Cat Running: (http://www.animatedbuzz.com/gallery/animation/cat-running.gif) | Dog Walking: (http://www.animatedbuzz.com/gallery/animation/dog-walking.gif) Not a cat, but the range of motion is about the same for your animation I believe |
How'd you separate the water from the sky like that?!I'm making these in MSpaint and Graphics Gale, are you asking me how I did it visually or technically? I'm using a drawing program not a code program. :)
While I love shrikes first animated edit, I think the perspective is just a tad off for a platformer. Or maybe it's just me.
Probably cause I think it's some standard and shouldn't be deviated from
I think I veer away from other people's edits because then it wouldn't be my sprite.
but doesn't really want to actually use it.
I think the problem is more of a doesn't know how then doesn't want to use. I'm still generally new to character creation and pixel art in general. Though I know enough to hob slob something together. And from what I've read, there's a certain set of rules that must be followed. Things like all terrain must be 16x16 or 32x32. All characters must fit in certain boundaries or it won't look right. Only 3/4 colors can be used or it won't look right, etc. I don't know what I'm trying to say here. I guess that whenever someone presents something different, or uses strange words that I've never associated with pixel art before. I guess I don't get it or something. Maybe I need to re-look up stuff again and see what I missed. (And throughout all what I looked up. Not once did they mention classical arts or anatomy and other things like that.)
But you have, in my opinion, too few colors. For a polished look, at my skill level, I needed a few more.I hate to disagree, but this is absolutely not true. If you can't polish something with four colors, you're not going to be able to polish it with ten. It might look harsh with just four, but that's not the main point of polish. The way I see it, when you polish something, you just go through your piece and remove any unneeded details or stray pixels to keep the piece clean and readable. Color control is an invaluable skill to learn as a pixel artist (or at least, so I've read), and I think that wouldn't be such a good idea to add extra colors to his piece.
Big, important thing I forgot. drop the outlines. IMHO, it's cluttering it up and hindering your drawing space and drawing the eye too much. So yeah, that's my opinion.I can't help but notice how ironic this statement is; you say the outlines clutter up his piece, but you fail to mention that the stripes you added, while they do add a nice touch, end up cluttering the sprite much more than an outline does, and IMHO push the sprite towards the background. It is good to break away from outlines to improve your ability to make priorities stand out, but when you're making the main character for a game, an outline might be the only thing that can stop your character from blending into the background; there are many ways to get something to stand out, like contrasting hues, simplicity against detail, and stuff like that, but when you've got a lot of things and colors going on in the background, even these can't keep your sprite away from the background.
Wow, thanks! I appreciate the critique, and I hope I didn't mislead xhunterko too much. I guess I made a pretty bad edit. Sorry about that, and thanks Kclic for catching me. I always manage to screw up and edit for someone.But you have, in my opinion, too few colors. For a polished look, at my skill level, I needed a few more.I hate to disagree, but this is absolutely not true. If you can't polish something with four colors, you're not going to be able to polish it with ten. It might look harsh with just four, but that's not the main point of polish. The way I see it, when you polish something, you just go through your piece and remove any unneeded details or stray pixels to keep the piece clean and readable. Color control is an invaluable skill to learn as a pixel artist (or at least, so I've read), and I think that wouldn't be such a good idea to add extra colors to his piece.Big, important thing I forgot. drop the outlines. IMHO, it's cluttering it up and hindering your drawing space and drawing the eye too much. So yeah, that's my opinion.I can't help but notice how ironic this statement is; you say the outlines clutter up his piece, but you fail to mention that the stripes you added, while they do add a nice touch, end up cluttering the sprite much more than an outline does, and IMHO push the sprite towards the background. It is good to break away from outlines to improve your ability to make priorities stand out, but when you're making the main character for a game, an outline might be the only thing that can stop your character from blending into the background; there are many ways to get something to stand out, like contrasting hues, simplicity against detail, and stuff like that, but when you've got a lot of things and colors going on in the background, even these can't keep your sprite away from the background.
As for your update, it's looking a million times better. There are still a few anatomical parts that are off, but shrike caught most of them. One thing nobody has mentioned yet, though, is that your cat's ears don't look connected to its head; one way to fix this would to just get rid of the outline separating the bottoms of its ears and head. The lightest shade needs to be even lighter than it is right now to really make a difference on your sprite, and I don't think that the shading on its head works; a cat's head is a little bit like a ball, and the only time the highlight should hug the edge of a surface is when the light source is behind the object, and, as the rest of your piece suggests, this isn't the case. Pretend the ears cast a little bit if a shadow onto the head, and try to shade the top of its head so that it looks more like a ball.
Another thing I notice with the shading right now is that it's too uniform for something as complex as a cat. Your highlight seems to hug the entire edge of your cat which is not good. Let's take Laser Kitty's back leg for instance; it sticks out past Laser's body, and so the highlight would extend down his leg a little bit. Since Laser's body would be slightly obscured by his(?) leg, the part right by the highlight on his leg would be darker than the surrounding area. This is only one place where the light gets jumbled up, and I'll let you figure out how to do the rest of the shading on him.
If you need more guidance, check these out;
http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm
http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm
I can't help but notice how ironic this statement is; you say the outlines clutter up his piece, but you fail to mention that the stripes you added, while they do add a nice touch, end up cluttering the sprite much more than an outline does, and IMHO push the sprite towards the background. It is good to break away from outlines to improve your ability to make priorities stand out, but when you're making the main character for a game, an outline might be the only thing that can stop your character from blending into the background; there are many ways to get something to stand out, like contrasting hues, simplicity against detail, and stuff like that, but when you've got a lot of things and colors going on in the background, even these can't keep your sprite away from the background.I disagree, if one is skilled enough you can still make the character pop. An outline, I think, although maybe stylistically appealing, is never necessary. In this case, if you want an outline at least make it black or white so it does it's job better; otherwise, in this case, I think having the outline a little bit darker than the body does not work and doesn't give you the most 'bang for your buck'. I guess what I'm trying to say is that, the way he was using outlines was not the most effective, and to build skill getting rid of them might be better. He could have done them better, I could have, actually, but I was doing the edit rather thoughtlessly, so I opted to get rid of them rather than trying to improve them. You are a far more talented pixel artist than me, so what I'm saying isn't totally a tried theory. And don't think I don't appreciate your critique. I'm very happy I got it.
And what Helm said is true (of course, it's Helm)
In any case, I don't think that I'll be posting here again for a good while. At least until things calm down.
Something about the cat seems off-balance...
do you not think your character looks kinda lost over this floor, your floor is too contrasting.
Just look at what happens when you just alter the contrast values less and more. when the characters colour range exeeds the floors darker and lighter tones it stands out much nicer. Looking at the what happens when the floors contrast is way too high gives you an idea that the game would really give you a headache trying to play because it'd be so hard trying to spot the character.
(http://img105.imageshack.us/img105/7265/05ys0.png) <---- (http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/2152/01kw3.png) ----> (http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/7510/05zg6.png)
Hello there!Urgh, no. Chances are there is very little you can do -- laptop screens have notoriously poor color reproduction. :( Basically the only thing you can do that you haven't already said you did is make sure that the laptop screen is exactly flat-on relative to the angle you typically look at it from.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure I have a monitor that applies to that. See, I'm using a laptop. I don't think I have any settings that control some instances like that. The most I have is color count, screen resolution, and that's it. Oh, I also have a brightness adjust function. It's all the way up as well. I don't know if there's another way to check for laptops. I'll try some looking to see if I can't come up with anything. Do you have any info about calibrating laptops?
(http://www.majhost.com/gallery/rob/new/forestcat.png)
. . .CnC please
"I really dislike the lack of cross-section tiles transitioning":
Wait, wait wha? ??? I'm not sure what you mean by that. Could you be a little more clear?
"Yer trees don't really qualify as trees, they're just wiggly brown oddly hollow pillow-shaded pipes jutting straight up with boughs at random that have an opposite light source for some crazy reason (sun is top right, yet lighting is coming from bottom left? are we in china?)":
Why does it always take someone else to spot pillow shading? :-[ Yes, yes we are in china, cough.
"why not have a trunk tile as a base, maybe some vegetation, an attempt at textured treebark, rather than smooth - refer here. Heard of tile variations before? - I know you've seen them--multiple versions of the same tile that can break up repetitiousness."
Yes I have. However, are you sure that's the correct thread your trying to point to? I'll see what I can do about the shading though. And to think it's spotted just After I finish the newest piece. I'll see what I can do about the clouds. Even though I thought it was earlier agreed that they were generally okay. Got a whisker?
Thanks again.
"You could greatly benefit from studying basic design principles, do not underestimate their importance."That palette is the new palette for the OHRRPGCE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OHRRPGCE). I made it specifically for that purpose, and it performs well as a palette to color-reduce to, for 95% of pictures tested. I concluded this meant it is both a realistic and flexible palette.
-Unfortunately, no one seems to know where these are written down sadly. Or, they are, and no one's telling anybody. Or they're here somewhere and I'm just completely blind and missing them entirely. (And unless I'm seeing things. Your brown tree edit uses nearly the exact same colors that my new brownish background tree does. What's that palette btw?)
"I think you might benefit from drawing a mesh showing the 3d shape of objects before you shade them -- it prevents you from doing impossible shading, more or less."I mean literally drawing a 3d mesh. Imagine that you are a 3d rendering program, and draw the wireframe mesh that makes up that 3d object (roughly. It just needs to capture all major features in 3d space.) Don't pay attention to color, texture, or anything -- you are just drawing lines to define the 3d shape of something. On a separate layer, you can block out the actual object. Once you have that mesh, it's easy to see how a particular part should be lit -- it depends only on the angle between the position of the light and that surface, and the distance between the light and the surface. Some styles even ignore the distance entirely, and still look quite good.
-Thank you for the edit. Your shading's a tad subtle but I think I get what you mean. And by 3d shape does she(?) mean an actual 3d model, or blobbing necessary colors around and adding texture later? (I'm guessing it's the latter.)