of parts that should be rigid. Mechanical animations are supposed to look perfect; its not organic motion, so squash/stretch doesn't really apply. That being said, I like how the motion in your edit "pops" better and is more linear instead of everything sliding into place at once like my first one. Thanks!
EDIT: To be fair, you should keep your first one on here as well so others can see what the hell I'm talking about! :D
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@crab2selout: Yes, your 2nd edit looks much better. The first one looked too rubbery, too much springy action and deformation of parts that should be rigid. Mechanical animations are supposed to look perfect; its not organic motion, so squash/stretch doesn't really apply. That being said, I like how the motion in your edit "pops" better and is more linear instead of everything sliding into place at once like my first one. Thanks!
EDIT: To be fair, you should keep your first one on here as well so others can see what the hell I'm talking about! :D
Sorry. I overwrote hte original file and since I didn't log into imageshack when I uploaded I can't see my history of image uploads. I agree there was some weird stuff happening there.
I think the animation is mostly the same, except for that little black thing at the back. It was really floppy in my original edit, although I don't know why I did that... Amazing the difference it can make getting rid of something like that.
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Ok, so we've decided to nearly double the size of the sprites for this game. I've got a start on it, but now that he's bigger, something doesn't seem quite right proportion-wise. Funny how incorrect anatomy is amplified by higher resolution. Anyone care to give me some pointers? I think I just need another set of eyes on it.
(http://images.niklofide.net/hero-firing1.png)
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I really don't think you should up the game's resolution, its gonna be tough doing all the graphics as is.
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Just wanted to pop in and throw my two cents in with bengoshia. You were really making some nice progress on the sprite as it was (smaller). Making it that much bigger is seriously going to more than quadruple the workload across the board, for really no aesthetic gains. If you're going that big you may as well just go 3D.
I'll give you some harsh critiques on the big guy anyways, just for kicks and giggles:
His belt-line is curving really strangely, as if his pants are falling off in the back or his shirttails are not tucked in.
The close arm is really wacky looking. Can't really tell what's going on there, especially the chunk in the crook of the elbow.
Far arm seems to be nonexistent. We should be able to see at least a bit of his elbow I'd think. I also can't figure out where the hand holding the barrel of the gun is supposed to be.
Boots are not uniformly sized.
The shading on the legs is rather odd. Close leg highlight terminates well before the knee, which is odd.
His butt seems to be a bit droopy, though this is also accentuated by the odd curve to the belt.
The far upper leg is rather misshapen, seems to bow in at the middle, rather than out.
Anyways, I was really liking where this was going at the smaller scale and I don't think making everything so much bigger is a good idea at all.
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If you NEED to make it bigger, then dont pixel it that big, instead you should pixel it at the same size you were before, and then just blow it up. That, or use other digital art (vector, etc). It's going to be a huge pain animating by pixel something that large.
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pawige: Thanks for the critique. I think most of my trouble came from trying to "remaster" the existing art at a new resolution and picking the worst possible frame to start from -the one with both feet in the air. I think I'm just going to start over with a new rough-in to make sure I get the forms right first.
The decision to do higher resolution sprites is final.. and I'm surprised at all the nay-saying. It's only 80px tall.. not super unmanageably large by any means. I have maybe a total of 5-6 hours in on this guy so far, and I'm not coming from zero animation knowledge here either. Doing this has been a learning experience to be certain, but I'm confident I'll be able to tackle this with frequent critique from all the awesome guys here.
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I'm gonna jump in with all the nay-sayers and say that upping the size/res is not a good idea.
Increasing the size of sprites always seems to have an exponential effect on workload. Pixels are weird like that :crazy:
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Had another go at it, from scratch this time:
(http://images.niklofide.net/hero-firing2.png)
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The neck and upper arm are both too long. Try bending your arm and then squeeze it against your side; you'll notice the elbow only reaches as far down as your lower ribs.
And I agree with the others on the resolution too: as a small time developer you don't need a quadrupled workload to break your back/motivation :wah: How about doing them small first to get a basic prototype up and running? Your hero there and a couple of enemies along with a background or two. And then, when you have a feel for the amount of work needed even for the low-res sprites, decide whether you want to go small or big for the entire thing?
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Update:
I decided to scrap the whole thing because I hate it, admit that doubling the resolution was a bad idea, and start over with a completely different style of sprite:
(http://images.niklofide.net/new%20BA%20draft2.png)
Tear it apart guys, and thanks as always for taking the time to critique.
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(http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/8049/runngun.png)
Uploaded with ImageShack.us (http://imageshack.us) I really like this style vs the old one, but It looked like the back leg was too chubby so I trimmed it a bit and made both the boots smaller. Also i assume the light source is the upper right so I saw no reason for the shaded left shoulder.I tried to keep with the original style
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His legs are really short in this new version. Also, remember to have thin lines in your sprite.
Added a whole bunch of edits to this, but the main thing is to think about your anti-aliasing and lineweight.
Original on left, edits on right.
(http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/1412/rybar.png)
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Thanks for the edits guys. I took a few of them into consideration, namely the fat leg and thinning out the selout in a few places, and the incorrect shading on the back/left arm. I like where the way his head was originally, even if the ear placement wasn't anatomically correct. Did a 1st run on his idle anim, working on run cycle tonight.
(http://images.niklofide.net/new-ba-idle.gif)
EDIT: Avoiding the dreaded run cycle tonight, got a firing anim done though:
(http://images.niklofide.net/new-ba-firing1.gif)
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Before you rush into the run cycle, work on your standing some more. The new design is superior, but there is some more cleaning up you can do. In general, the lines are jagged and not smooth. The gun is looking fantastic, it's very smooth. I would love to see the rest of Rambo given the same amount of care.
But work on the basics before you rush into animation. Also, his anatomy is mostly fine, except his right foot (our left) needs to point towards the viewer, not at a profile. The legs themselves are also kind of big and too separated.
I noticed his pose is similar to the Contra guy.