Pixelation
Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: Seiseki on July 16, 2011, 07:41:08 pm
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So I'm working on a game, it's still in a very early phase, but I'm doing a few bits and pieces here and there.
I made a few tiles for a house, the grass, walls and flowers are just temporary tiles though. (the wall is just a resized floor tile)
And since I've learned a few things about contrast and sharpness since coming here, I'm gonna go back and re-do the entire tileset.
A few issues I know about this mockup:
Bad bad contrast.
De-saturated, washed out colors.
Perhaps slightly noisy in some parts (cliff side)
I'm gonna re-do it in a more modern and colorful style and I'd love if anyone could point out any larger faults in this current style and some hints for colors and such.
(https://www.dropbox.com/s/dvc8gpmtys3iclk/house_mockup.png?dl=1)
The way I do it when selecting the color for the shading is just pick a color, make it darker, more de-saturated and shift the hue towards blue.
Obviously that's not working out very well :P
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Your worst color choice was the grass. Grass is really hard and I'm still not really sure how to pick the color for it. But I'd also say that, generally, in this piece you don't have dark enough darks so it all looks pretty flat
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The biggest issue I see is there are a bunch of colors that are very similar. Here is the palette sorted by brightness.
(http://www.annishman.com/pixel/crit/housemockup-palette.png)
All those browns could be simplified to a few colors. This goes the same with the greens, blue, and orange. Too many colors with not enough range makes the image feel muddy and lacking in contrast. Lowering your color count will go a long way in making it easier to tweak your palette and get better results.
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Wow, that image is very informative..
The large palette comes mostly from having shadows and a bit of soft shading in a layer on top, so that's not strictly pixel art.
Haha, but man, that palette looks like a horrible mess!
And I'll have to say, I'm not used to having an organized palette, I just make up colors as I go.
So I think that's one thing I really have to improve.
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@ AnnIshman =
The reason why the palette is "that" way is because this image seems to be assembled together piece by piece of what it seems to be ripped content from various snes-like games.
(http://www.annishman.com/pixel/crit/housemockup-palette.png)
The image is first set up as 24bit colors so when each piece is pasted it won't lose any color, and then once all the pieces have been mashed together, it is decreased to 256 colors, and ta-da! it can be thrown inside programs that only support 256 colors, like cm1999 or used in old game making programs like Rpgmaker 2003. The browns you see there are just simply generated automatically by the computer.
@ Seiseki =
Hey, what's going on in here man? why are you using ripped content and not making your own?
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I'm sorry but you're wrong :P
This is a mock-up I made from tiles that I've made my self.
NOTE: If you actually right click the image and select properties it says 24-bit too, so, just saying..
By saying it's from various snes games you're giving me way too much credit :P
Also what's the point of doing that and then asking for criticism?
Here's a mashup of my 3 current tilesets, interior, buildings and terrain.
As I said, the palette was messed up because of the soft shadow, and there might also be some overlay going on in the mock-up.
I'm not sure how to check the palette, though, but this image shouldn't have any extra colors other than the ones painted by hand.
(http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/9140/tilesetmashup01.png)
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Started this edit (pretty rushed) mainly for my own learning as first time doing 16x16 tiles.
Only got to work on a few bits but would love to spend more time on it (especially the cliff tiles) for practice.
Hope you get something out of it.
(http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/1985/housemockup.png) => (http://i1126.photobucket.com/albums/l615/Decrosion/grassyedit.png)
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Ohhh, nice work! Great contrast! You managed to make a pretty good grass tile too!
Reminds me that my stone blocks might be a bit too even and clean.
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Thanks yeah, my fave bit is the little highlights on the windows I've never tried that before :-D
I was a bit rushed before, I was going to say I was studying this as a reference for the grass tiles
(http://gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/5-1.gif)
I read this this a while ago http://gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/sywtbapa_de-mystifying_greats_1.php (http://gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/sywtbapa_de-mystifying_greats_1.php) but have never had a chance to have a go.
Obviously the original is much better but practice makes better.
Inspiring stuff really, the beach tiles there are insanely good.
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I'm sorry but you're wrong :P
This is a mock-up I made from tiles that I've made my self.
NOTE: If you actually right click the image and select properties it says 24-bit too, so, just saying..
By saying it's from various snes games you're giving me way too much credit :P
Also what's the point of doing that and then asking for criticism?
I'm not sure how to check the palette, though, but this image shouldn't have any extra colors other than the ones painted by hand.
Haha that was a test of integrity. Didn't meant to actually accuse you of stealing... if I did I would have hit the report button instead. ;D Good work... a few twists here and there as you saw in the edit from Decroded and you're in the right direction! :y: About the color problems... Charamaker1999 fixes this issue by selecting "scan colors used" which eliminates all of the extra colors from the image that aren't used... more like color defragmentation / cleanup. :)
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Not quite sure I understand, but oh well :P
Also, I've been thinking about how to approach this issue with contrast.
A high contrast gritty style is not what I'm after, so how do I get a more cute and colorful style while not making it look washed out?
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If you want high contrast and a cute style you need a different approach.
What you have at the moment is a whoooole lot of subtle grainy texture through everything. As soon as you dial up the contrast on that you get TEXTURE OVERLOAD.
The main tool you want to use is simplification. You want to simplify shapes down and work in broad blocks of colour with accented bits of detail. This lets you use all kinds of bright, saturated colour at any level of contrast without introducing graininess.
Here's a quick example:
(http://i188.photobucket.com/albums/z212/gastrop0d/edits/stone_wall_ed1.gif)
It might not be 100% the style you want, or fit with the setting of the tileset (looks more like a dungeon wall to me), but the point is the process. Working with very few colours, building it up in basic blocks of tone, only introducing colours a couple at a time and for very clear roles. At no point do you want to introduce any kind of graininess to it. After the final step in the gif you can add more colours for AA (also to remove the dither-lines), but I probably wouldn't be going much beyond that.
You also might not want to work from dark-to-light. That's just my habit, but working from midtones into dark and light is a good practice. I suppose you could work from light to dark (sort of like drawing with pencils I guess), but that seems more problematic to me.
Also the interior walls of the house would not cast shadows like that, since the sun would not actually shine inside the house (because there would be a roof).
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Wow, you guys are brilliant! I love this forum <3
That style looks really nice!
I think your explanation is pretty spot on too, since every time I tried to increase contrast it becomes very grainy. I actually considered making it more clean after seeing how the wooden floors looked without any grain.
The problem I'm having is that I tend to jump from style to style, I see something and go "oh let's try that!" and then next week it's something else :D
Right now I'm sorta trying to collect it all in my head before I start re-drawing the tiles.
A question, what method do you use for selecting colors in photoshop? I just have the standard color picker, but it can be confusing when shifting hues. Like a darker shade for wood becomes more red, but perhaps I need to shift it much further. I'm kinda bad at exaggerating colors and contrast as you may have noticed :P
edit:
Had a go at making some objects and tiles using a quite colorful palette.
It's really hard with the limited colors and it's also looking quite plain. I assume this kind of style looks best when you see the whole picture. But I had some trouble with the top of the barrel looking quite plain.
Ugh and outlines are looking quite messy in general, bah, need to do this properly when I'm not super tired and can barely see straight :D
(http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/3060/objectstest.png)
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The new stuff looks much more interesting :-D
I actually don't like the colours of the grass in my edit.
Anyway I'm really still learning this but so far all I know how to do is use the HSB side of things in the colour picker:
http://i1126.photobucket.com/albums/l615/Decrosion/colourpicker.png (http://i1126.photobucket.com/albums/l615/Decrosion/colourpicker.png)
You probably know this already but:
Hue is like which colour it is whether it be green, blue or whatever.
Saturation is how much of that colour is used, lower sat leads to grey.
Brightness is how much or how little black is in there.
I do everything like that now.
What about you other guys how do you do it? Probably moslty use other programs.
I could post a step-by-step on how I make the rocks for fun if it helps?
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Decroded, if you don't mind, any help would be welcome :)
btw, Just to show how badly I'm struggling with keeping the same contrast and style:
(http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/2076/mashup02.gif)
Btw, if anyone feel like helping out, post a palette and I'll try to make something out of it, just for practice and getting used to more colorful and stronger contrast.
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your problem seems to be the dither. at your previous trys you don't used it. Because of that it's something completely different now.
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Well, here are the colors you used in that last one-
(http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/6220/palettel.png)
...I think you see the problem. For the style you want, you need bright, vibrant colors and high contrast. I don't mean to be too blunt, but with this last mock up it looks like you were trying to do the exact opposite.
What you had going with the wood in that other post was great. Try applying that to this new mock up.
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Just to clarify, the stuff I'm posting is old stuff from a few weeks back, they were done on different sheets, so I made the mockup to see how poorly they would match each other..
The only new stuff I did was the barrels, boxes and such.
Oh and those sprites are new too..
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So I started working on a new style inspired by EyeCraft's edit.
The contrast is a bit better, but I'm not sure about the palette..
It's a quick and dirty mockup with some tiling issues since I haven't actually made tiles that loop properly for the wall material.
I tried painting a bit of grass in the corner there, mostly just trying out the colors.
(https://www.dropbox.com/s/4zz9ujjzhj5wp57/house_mockup2.png?dl=1)
Edit: Seeing the house against the background like this makes me think the highlights needs to be much stronger..
Or perhaps I'm just too tired to see straight..