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Messages - Cyangmou
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881
Pixel Art / Re: [wip] Bilou in school zone [c+c]
« on: May 11, 2012, 05:18:31 pm »
It seems that those are at least 2 different books, but it's kinda hard to separate them (if they should have different sizes, change the color/details of each book)

I they are the same, make a perspectivical projection to get the proportions right (slym pointed already out that they look awkward).
I choosed your first book, drew the ground view and constructed the other views - really simple to understand by just looking at the picture



882
Pixel Art / Re: Pixel Twilight Sparkle -- Wrong Side of the Hay
« on: May 09, 2012, 09:43:52 pm »
Huuuuuuge improvement since start - the next thing you have to tackle is getting rid of jaggies and improving your AA  :y:




883
Pixel Art / Re: Making our first game. Character Sprite. C+C Please?
« on: March 27, 2012, 10:37:32 pm »
Hello Devin,

Before you think of AA you should general think of your form. At the moment you have pretty much jaggies in your slime and the front looks to squarish. It looks also pretty flat

I don't really know for which perspektive you are going for but I guess it's some 3/4 perspective style. Try to give your charakter volume by better lighting.
Then you should think about your colors - try a Hue-Shift and play more with your contrasts.

Colors are just a tool, use as many as you are comofortable with, but try to use as less as you need. A organized palette is easier to use and to improve than a huge color orchestra.

Forget about Sel-Out, it looks terrible, a clear or lighted outline looks definitely better.

Improve your shading by object studies - shading tutorials won't help you. You have to observe and understand light from nature if you want to understand lighting. Once you understand it you can use it. Look at objects from different angles and try different lighting conditions, there aren't words that will help you, you just have to look - it's that simple. If it Comes to a slime look for something similar - a waterdrop for example - although if you have shading problems with massive objects too, it's a really bad idea to start with complex medias like transparent ones.


I made you a little example:

My lightsource is coming from the right front side.
The object is transparent, this means the ground will shine through the object (dark round circle at the bottom), there is also a highlight (point nearest to the lightsource), there the object is brighter, like massive medias the object itself has also a shadow (dark area right). And there is also reflected light (ligher area between dark boarder and right dark shadow area) here the object gets lighter.


~5minutes if you know what you have to do


884
General Discussion / Re: Dither and Animations
« on: March 24, 2012, 10:10:21 am »
Thanks that all of you took time to help me with my thoughts. Most of the things you are pointing out are the things which I thought the exactly same way about it, and there are also some really interesting thoughts from you.


885
General Discussion / Dither and Animations
« on: March 20, 2012, 11:11:06 am »
Hello pixel fellows,

I came some time ago over the question if it's senseful to connect dither and animations. I am thinking about dither as method to smoothen out gradients while keeping the color amount low and to add a clean looking but raw texture to smaller sprites (stone, rusty metal). Dither can look great if it's done in the right doses because it strengthens the impression of volumes and it's also a easy way to achieve hard and soft edges.

The only thing which is bad about dither is that it works only with bigger clusters. So there is no way to use it for standard e.g. 32x32 animations. But if you have to animate a bigger sprite (64x64+) it can be that there will be enough space for dithering.
This leads me to two solutions:
a) I use more colors - modern hardware don't really has a limit so there will only occur heavy banding problems if I am using too much colors - (this means that I am keeping my color orchestra manageable)
b) I use dither

I heard that dither is in general bad for animations because there will always be some pixel fragments which look odd.

I have an dither example from metal Slug:


(don't mind that it's zoomed in - I was lazy and don't build rips together)

As you can see they used animated ditherpatterns. If you are looking at the elephant's back you'll notice that the dither there isn't moving heavily, it looks more crisp and clean than at the elephant's legs. I think the Dither at the hind leg leads to serious clusterfuck because the basic clusters changing there form heavily and the dither makes this impression even worse.

Because of that I'd say dither works at calm parts of an animation



An example for the layered method would be my seasnake:



The whole sprite uses only layered clusters without dither. The animation stays crisp and clean (at least at the head and the first body segments where I worked more carefully) but in general the form with a layered style looks more flat.


The Questions are now:

1) Dither
1-a) Is Dither from it's technical side a plus for pixel graphics or is one color more better?
1-b) Where does dither general improve a graphic?
1-c) Improves dither the 3D effect (or general form) of a graphic more than more layered clusters?

2) Dither + Animations
2-a) Is it possible to use dither and animations together or is it a NoGo?
2-b) if 3 is possible where are the best places to achieve a better result with dither?

Well, that's all to start with

886
Pixel Art / Re: Small game sprites- no.1: a tree (now animated)!
« on: March 19, 2012, 02:05:52 pm »
I think it won't bother anyone as long as you keep environment perspective on it's own consistent and the charakter perspective as well. From my experience i can say that it starts to look odd if you'll mix up 1/4 1/2 and 3/4 (as you rendered) so that it looks that each thing has it's own perspective. And the angle between the charakters and the environment shouldn't be to big - If you think of Zelda-perspective like backgrounds with sideview sprites the credibility isn't the best as long as you don't use a very low-res and simple style (e.g. 8x8 NES sprites with high symbolic look).
I really like the stuff you have so far, keep on working.

887
Pixel Art / Re: Help with a tree [WIP] [C&C]
« on: March 10, 2012, 11:14:09 pm »
Quote from: Shrub on March 10, 2012, 01:15:11 pm
Pffff, I'm pretty blown away at how you just whipped up a perfect tree like that. Great advice. Truly incredible - I've just spent a long time labouring over my new tree, which is stage III at the moment. It's still poor in comparison to yours, but at least it's a start. Your shading is fantastic.

Well, well, it was more a quickie than a fully finished tree - there are lots of things you could do with my version VIII to make it better especially at the leaf texture:




To your actual problems:



I guess your try is somewhere at my VI or VII

1 - you don't added a cast shadow below your tree crown
2 - the shading at the roots is inconsequent
3 - there is also a reflection from the light which hits the ground on the trunk
4 - now look at all those single pixels in your texture - they cause a grainy impression, however you should think of your forms and your perspective before you are thinking of adding texture.

I think it would be more important for you to get the basics right before you start with the texture because of this look at those facts - maybe the help

5 its for an RPG - this means it uses a 3/4 perspective, you have some foreshortening in it at the base plane
6 now this are base forms
7 shading the baseforms
8 reflections (but before you think of reflections you should try to get the basic shading right)

Once you are able to draw the basic forms (cube, cuboid, sphere, cylinder, pyramid, and cone) in any perspectiy and shade them from every possible direction you are able to create anything you want. With more practice you can also shade anything you want. You can build up complex forms out of simple forms - usually you don't do more than creating forms and give them plasticity with shading - that's it

Lilyo showed you how you could solve it better, especially his shading is on a higher level than yours - it's because his understanding of forms and besic shading is better than yours - you should try to increase your skills by understanding how light works - this will help you at your current level the most. The best thing is learning by seeing - for example you could turn on one light in a room and study then how the perspecitve and shadows are working at a simple geometrical thing a box or something else. You should also look at it from different angles and change the position of the object some times that you get a feeling.

888
Pixel Art / Re: Help with a tree [WIP] [C&C]
« on: March 10, 2012, 12:37:15 am »
nice attempt, but if I am looking at it it's easy to spot out that the whole palette is to green and it looks - as you remarked - flat. Another problem is that the perspective seems to be somewhat off and that your foliage texture is rather rough.
I also don't read your tutorial (link would be great) so it's pretty hard to imagine what you did wrong - or if the tutorial isn't a good one.

So what would be the best thing to do? step I and II should answer your questions, step III-VIII just show you some of my ideas - trees are always a nice thing for exercising.


I: block it at first out with raw forms, this shouldn't take very long but if you are creating different sprites like this you can choose your best one - give special attention to the perspective.

II: try your raw shading, if your raw shading looks weird the end product will look weird.

---

III: if your raw shading looks ok you can work with all those lights you want, the sunlight, the reflected light through the leaves, the reflected light from the ground and so on - train your eye and look around in reality to learn how those light phenomenas are working. The color strongly depends on the light, there is no tutorial for coloring, you can use a reference or thrust your experience.

IV: now you can start with filling in your raw texture, at this time it's more important that you get the right forms and the right impression that you work clean

V: it can be that you did to much, you can test to remove colors and compare the result, in this case the highlights were to bright for a tree

VI: now you can rework your gradients/raw textures. Don't use to much single pixel details, bigger pixel clusters are the way to the goal. Also an important thing to mention is that you shouldn't overdetail it - forms are more important than details

VII: At this point I start to give the outline minimal detail, to underline the impression of foliage.

VIII: FInal color adjustments and contrast/brightness adjustments, this point strongly depends on your scenery




I added next to the last version of the tree yours again, just to show you all the differences - mine has 11 colors, also 3 only colors more than yours.
What to mention is that you keep the pixel art basics (clusters, AA, Banding...) in mind and the drawing basics (perspective,light/shadow,...)

If your drawing or pixel experiences aren't enough to get a good result you should start with studies from nature or from photos. A tutorial will give you only a few insights and you are mostly copying steps you don't really understand.

Or it's also possible to compensate experience with a simpler style or a smaller size, for example -possible isn't a guarantee that it'll look better.



or if you want to do a small and simple variation:

889
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Yian Kut Ku
« on: March 02, 2012, 11:37:29 pm »
I don't knew at first tha tit was a monster from Monster hunter, but as I recoginized that I searched myself some references.

The main problem is here that as well forms as color aren't really fitting together with the creature concept. I don't know your reference (link isn't working) but the proportions were also off.

I'd suggest that you should start with correcting some colors and create a palette which is interconnected in the whole image to get a homogen color look. then you should look carefully how the whole thing is looking, I don't played the game so I had only the rough imagination of some pictures.

As long as your proportions and your basic forms and colors aren't right you shouldn't start with detailing the stuff. Work at first sloppy and refine always the picture as a whole, this brings usually a better result than detailing part for part. Of course if you are fine enough you'll have to give each part the final touch.

I also played a bit more with the light. Its obviously coming from the left side now. I also added here and there some reflections from the ground and I also did a bit more with the wings.

I don't detailed anything yet, the head was done with a bit more attention, but it's just an tip in which diraction you could go.

It's also rather big for a pixel art piece. Maybe it'd be a good idea to study some good pixel art revs.

Here is a suggestion for some important changes while staying pretty near to your version.


890
Pixel Art / Re: Lizard Guys
« on: February 07, 2012, 11:24:23 pm »
why don't work on flow, anatomy, lighting or colors in detail? By improving at least one thing the completely image could get better.

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