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Messages - Rosse
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31
Archived Activities / Re: HEXQUISITE CORPSE COLLAB II - DONE!
« on: November 09, 2009, 08:50:34 am »
 :y:

This is incredible in so many ways... perfect example of how the result is greater than the sum of it's parts. Huge compliment to everybody which was brave enough and took his time to contribute to this unique experience.
There are so many different approaches and styles - the restricted palette really is capable of making it look coherent. It's very interesting to see how small regions tells their own stories.

32
Archived Activities / Re: HEXQUISITE CORPSE COLLAB II
« on: October 23, 2009, 06:18:16 am »
#56, please

Done

33
Archived Activities / Re: HEXQUISITE CORPSE COLLAB II
« on: October 14, 2009, 12:28:23 pm »
#28, please

Done

34
Pixel Art / Re: Elephant Rider [WIP]
« on: October 06, 2009, 08:32:34 am »
Interesting, I thought of Dali too, but not so much in the original drawr picture. Probably because of the background in the pixel version, which alters the composition the most (letting the elephant breath).
Some more thoughts of mine:

* The picture currently works I think, but it would benefit if it had a deeper story-telling. You wrote the elephant is a robot/organic-hybrid, but I think it needs more personality. To increase the story aspect, you could let the elephant interact with the guy more, letting the eye stare at him or making a strange smile or doing something with the trunk or something else.

* Because of the coiled tail, the huge eye and the not fitting legs the elephant looks more like a cameleon to me. It's not really a crit, but more an inspiration what you could do else with the elephant. Currently it looks a bit out of balance, the trunk is too heavy to be balanced by the small tail.

* I think the clouds are too dark. I put your picture in ProMotion and made the clouds one step lighter and thought it looks better composition-wise.

Nice progess so far, I really looking forward to the finished picture.


Btw: Zoggles? I think Ptoing should post more often to resurrect old people ;)

35
General Discussion / Re: KOF XII Dot Art
« on: August 18, 2009, 06:10:38 pm »
rotoscoping> I don't think rotoscoping is a bad technique per se. I played the old (DOS) Prince of Persia a lot and I still think the graphics fits the gameplay and mood perfect. So I think it's more of a misuse of the technique than the technique itsef (which noboy claimed here, but whatever ;)). Flashback worked great too, but I never played it that much like PoP.


About KOF. Personally, I think the backgrounds are way more ugly than the sprites, which I find just mediocre. There's a very interesting paragraph in "DOT creation":

Quote
Why construct a 3D Model?
Creating animation patterns for 2D characters was, until now, highly dependent on the skill of the artist assigned to the character. The results could often vary wildly depending on the animator, and to fix this, we developed our animation motions with 3D models in order to standartize every character's moves before anything else. This eliminates individual style differences among the artists and ensures a high level of quality behind every move in the character's skill sets. It also saves the artists from having to draw 2D rough drafts for every frame of animation. The resulting rough pixel art is extremly detailed but still far from original goals, so the 3D models are used primarily as a reference for animation and detailing.

First, let's divide the discussion into animation / pixeltech talk (just like we would critic an animation here on pixelation). In the quoted paragraph, they talk mainly about the quality of animation. If I interpret what they are talking about, I think they are right. Apart from creating coherence, "Tracing" over prerendered 3D Animation (from a decent animator), creates better results than "from-scratch" work from a bad animator. But in return, the animation is just as good as the 3D animator. And I think we all agree, that hand-drawn animation has the ability to create animation which has that magical feel, which most of the modern 3D stuff lacks (Of course, it all depends on the animator).
What I want to say is, that using animated 3D models as a base is a efficient way to produce decent animation without having very experienced 2D animators (which are probably rarer than 3D animators these days). To this point, I'm not talking about the polishing of the single frames, just the animation by itself.
So talking about the animation, I think they did a good thing (mediocre), but if they talk about godly animation, I think they don't deserve this rank. The animation is pretty stiff compared with older fighting games animations. Remember all these bouncing boobs in the SNK games back then (I'm not a supporter of bouncing boobs!)? In this KOF the boobs are nearly frozen. Well, maybe it's a stylistic choice (realism? Character design?), but I assume it's because of the stiff prerendered 3D Models. And maybe more eye-catching, the falling skirt, which behaves very unnatural for me.

If we want to talk about the pixelquality, I think they didn't do a very special job. I think they did a good job of producing coherent results (a coherent look over all the different characters). But pixelquality wise, I think the didn't paid very much attention to the single pixels. Banding is a term which was used very often. Another thing I noticed is the lack of antialiasing of self-shadows. Why is that? It gives the impression of a fast rendering job by bad artists. Just like the color departement in the old animation films. Lots of people which colored the cells without thinking (because they are paid per cells and thinking reduces the output).
You can call me silly, but I state that it's possible, today, to code filtes/shaders that can render similar looking sprites from 3d models even on the fly. Think of "hinting" in Fonts these days. A similar technique could be used to prevent important details from disappearing. Other algorithm could be used to create nice looking edges and curves. The color quantization could be done on the fly or in preproduction by good artists. I don't say computers can create great looking pixelart, but they can produce mediocre pixelart on the fly which is probably similar to what we see in KOF XII (maybe that's a topic for itself, but whatever). To work 16 month on a single character of this quality animation-wise and pixel-wise is a waste of time and money imho (the used time is probably an advertising-lie).


But what bugs me the most about KOF XII are the fugly backgrounds. Okay, if they are 100% animated, everywhere, then maybe they have a reason to use a 3D base (but overanimated backgrounds would only be annoying, tho). The design is way to noisy for a background, the characters are fugly 3D-shaded puppets, the architecture is mostly boring and the mixture with 2D painted, 3D rendered and pixeled doesn't work as a single piece of artwork. Thinking of all these amazing pictures fool has uploaded on pixeljoint lately makes my artist- and pixel-heart cry. Maybe they spent all their love and soul already on the genious sprites?

36
General Discussion / Re: Disturbing trend in iPhone games
« on: August 16, 2009, 01:15:05 pm »
There was a GBA remake of Rick Dangerous by Spoutnick Team. But I think there were some copyright problems, so the remake was cancelled and a custom christmas version was made.

remake:









xmas:



I'm not sure if that's the same company as behind the iPhone remake.

[edit]
Looks like the iPhone Developer is French, just like the Spoutnick Team. And the Pistol on their website looks very similar to the GBA Remake (XMAS). It's very likely that these are the same developers. http://www.magicteam.fr/RickDangerous.htm

37
Pixel Art / Re: Brave Guy vs Drill Crew
« on: July 11, 2009, 03:25:32 pm »
Hello junkboy, nice picture. Here are some things which came to my mind while watching your mockup.

First I assumed that it looks like a game scene. Therefore, reading from left to right, it kind of feels like the blue drills would start an attack leaded by the swordman standing on the hill observing his minions. But your message is different and combining this thought with the normal way of playing a game (imagine a mid-boss scene here), I flipped the whole image on the x-axis. Since the composition doesn't work now, I added a tree on the far right to fix this issue (the lightsource comes from the right right now, but it works nevertheless I think).
The round edges on the ground wouldn't work in a game I suppose. Jumping from them would be confusing, so I made them more abrupt. Then I tried to add some atmosperic perspective to the tree in the middleground and the rocks in the foreground to increase the spatial clearity (less saturated, more blue the further away). I don't mind the usage of a gradient, but I think the image gains nothing from it, therefore a nicely pixelated background (maybe like owlboy as hsn2555 suggested) would be much nicer. Up to you, tho.
The brave guy doesn't work currently I think. Colorwise he's too close to the enemies and therefore looks more like an ally of them than there foe. I tried to alter the colors according to my gusto and made a new outfit, because the hero's concept wasn't as interesting as the blue drill's. The brown critter next to the hero looks almost like a generic 0-lvl enemy and not a friend of the brave guy. Maybe change it's color (it's too similar to the enemies) or appearence. I shifted one of his eyes one pixel. The shadows of the sprites didn't made sense, so I deleted them too.

Great work so far, junkboy. I hope you continue working on it. Looking forward to your new homepage. I hope you keep posting images here.



here's my edit for comparison:






38
Challenges & Activities / Re: Hexquisite Corpse Suggestion Thread
« on: June 12, 2009, 06:21:32 pm »
Animated Hexquisite Corpse! All rules stays the same (palette, borders), but with 2 (or 4 frames). Maybe make the collab template a bit smaller (edit: I don't mean the actual tile size, but the total amount of tiles) for the regular, theme based activities?

39
Archived Activities / Re: Hexquisite Corpse Collab
« on: June 06, 2009, 04:29:41 pm »
67, done!

40
Just finished my first tile (nr 3).

I'm not sure how different programs sort the palette brightness-wise (photoshop is different from promotion afaik), but the current palette is not correct sorted according to ProMotion 5.1. Maybe PM 6 uses a slightly different algorithmus, tho.

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