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Messages - chriskot
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51
Pixel Art / Re: Water-mill [WIP]
« on: July 05, 2008, 06:45:49 am »
I think that this is one of my favourite pieces on Pixelation at the moment. It reminds me of Harvest Moon, but better. Really nice.

Although I like the way that things stand out in the colour edit, I still prefer the colours in the original because they seem to have a much "sunnier" look to them, which I think is important here. Perhaps there is a happy medium between the two?

Quote
Saimo, you could try editing it yourself and posting it instead of continually criticizing it.

No, he can continually criticize it to his heart's content. This is what this board is here for. If an edit is possible great, but words will do fine. This isn't a 'omg stfu unless you can do better yourself' kind of place, so check that attitude.
Check your own attitude, drama-monger. You think you're so tough blowing things out of proportion and looking for any reason to start a fight on the Internet. If you're life is so hard you should go to counseling rather than trying to give it.
Helm is right. Also, you're coming across as hypocritical. I smell some bad karma coming...

52
Those Mario pictures are awesome. Mario and Luigi are my favourite, followed by the piranha plant and the thwomp.


I decided to try doing some larger pixelwork, since it's not really something I've done before. The first one's an alien that popped into my head somewhere between playing the two best shooters ever, Metroid Prime and Half-Life 2. The second one's a nest of some sort I guess (I didn't really have anything in mind when I started). The third one was done at the request of my 9-year-old brother.

53
Pixel Art / Re: Giygas (Giegue), Ninten, and other nes chars (WIP)
« on: July 04, 2008, 08:21:12 pm »
These are pretty good. Mother/Earthbound never gets as much credit as it deserves.


I never interpreted the things on the sides of Giegue's pod that way, but I like your way because it reminds me of the machine holding Giygas back at the end of Earthbound.


A couple of quick crits, because that's what you're asking for:

-Currently, these sprites have the wrong colours and way too much detail to look like an NES piece. Usually this wouldn't be a criticism, but you said that you were aiming for an NES look and this appears more GBA-like to me.

-The walk animation is good, but in the last frame his left leg goes in front of his right one, making it look like he is walking slightly downwards when the rest of the animation looks like he is walking straight east.

54
Pixel Art / Re: Rainbow World entrance
« on: July 04, 2008, 01:06:48 am »
The metal tiles are perfectly square, as though they are being seen from a top-down perspective, while everything else is seen from a more slanted view. I think that you should begin by fixing this.

There is no consistency between the shading and outlines between the different parts of this image. This should be one of the first things that you fix because the more detail you put into something, the harder it is to change its basic style. I'm going to guess from the image and the comments that you have a habit of learning how do draw different things from different sources and then emulating their styles on those objects. Learning from example is good, but you have to put your own twist on it and form your own style to tie it all together. Don't just learn how to draw a particular object, learn why the artists have drawn them that way and try to apply these rules to other things.

The branches on the tree in the foreground look slippery, more like squid tentacles, due to the smoothness and the way that you've highlighted them.

I really like the flowers on the other tree, but while you've outlined the flowers themselves, the internal features such as the stamen are almost unreadable because they are not outlined.

I sort of like the gradients and think that they are appropriate in this case, but you should be prepared to receive a few negative comments on them since they don't fall within the boundaries of traditional pixel art. The same goes for anything with transparency, such as the beams of light under those glass platforms leading up to the edge.

55
Pixel Art / Re: Mini Mario...REALLY mini...
« on: July 01, 2008, 09:41:09 pm »
I think that he could use some dark pixels behind his head for his signature mullet.

56
Pixel Art / Re: straight smiles : D
« on: July 01, 2008, 05:57:29 pm »
Currently it reminds me of the characters from Alien Hominid, albiet with more shading.

The clothing looks leathery to me currently, but if you were aiming for a fabric look you should ditch the specultar highlights. Fabric has almost no specular highlight whatsoever.

57
General Discussion / Re: Megaman 9 with 8-bit graphics
« on: June 26, 2008, 10:54:56 pm »
I really like the idea actually, as long as it isn't priced much higher than the NES games on the virtual console ($4-5). It's like releasing one of the Megaman games on the VC, but it's new. The NES Megaman games were the best ones anyway.

58
General Discussion / Re: Perception of color of skin and hair
« on: June 24, 2008, 09:56:03 pm »
Here's my take on it:

In my search for a good color palette, I decided to inspect the colors of the hair and skin in photographs of me an my wife. I was quite surprised by the results, so I'd like to her your ideas on this. (Perhaps, to clarify I should add that I am a very pale skinned European and my wife is Asian.) 
First of all, even though I know next to nothing about photography, I think that you could get a slightly better idea of the colour of something by just looking at the thing/person itself. Every extra step in the middle is one potential way of warping the results.

  • The half tone of my skin is a desaturated and grayish hue of red orange (HSV around: 20 40 80) . When looking at the photograph, I would say my skin is pinkish or whiteish, but that shows that the camera reacts differently than the mind.
This follows what I said above. I'm a Canadian of German and Estonian decent, and looking at my hand right now, the colours of my skin gradient seem to go from a pale yellow, to pink, to brown, to grey. Naturally, any non-white light (such as the light radiating from my computer screen), or light reflected off of colour objects is probably messing with these results. In fact, white light even distorts things. Human skin is slightly translucent, which is why you can see blue veins through your skin and why thin parts of the anatomy (e.g.-fingers), may appear red around the edges when lit brightly from behind. Describing this using a more scientific approach, the phenomenon is called subsurface scattering. The photons travel into your fingers, bounce around a bit, and come back out. Along the way, the frequency of the wave (colour) is being altered by the materials that it bounces off of.

  • In normal light circumstances, shadows on the skin have a more orange/yellowish hue (around 25). This is different form what I read  before.
The sun is a yellow star, and many lightbulbs give off a slightly yellowish glow. Thus, it follows that everything would be yellower under regular conditions than under pure white light. What you are observing is not the actual colour of your skin, but the colour which it usually appears to be. I would assume that they wouldn't be too different, but the natural light colours would probably be better for a sprite in a realistic world, while the actual colours would be better for characters in a varied and colourful world because they are more average. Just a guess. Anybody else know something about this?

  • The human brain seems to use some kind of extreme "jpeg" style compressing when seeing, and the colors of reality into a kind of symbolic colors that are different from reality. I think the brain especially brightens colors. Also, it seems that contrasts are highly simplified in our brain.  Hue also seems to be somewhat unreliable, and tied to prejudices in the brain.
The brain has to process a lot of visual information very quickly, so it must compress all of that information somehow. I think that the brain uses colours to identify things, so it naturally picks a colour that seems rather unique to a certain material. I'm guessing that this is usually a more saturated average of all of the colours a substance reflects. As far as the brightening goes, the brain could just be imagining them in a brighter light. I don't really know. This whole paragraph is complete speculation on my part.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject. Hope most of it makes sense. I find it interesting that the colour someone sees is subjective anyway. Some people are colourblind, a rare few see things tetrachromatically, and everyone else still has a slight genetic variation in the number of rods and cones they possess.

59
General Discussion / Re: Pixelation has been DUGG!
« on: June 23, 2008, 10:12:38 pm »
I mean if you *really* feel the need to keep using a program that's restricting you for no good reason, be my guest. just let me know how much fun you're having with your three levels of undo and no layering ability. and that god awful curved line tool.

I'm still working on getting a good enough grasp with GraphicsGale that I can can switch over completely, but for now I still mainly use Paint. I've never actually tried to use the curved line tool for anything because it is crap. Even less useful than the spraypaint tool. Faking "Layers" is pretty bad in Paint because you have to copy and paste things all over the place. The only thing that I would like to mention though is that I recently started using Vista and the new version of Paint has many more levels of undo than the three that the previous versions had. I'm not mentioning it as a defense, but more like a clarification, since a few people have tried to use it as argument fuel already.

Anyway, that's all. I don't want to revive this thread and bring it back into full hate mode. There are enough Paint-bashing discussions on Pixelation already. I think everyone gets it by now.

60
Pixel Art / Re: Zufub PIXart
« on: June 22, 2008, 07:32:29 pm »
first thing that came to mind was an abstract cigarette, but perhaps thats just my cravings...

Nope. That's what I saw too, and I've never smoked a day in my life.

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