Pixelation

Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: o_8 on June 26, 2007, 02:03:19 pm

Title: new Skullgirls sprite style: Filia idle stance
Post by: o_8 on June 26, 2007, 02:03:19 pm
Hello all,

My name is Alex Ahad / o_8 - I actually signed up to this forum a while ago, but haven't gotten around to doing much pixel art due to school.

Some friends and I are working on creating a fighting game called "Skullgirls" http://www.skullgirls.com
Actually pkmays made some very awesome fan sprites which I enjoyed seeing greatly. Talking to him is what eventually led me to this forum.

It was also his fan sprites that had me seriously reconsider increasing the size and detail of the game's sprites.

Here is an example of what it would be more like now:

(http://www.skullgirls.com/documents/Characters/Filia/filia_idle_070623.gif)
(note: I used Filia's 2P colors here because its easier for me to work with than when her hair and skirt are close to the same color as is in her 1P)

You might notice a considerable amount of wobbliness...I wanted that sort of animated traceback look- but I think at the size of pixels, what might have seemed okay in a normal hand drawn image ends up looking kinda funky in pixel form? However, if this seems okay, then I'd be fine with that. I do want that sort of hand drawn feel in there as much as possible
The rendering style, I allowed some elements of black in the shading. I guess this uses more black than most sprites would normally?

Oh on the topic of colors.. I don't know how to ask this exactly because I'm not too good with proper terms.. but basically I used Photoshop to make this file... and I guess my index pallette or whatnot is kinda sloppy and a mess. I think for how our programmers are planning it, I'd need to have the transparent color at the first spot in the pallette. However, its somewhere random in the middle of it... generally I was curious if there is a way (in any program) to organize a pallette without like changing the color? I dunno if that makes sense.. hopefully it kind of did ;

Another reason I post this is because I'd like to inquire if anyone would like to help in the future in the creation of the sprites for the game? It'd be like.. totally voluntary non-pay stuff... since we are extremely limited in any sort of money. Its mostly a for-fun kind of thing. Great for portfolio I'd imagine, particularly if we could make a completed version of the game.

And on that note, I'd also like to ask if anyone has seen pkmays around lately? I haven't heard from the guy in ages. As far as I can tell he just disappeared. I'd like to talk to him again if possible, if anyone here knows anything about it owo

Thanks guys, I hope to hear from you soon T^T/
Title: Re: new Skullgirls sprite style: Filia idle stance
Post by: EyeCraft on June 26, 2007, 03:30:14 pm
Oh wow, that is a big sprite  :blind:. The animation is very impressive, and though you say you're aiming for a hand-drawn look to things, I think you need to rope in that wonkiness a little bit. Area's in need of particular attention are the teeth on the top of her head, her right arm, and the shading on her shoes (wobbles a fair bit). The wonkiness I think is distracting and takes away from the overall quality of the sprite.

I don't know how rough this piece is exactly, but I can make out a fair few jagged lines throughout the piece; introducing some AA throughout would greatly help smoothen things out.

In regards to the palette issue, I have to deal with the same thing with my game, and I know how irritating it is. I made a special "palette" bitmap, and swapped its colours appropriately [manually] by using replace colour and such to order the entries how I wanted them, then I exported that palette file. Then every image that I want to use the palette, I copy that palette bitmap to make a new file, and paste in the image I want into that new file, which causes the colours of the pasted image to map to the palette of the palette bitmap as best they can. It's a real pain, I'd actually like to know myself how this process can be sped up.

Oh and by the way, I'm pretty sure it's preferred around here that you give your sprites transparency when posting them. And finally, I love Skull Girls  ;D
Title: Re: new Skullgirls sprite style: Filia idle stance
Post by: ptoing on June 26, 2007, 03:38:51 pm
What he said. You have massive inconsistencies in your volumes, and keeping volumes consistent is one of the most important things in animation (if not THE most important one). Lots of stuff shrinks and grows and wobbles. The lower part of her shirt, the pockets on her chest, and her thumb on the hand on the right is doing a really odd sinewave thing. If you iron all those inconsistencies out it would look much much better.
Title: Re: new Skullgirls sprite style: Filia idle stance
Post by: Kennethfejer on June 26, 2007, 03:54:19 pm
making sprites this huge is a bad idea in my book, not only will they take you ages to finish, but they also require you to be much more precise with the animation. 
(http://www.racketboy.com/images/ryu-sprites-large.jpg)
check it out, she's the same size as the guilty gear sprite, i would shrink her down to SF3 size, that way it'll be a more manageable project.

love the character designs and art on the website  btw.
the project looks really cool.
Title: Re: new Skullgirls sprite style: Filia idle stance
Post by: Agent green on June 26, 2007, 04:07:06 pm
Her legs are like sticks  :mean: quite strange
Title: Re: new Skullgirls sprite style: Filia idle stance
Post by: o_8 on June 27, 2007, 10:17:38 am
Hmm this is very good feedback. Kennethfejer, I agree with you that a smaller size would be easier to animate and faster to make. I guess I really wanted something close to Guilty Gear size- something fairly detailed if possible. But I guess approaching it like how I was is producing rather bad results. However, before I ditch this sprite and start over, I might try to see if I could just have elements just copied and pasted from one frame into another, hopefully to reduce the wobbly parts that you guys have mentioned.

Eyecraft- is it possible to use AA (anti aliasing?) if being in 256 colors is a factor that must be considered?

Another possibility I'm toying with is the possiblity of no shading and having flat colors - as the hit effects and backgrounds will probably have stark shadows and be of bold shapes and colors- somewhat like a comic book - another being using only black or some single dark color across all the colors of the sprite for the shaded areas
I'll try those out if fixing the large sprite doesnt work

Agent Green: Yea I guess its strange. That's just how I draw her though- its on purpose. I understand that a lot of people hate it. Oh well- it was my decision.

By the way, has anyone heard from pkmays lately?
Title: Re: new Skullgirls sprite style: Filia idle stance
Post by: ptoing on June 27, 2007, 10:29:28 am
do you mean 256 colours at the same time on screen? If you do it smart it should be no problem. like have 16-24 colours per sprite and aa a bit. but really at that size and for a game like that i would not aa. Just get stuff done. I would do it GG-ish. Flatshaded, 2 shades per material most of the time and no aa at all, plus coloured outlines. Wouold work rather well with your stuff I think.

About Pkmays, I have not seen him online for ages on MSN.
Title: Re: new Skullgirls sprite style: Filia idle stance
Post by: Helm on June 27, 2007, 11:19:55 am
Quote
Another possibility I'm toying with is the possiblity of no shading and having flat colors - as the hit effects and backgrounds will probably have stark shadows and be of bold shapes and colors- somewhat like a comic book - another being using only black or some single dark color across all the colors of the sprite for the shaded areas
I'll try those out if fixing the large sprite doesnt work

Such an aesthetic choice would certainly speed-up art production and result in a pleasingly different game. I urge you consider vectors in such a case.

PKmays disappeared, yes.
Title: Re: new Skullgirls sprite style: Filia idle stance
Post by: Ai on June 27, 2007, 02:46:25 pm
Oh on the topic of colors.. I don't know how to ask this exactly because I'm not too good with proper terms.. but basically I used Photoshop to make this file... and I guess my index pallette or whatnot is kinda sloppy and a mess. I think for how our programmers are planning it, I'd need to have the transparent color at the first spot in the pallette. However, its somewhere random in the middle of it... generally I was curious if there is a way (in any program) to organize a pallette without like changing the color? I dunno if that makes sense.. hopefully it kind of did ;
That's a fairly trivial operation, and recent 2.3.x releases of GIMP (www.gimp.org) provide a 'colormap rearrange' plugin (accessible by rightclicking in the palette dialog) that allows you to do this kind of thing with a dialog where you drag + drop colors to achieve the desired ordering.  Really, if you want to just swap the mask color to the start of the palette, then I think you should ask your programmers to code something to do just that. But it looks to me (if you plan on doing palette-swaps to derive 2P sprites from 1P sprite data) that you might benefit from arranging the entire palette in some fixed order -- it would make the creation of alternate palettes easier.
Title: Re: new Skullgirls sprite style: Filia idle stance
Post by: Schu on June 28, 2007, 04:34:46 pm
You don't really need a new program, you can do it in photoshop when you index your graphic. Click on CUSTOM and then pick your colours from your graphic in the order you want it. I know it seems tedious, but I personally like it more than having the program order for me (unless there's more than 16 colours). It also helps if you put little boxes of your colours in the corner of your graphic to pick them easily, then just remove them later.

There's also promotion if you have access to it.
Title: Re: new Skullgirls sprite style: Filia idle stance
Post by: o_8 on July 05, 2007, 06:23:03 am
Well, I'm going to try to animate this sprite hopefully tonight- but I've basically redone it. Still looks similar to the first one since I'm using the same colors (though less of them) and its slightly smaller- considering wether or not to keep the black lines- I did want a heavy use of black particularly in the shading, but maybe its not necesarry in the lines

Another thing about this is in the file I have for it, the character is in many pieces now, and I'll be sliding them around per frame, as opposed to redrawing- so hopefully that will both speed things up and keep it more stable looking

here's the drawing I used as the base:
(http://www.skullgirls.com/documents/Characters/Filia/filia_idle_refix_wip_pencil.jpg)

here's the sprite so far- not animated yet- I'll add the animated version here as soon as I get it done
(http://www.skullgirls.com/documents/Characters/Filia/filia_idle_refix_wip.gif)

I also tried fixing the older one and it was okay but still seemed too wobbly yea