Pixelation
Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: Arachne on June 08, 2009, 03:00:21 pm
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I've been trying to make some RPG bases in a realistic style, but I can't seem to get them to look right. Instead, they look stiff and awkward. I tried to move the woman's right leg (our left) more to the center, but I think it'll take more than that to make her look balanced.
(http://www.retinaleclipse.com/basesb.gif)
They're meant to be displayed against darker backgrounds, but I might tone down the AA against the outlines a bit.
(http://www.retinaleclipse.com/wmockup01i.png)
Here's a mockup showing the perspective I'm going for. I plan to redraw Alden's robe, and I have trouble with shoes. Well, feet in general, and especially at this size. :'(
I've written more about the project at TIGSource (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6366.0).
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amazing job man,
but WTH ! too gloomful colors </3
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What kind of perspective is that in the center screen? I'm sorry, but I can't figure it out. The floors look birdseye, the door looks like a full-on side view, and the furniture comes off a bit strange since they have their own separate vanishing points. I LOVE the portrait art though, and the wood floor next to them is even more gorgeous.
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The poses look ok to me, except the left legs.
Edit:
(http://i174.photobucket.com/albums/w104/chris_6713/edit1230.gif)
I think that balanced it out. Changed the left calve and the foot position. The calve was too thick compared to the other one.
Those are some nice icons. Good detail on the window edges. I also like the wood but I think you got a little crazy with the purple / red.
Seems you have a way of slipping in bright contrasting colors everywhere. Its gutsy but in some places I don't think it works well. An example would be on the portraits. The lady's skin looks like a bronze and her hair looks like a bad quality wig.
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I touched up one of your portraits. I didn't want to, but a muse grabbed me and would not let go. One minute I'm sitting here thinking I might practice some dithering (on one of my pieces no less) and then bam! four hours have gone by and I only break loose because I've skipped dinner and I urgently have to use the bathroom. Ugh. And I've touched up one of yours, using Paint, instead of one of mine, using Paint Shop Pro like I normally would.
(http://www.ixdrive.co.uk/img/a19ae9512b1084934aa21489050ae451.png)
Some minor anatomy tweaks. I made the ear larger to fit better with the long face. The eye area (brow, eyeball, cheek) was rather flat looking, so I enhanced up the depth differences. This also meant minor tweaks to the profile on the shadowed side.
I didn't alter the hair or lips, and the eyebrow on our right still needs to be adjusted down a bit. It's a tad distorted.
Oh rats, I just realized this was your avatar too. Um, sorry about that.
Tourist
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What your female figure seems to lack is hip and shoulder rotation. Putting the right leg more in the center kind of requires the hip to raise on the right as well, creating a curve through the spine leaving the shoulders in the opposite angle. Perhaps you know the term 'Contraposto' and that then describes much more to you than my previous explanation, make use of that.
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Perspective is all over the place. The characters are front view except for the feet. The vanishing points in the furniture does not work at all. The cupboard is again front view. The floors look like top view. It's not making any sense.
Can you try to explain the perspective you're going for?
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The poses look ok to me, except the left legs.
Edit:
(http://i174.photobucket.com/albums/w104/chris_6713/edit1230.gif)
I think that balanced it out. Changed the left calve and the foot position. The calve was too thick compared to the other one.
Those are some nice icons. Good detail on the window edges. I also like the wood but I think you got a little crazy with the purple / red.
Seems you have a way of slipping in bright contrasting colors everywhere. Its gutsy but in some places I don't think it works well. An example would be on the portraits. The lady's skin looks like a bronze and her hair looks like a bad quality wig.
Yeah, that looks better. I'm not sure I like using straight lines for the legs, but at this size I couldn't get curves to look very good, either. :(
I spent the first couple of months working on this with broken monitors, so the palette has been through a lot. Initially, I tried to mix the colors up a bit for variation, but it looked better on a low-contrast display.
amazing job man,
but WTH ! too gloomful colors </3
The background was originally a neutral gray, but the second monitor I used shifted everything towards blue. I liked the colder look, so I kept it. I thought it fit the world I was designing, since it's not supposed to be a happy place.
(http://www.ixdrive.co.uk/img/a19ae9512b1084934aa21489050ae451.png)
Some minor anatomy tweaks. I made the ear larger to fit better with the long face. The eye area (brow, eyeball, cheek) was rather flat looking, so I enhanced up the depth differences. This also meant minor tweaks to the profile on the shadowed side.
I didn't alter the hair or lips, and the eyebrow on our right still needs to be adjusted down a bit. It's a tad distorted.
I wanted to avoid the application of dithering to the skin, since I think the texture ends up being too grainy with this palette. Also, notice the banding effect you get by placing the brightest colors in two checkerboard patterns together. It'll look better if you put the darkest pixels in one pattern next to the brightest pixels in the other.
What your female figure seems to lack is hip and shoulder rotation. Putting the right leg more in the center kind of requires the hip to raise on the right as well, creating a curve through the spine leaving the shoulders in the opposite angle. Perhaps you know the term 'Contraposto' and that then describes much more to you than my previous explanation, make use of that.
Oh, I hadn't thought about that. Thanks, I'll give it a try. :)
Perspective is all over the place. The characters are front view except for the feet. The vanishing points in the furniture does not work at all. The cupboard is again front view. The floors look like top view. It's not making any sense.
Can you try to explain the perspective you're going for?
Maybe perspective wasn't the right word for it. :lol: I came up with a bunch of restrictions to make the project easier for me to finish. There would be grid-based movement, no animated sprites, only one sprite per tile, no separate tiles for doors or walls, etc. I guess a completely top-down perspective would have made more sense, but I was worried that it would make things less recognizable. I also thought a complete lack of perspective would have made it look flat, and I thought trying something new would be a fun experiment. It has grown on me, maybe because I've been working on it for so long, but I can see how the effect can be a bit jarring. It wouldn't be the first game to strangely mix perspectives, though, so I'm not sure what the difference is between what works and what doesn't.
(http://www.retinaleclipse.com/wmockup01jb.png)
I desaturated some of the colors a little, gave Winter a longer ear and more color, changed the eyes, jaw and nose. Still not happy with it, but she looks a bit more human now. I'll work on Alden's portrait later.
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Marvellous and strange skin tones there. Made me think of the Drow race from D&D.
Agreed regarding keeping dithering away from the skin - smoother looks best.
Given that the woman seems to be leaning slightly on 'our' left leg, I don't get why the knee on our right is slightly lower. Perhaps that's what is throwing it off, especially as the legs of the male have the knee perspective done better. Likewise with the foot on our right - the man has it retreated so he looks okay, while the woman doesn't.
AFAIK it is only the legs which are throwing off the poses.
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Marvellous and strange skin tones there. Made me think of the Drow race from D&D.
Agreed regarding keeping dithering away from the skin - smoother looks best.
Given that the woman seems to be leaning slightly on 'our' left leg, I don't get why the knee on our right is slightly lower. Perhaps that's what is throwing it off, especially as the legs of the male have the knee perspective done better. Likewise with the foot on our right - the man has it retreated so he looks okay, while the woman doesn't.
AFAIK it is only the legs which are throwing off the poses.
If you will notice her hips, her left hip is lower then her right hip. That means she cannot be leaning on her right leg. To me it looks "passable", at least with the edit I did. Not perfect, but passable.
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I don't know. You can make any perspective work, but not this mixed batch. It just lacks cohesion and confuses the viewer. The classic 45° down orthogonal perspective would work best here.
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If you will notice her hips, her left hip is lower then her right hip. That means she cannot be leaning on her right leg. To me it looks "passable", at least with the edit I did. Not perfect, but passable.
I'll agree your edit seems an improvement. :)
The closest I can find by a quick google image search is this - see far left. It looks like the same pose, but looks to me like she leans on the right leg, with the other for balance. Her knees stay at the same level, though the hip on her extended left leg has sunken.
(http://www.fineart.sk/photos/anything_3d/003.JPG)
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I think it is a wrong idea that topdown games have to use a constant perspective, it's normal to want to show the front of characters (to give a clear silhouette, characterization, whatever) against the floors and walls from above (to keep the grid clear) - and for other objects, it makes sense to use whichever view best shows its utility. It doesn't make sense if you try to view the whole thing as a 3d space - this is a somewhat symbolic method. But it's a useful abstraction, is what I mean.
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Actually what I'd suggest is moving MORE towards symbolism. Right now the only element that is breaking symbolic cohesion is the wall-door tiles. Make the wall tile as big as the other element tiles, and the door be a front view symbolic tile too, either closed or opened. Think *more* roguelike, not less! If you fix the door and the wall I guarantee the mockup will immediately parse better! :crazy:
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Yeah, I can relate to that. That was kinda my point too. Whatever you do, go all the way. It's the hybrid that doesn't seem to work well.
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Thanks for the tips on the dithering.
Another option for the perspective is an single point perspective focused on the middle of each room or hallway. It only works if you've got discrete areas and if the hallways don't wrap around a lot. This was used in the boardgame Warhammer Quest.
It doesn't solve the problem of what to do for the characters (the boardgame had miniatures),
Here's an example (not my art, and not pixel art, but you can get the idea).
http://www.wqchronicles.com/boards/lab.jpg (http://www.wqchronicles.com/boards/lab.jpg)
Just another option,
Tourist
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(http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/7138/79459233.png)
(http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/6482/20271647.png)
why does the door's perspective look different from everything else?
... but I don't think I did it right either. xD
EDIT:
(http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/6533/28055357.png)
If you're going to give the guy a pen0r, why not give him nipples? :huh: If we're going for anatomical correctness here, I see nothing wrong with adding them. And if simply because no one will see the nipples, and therefore that was why you omitted them... well, I'm pretty sure they're not going to see the pen0r either. :-* I also made the woman's nipples shinier because... well. I'm not sure. -subconscious perversion?- ^-^
I fiddled with the woman's leg too, no worries. :)
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something about the way that the dresser/cabinet and table related to eachother bothered me from the first time I saw this. I couldnt quite put my finger on it, so I pulled it into the workshop to try and tink around and see what was up. and it hit me after a while;
You have no walls. Sure, the outline of the ceiling limits are there, but you have no visible, depth-creating walls. so, to start off, I added a wall relative to the dresser, seeing as one would usually place it there.
(http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/4391/arachne.png)
it looked better with the dresser, but the table looked even worse. because from that angle, the table would be jutting through the wall. so with some work, pulling the table forward made them both look like they were from the same place/dimension. Not only that, but when the table and dresser showed depth, it also helped the characters to have a feeling of existance rather than placement. Another thing to help that out would be shadows, to make things seem like they are ALL being hit by light universally. The table is demonstration. While you say you want everything to be gridbased, it wouldnt hurt the layout to have the grid be only about half of the characters height. I do think that the only way this could work would be if you took the Legend of Zelda like route, making the walls all central based and the objects topdown-ish. Hope this helps a bit :) I always love to see your work.
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A lot of people hate it, But it seems like if you went with the sort of perspective that was used with the old AD&D Pool of Radiance gold box game you'd have something pretty stunning on your hands;
(http://lh5.ggpht.com/_AcOX2WusIEw/SfGxLHIL1iI/AAAAAAAAAYQ/gksmIFSrh3c/s512/6.png)
It's a bad example but it's the best one i could find. I don't know if you've got enough room on your view screen there to accomodate it, but i think it could work pretty well.
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I think if you still want to create a sense of real space go with miscdudes suggestion.
Personally, I quite enjoy that youre challenging the base assupmtions of 2D games to cater to your own personal needs, and I would prefer it if you established more of a symbol space
Dont make the texture of each space something real like floor or wall, make it something more related to ambience...make a small painting that comunicates an ambience of "house" or of "city"......something that says this is not actual space but symbol space...if you give me a floor I will think about the things that are grounded on it...instead I think you should use what usually is the furthest layer in a sidescroller...horizons, far away landscapes so that no expectation of grounded material is made...in fact I would have them remain completely still and only communicate movement trough the movement of the props or the npcs relative to the player (if needed even do it by overlaying a white grid of some sort...but dont scroll the thing)...that would effectively tell me this is a sort of mindscape.
Referencetuff like Ace Attorney, or the space in a random triggered RPG fight....real time online strategy games(those in which in game time synchronizes with real life time) cardgame videogames, hell even Inventories of high budget games.....basically any visualization in which spaces arent meant to be seen as 1:1 to reality... basically any setting where the visuals are only allegoric, not meant to be an actual in game reality.
and cheers on challenging base assumptions...I cant help but kick myself about not being bold and doing something like this.
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Agreeing with conceit and helm here, I believe that having the door being a tile and the walls being a tile thick would improve this. The pixel technique is working just fine. Even if I wanted to elaborate on that, conceit just elaborated for about for 3 people ;]
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(http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/4391/arachne.png)
That does look better. I want to stick with the grid I have now for the sake of simplicity, but I'll think about adding some shadows.
(http://www.retinaleclipse.com/wmockup01kb.png)
Here are the wall and door tiles so far.
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ive got to say that with the door like that, it seems as if the grid all comes together. Now, you dont have a 3d wall with a non 3d setup. Much better :]