Pixelation

Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: micah_denn on March 03, 2016, 03:06:03 pm

Title: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: micah_denn on March 03, 2016, 03:06:03 pm
Hi guys!  :P

This is my first post. Looks like there's a nice community here.

I'm a fairly experienced digital artist (mostly 3D) but completely new to pixel art. I'd appreciate any comments/critique on this little piece I've been working on.

I'm mainly looking for advice on colour/shading.

(http://micahdenn.com/projects/rey/rey.png)

 :y: If you recognise who it is  ;D
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: dpixel on March 03, 2016, 04:43:52 pm
Welcome  ;D

Pixel art usually looks better with higher contrast.  It helps define things better too. 
You had 28 colors and reduced it to 11 with this quick edit:
(http://i.imgur.com/eDhCBnq.png)

I think she's female?

Also we have a click to zoom feature here.  No need to post images enlarged.
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: Ambivorous on March 03, 2016, 07:28:04 pm
Copy-paste what dpixel said.

(http://i.imgur.com/Efp1F0z.png)

Look how happy that sun is.
Don't be afraid to have massive areas of one colour.
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: Atnas on March 03, 2016, 08:29:05 pm
Pixel art usually looks better with higher contrast.  It helps define things better too.
(http://i.imgur.com/eDhCBnq.png)
I don't agree with that color edit, low contrast can look good, as it does here. And perceptually near-black tones are something people should be more careful about using. And you lost the cute doll-like look by changing the eyes.

the levels: (http://i.imgur.com/aPngnBp.png)
"contrast" spreads the tones out. Can make something feel flat even, because of evenly distributed values.



My first observation is you have a lighter shade completely hugging the borders of things. Think about that. If this was a painting, would that be the case? Unless strongly backlit, light usually wraps around a form, you could use that lighter tone to indicate the cloth's surface rather than having it completely flat, which now looks completely facing the camera, completely flat, and with beveled edges.

Secondary to that, it also creates banding along the edges of everything you are "highlighting". (For more information, ctrl+f the word "banding") (http://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=19594.0)



I just got ninja'd.. so:

(http://i.imgur.com/Efp1F0z.png)
This is a nice edit. You get a great impression she's in a hot and harshly lit environment, parts of her are fully occluded by shadow, but she doesnt look like a secluded still life or model with a light source floating in a 3d editor, she retains the impression she is still in an environment because the palette is unified without the near black tones creating 'holes' or punching through the image. This is because the ramp is less contrasted, with tones clumping towards the mid-dark end, rather than being evenly spread out.

The levels: (http://i.imgur.com/BQo9Yhf.png)
Here we see a representation of the impression we first got, nice subtle shades going from shadow to midtone establishing the character, and then the light from the sun illuminating at the highest end of the spectrum. The contrast here is not forced, but natural, and created from the light source, rather than an arbitrary algorithm that forcefully seperates tones.

(these levels were done after isolating only the sprite onto a transparent background.
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: dpixel on March 03, 2016, 09:55:56 pm
Pixel art usually looks better with higher contrast.  It helps define things better too.
(http://i.imgur.com/eDhCBnq.png)
I don't agree with that color edit, low contrast can look good, as it does here. And perceptually near-black tones are something people should be more careful about using. And you lost the cute doll-like look by changing the eyes.


I'll agree I'm not the best at colors, but to my eye, this needed more pop (especially the skin tones).  After a color reduction, I tried to sort out the camo colors to sort of match the new skin tones.  And maybe the op did not want a cute doll-like look.  Keeping in mind I don't know of the character.  One dot eyes bother me.   ::)  The eye edit kind of goes along with the shoe edit, which seemed very small.
Yeah, the darks look a bit too dark.  I see it now.

the levels: (http://i.imgur.com/aPngnBp.png)
"contrast" spreads the tones out. Can make something feel flat even, because of evenly distributed values.

This is interesting.  I've never heard of this.  I know just an outline alone does nothing for depth. 
I suppose it's how higher contrast is used.
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: Roach on March 03, 2016, 10:29:15 pm
Was my post deleted? That's weird. I'll re post it. Nice Rey sprite.     :y:
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: Atnas on March 03, 2016, 10:43:48 pm
Was my post deleted? That's weird. I'll re post it. Nice Rey sprite.     :y:

Yes. I deleted it. One liners are not tolerated and they never have been. If you're going to say something in the critique board, try to add something helpful. You can say it's a nice sprite, but surely you can help him too? This isn't a gallery. The line gets blurred sometimes when people post too many things to critique at once, and it's human nature to be overwhelmed and just compliment the effort, but for threads asking for focused critique, this is just clutter.



@dpixel: In my rush, I left out that I thought your edit was helpful in the drawing aspect, such as adding dimension to the cloth. It's just the values that I felt were taken in the wrong direction. Maybe it's not the one dot eyes, but that it changed the expression from cute to determined.

My theory why these eyes bother some people is because it's like a declaration: "hey this is pixel art and this is therefore a caricature, it's a doll!" and that's pretty common. I suppose its easy to dislike this approach if you feel differently about pixel art, that its not just a trendy thing to dabble in.

Edit:
Quote from: dpixel
This is interesting.  I've never heard of this.  I know just an outline alone does nothing for depth. 
I suppose it's how higher contrast is used.
Yeah, if you just adjust contrast on the whole image, it flattens it in my opinion. From my experience, I find there is both image-wide contrast which is the lens you view it from, the mood/atmosphere, and object specific contrast, for things that focus on being true to a lightsource. Often people do a general contrast bump and they destroy nuance. You really shouldn't be doing that unless you are correcting for calibration issues, or in the all too common occurrence of working too zoomed in and not seeing the values as they are at their regular resolution where they are all vying for screenspace. So, a small adjustment is usually necessary in pixel art if you're creating your palette from scratch. But using it to correct for lighting can be troublesome, and you're better off just adjusting the light and dark areas of a rendered object separately to achieve desirable contrast.
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: micah_denn on March 03, 2016, 11:18:33 pm
Wow, thanks everyone for all the help!

@dpixel your edit has really helped me a lot to understand some of the things I've been doing wrong.

I probably should have mentioned that this is intended to be viewed quite large (around 500%). The simple eyes and lack of facial features is an intentional stylistic choice.

I think it does benefit from pushing the contrast a bit more but I might not go as extreme as dpixel did. I will play with the values and post another update tomorrow.

@Atnas the comment from Roach was constructive as I did ask if the character was recognisable in my post, which he was confirming   ;D
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: dpixel on March 04, 2016, 01:28:34 am
Yeah, if you just adjust contrast on the whole image, it flattens it in my opinion. From my experience, I find there is both image-wide contrast which is the lens you view it from, the mood/atmosphere, and object specific contrast, for things that focus on being true to a lightsource. Often people do a general contrast bump and they destroy nuance. You really shouldn't be doing that unless you are correcting for calibration issues, or in the all too common occurrence of working too zoomed in and not seeing the values as they are at their regular resolution where they are all vying for screenspace. So, a small adjustment is usually necessary in pixel art if you're creating your palette from scratch. But using it to correct for lighting can be troublesome, and you're better off just adjusting the light and dark areas of a rendered object separately to achieve desirable contrast.

I see what you mean by adjusting the contrast on the whole image.  I agree with that.  I can't imagine that would ever look right.  I suppose my edit might look a little like that on further inspection.  I used graphicsgale to reduce colors to 16 and combined some similar ones, and adjusted individual colors from there. 

The lighting could be more dramatic with less contrast as well, such as in the edit by Ambivorous, which is nice.

And working too zoomed in on my preview image does throw things off and has been something I've been aware of for only a few months now.  I saw this mentioned recently and started paying attention to that.  Makes a bigger difference than I thought.

Ahhh.  Rey.  I still haven't seen the movie yet.   :-[
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: micah_denn on March 04, 2016, 02:43:19 pm
(http://micahdenn.com/projects/rey/rey_2.png)

I think this is an improvement but I'm still not quite there with the values. (I'm stuck using an un-calibrated monitor for the moment so I might be miles off)
Is the skin tone okay in this one?
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: Roach on March 04, 2016, 03:40:40 pm
Try not to post upscaled images. Generally best to keep the original size. The website has a zoom tool built into it. Simply click the image. I was going to make an edit on your BB8 but your image was too large for me to handle. The light source seems kind of inaccurate. Like its coming from a 30 degree angle rather than a 45 degree angle.
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: micah_denn on March 04, 2016, 04:52:22 pm
Try not to post upscaled images. Generally best to keep the original size. The website has a zoom tool built into it. Simply click the image. I was going to make an edit on your BB8 but your image was too large for me to handle. The light source seems kind of inaccurate. Like its coming from a 30 degree angle rather than a 45 degree angle.
Okay sorry about that.
Here's the un-scaled version.
(http://micahdenn.com/projects/rey/rey.png)
I also pushed up all the values and which I think is an improvement.
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: Roach on March 04, 2016, 07:04:16 pm
(http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb417/spaghettiman666/Rey%20edit_zpsobn6swab.png)
Thanks for the resize. I was able to edit some points I wanted to put out. Mainly on BB8 regarding your light source.
Light reflects off of the ground. You accomplished this with rey's legs, but it's missing off of BB8 which throws the whole perspective out of order to me. Your sphere looked sort of flat because the shadows were off, and thus the perspective. Rounder objects tend to be the ones that capture ground reflection(whatever it's called) the best. also BB8's head should have a cast shadow over his body, at least according to references I looked at.
Also an Idea would be to go more in depth on your cast shadows. I tried to give you an idea of what I mean, they aren't perfect though.   
My final note I wanted to point out was on rey's cloth. The fold flying in the breeze, didn't really resemble that to me. The reason because it was much to flat and square, which resembles cardboard rather than cloth to me. To fix this, try making the flap thing, less consistent.
Hope this helps.
Title: Re: [CC] Pixel Art Character
Post by: Friend on March 04, 2016, 07:20:49 pm
some thoughts 
(yes the are a million mistakes in my edit, come at me bro)
((btw i'm liking your sprite, but it reads too much like a boy to me.  try to bring out rey's femininity more.)
(((i don't know the character, haven't seen the movie, but she looks pretty girly)))

(http://i.imgur.com/V0NKLB8.png)