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Messages - questseeker
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21
Pixel Art / Re: [C+C] [WIP] Game character
« on: May 17, 2017, 08:24:50 am »
The floating book animation is good (but it might be enhanced by having the character move a little, to show he's reading from the book).
In the walking animation the front view looks unnatural: the character seems to move only his toes, with heels sticking together on the ground.
Maybe spreading apart the legs while walking would enable bending the knees in the front view too, with enough difference with the standing frame.

The tree and the fence have very good shapes and proportions, but they are shaded very flat. Can you adopt an oblique light source from the front?

22
General Discussion / Re: Rotating a very small pixel without distortion?
« on: November 14, 2016, 10:27:26 am »
Quote from: Lores on November 10, 2016, 02:25:17 am
Hi there. Rotating then doing cleanup is your best bet, unless you wan't to do what the person before me said, go higher resolution then drop it down again
I didn't suggest to use downscaled images directly, I just argued that, as an approximation of high-resolution rotation, they are a better reference and starting point for cleanup than the results of low resolution rotation.
Scaling down the reference rotated image to a blurred one with mixed colours might be needed for the common case in which unenlightened image editors operate only at the final resolution of the sprite, without any way to align a higher resolution reference with the canvas.

23
General Discussion / Re: Rotating a very small pixel without distortion?
« on: November 02, 2016, 08:19:18 am »
If possible, rotate vector art or a high resolution image: it will be a better reference for redrawing because it will have better proportions, with less mangled, warped and displaced features. Even if you have to scale down the rotated reference image it will be just blurred, not devastated like your example.

24
Pixel Art / Re: Simple Windmill
« on: August 31, 2016, 07:00:40 am »
Regarding your reference photograph, it shows frames without sails because it isn't operational. If the windmill spins, it should have sails.
For example, no further than Wikipedia, a Dutch-style "smock mill" of the sort I had in mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill#/media/File:Goliath_Poldermolen.jpg and a tower-like one, more similar to your reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maud_Foster_Windmill#/media/File:Skirbeck,_Boston,_Maud_Foster_Mill.jpg

25
Pixel Art / Re: Simple Windmill
« on: August 26, 2016, 07:47:05 am »
  • The windmill is spinning the wrong way. The sails should follow the wooden arms.
  • The windmill body shouldn't be a cone: the upper portion where the arms are connected to gears is a separate piece that can spin around to align itself with the wind, about as wide as the base or wider.
  • In the frame with vertical and horizontal arms, I think omitting the border of the trailing edge of the sail would result in better compatibility with the other frames.
  • The antialiasing seems irregular. All pixels of the arms and all pixels of the sails should be the same colour, respectively lightened to give the same apparent arm thickness, and exactly identical, compared to the colours in the frame with horizontal and vertical arms.
  • In oblique frames, sails are deformed from rectangles to parallelograms and the sharp corner at the end of the arms disappears. The current 50% stippled transparent sails impose an unacceptable amount of 45° features at such a small size: why don't you try a more realistic style with off-white solid sails?

26
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP][C+C] My first pixel art project
« on: July 29, 2016, 08:36:33 am »
The character and the campfire are promising, but the tree (an important reference if you plan to use a forest background) and the rocks at the bottom are dark and rather low contrast; they should only look like this in unusual low light conditions, as a deviation from the comfortable colours and legible details which should be the norm.
I suggest making a separate day version of the same scene to study the required palette changes.
The rocks also have an unnaturally smooth and pillowshaded appearance, but it's a separate issue.

27
Pixel Art / Re: Project Kitsune Colour Help!
« on: July 01, 2016, 08:49:02 am »
The two variants share a problem, or possibly an opportunity: a drastic mismatch between monochrome (and deliberately tinted), low saturation and relatively low contrast buildings in the background and bright, saturated objects of much less stylized realistic colors in the foreground.
Depending on the needs of your game, you can take this difference into two different directions:
  • Everything consistently stylized. The second variant might be a step in this direction, but some objects (like the red post box) still look bright and out of place, while others (like the woman and the vending machine) look unnaturally desaturated relative to realistic standards.
  • Obviously divergent background and foreground. You mention it's going to be a platform game: you should be able to make a structurally complex, good-looking background easily distinguishable from important foreground items that allow interaction because they don't share the same palette. For this purpose, combining the sprites in the first variant (more realistic) with the buildings in the second variant (in which the brick walls are more consistent with other ones) should be a good starting point.
What are the platforms in this platformer game going to be? The screenshot shows only a completely flat sidewalk.

28
Pixel Art / Re: Game graphics - ive got stuck :(
« on: May 27, 2016, 09:19:10 am »
I find the cliff faces distracting: they have many contrasting layers, producing a cake-like texture, and the thick dark layer confusingly suggests shadow.
The vertical structures in the  first iterations of the cliffs, although unnatural and rudimentary, look much better.

Experiment with more rock-like cliff textures and more natural cliff shapes (i.e. not vertical planes).

29
General Discussion / Re: Sprite tile sizes, what should I know?
« on: March 07, 2016, 08:15:37 am »
Quote from: Ai on March 07, 2016, 01:49:53 am
Some OpenGL games have occasional subpixel gaps between tiles, and AFAICS this is because the texture mapping is fractionally off.
If there is a subpixel gap, there is a bug, and it could happen with any tile size. Correct drawing is possible, and expecting it is a minimal test of programmer competence.

30
Resources / Re: Pixels And Art Glossary (v.0.5)
« on: March 04, 2016, 03:25:45 pm »
I'd expect more entries about techniques and patterns found both in tools and workflows and in images. Here's a first draft of two important ones:

Pillow Shading
Unrealistic shading of a smoothly curved object by distributing light and dark colors according to the shape of the object's outline instead of imagining and matching the shape of actual isophotes and the location of highlights; this normally results in approximately parallel and constant width color bands from the outline inwards, vastly different from the bunched up, interrupted, expanded and nonconvex shapes of correct shading.
A rectangular pillow is one of the rare cases in which the incorrect but easy procedure sometimes approaches a correct result.

Index Painting
Editing palette indexes instead of pixel colors; it implies caring about palette organization (two palettes with the same colors in a different order are different) and not only about limiting the available colors.

Deliberate attention for building the final image through an explicit indirect mapping mechanism can have a variety of benefits and purposes, mostly related to determining actual colors after editing the image:
  • Making images that can be displayed with different but "parallel" palettes (as typical of many videogames with recolored sprites, which can be implemented with a simple palette swap).
  • Distinguishing palette indexes in order to treat identical colors as logically different, for example because they are shades in different color ramps.
  • Caring about the use of palette entries rather than their actual color (e.g. "I need three entries for flesh, eyes and pupils and I'll reuse hair colors for irises" vs. "I need three entries for rosy pink, blueish white and pure black"); palette structure can be more important and more stable than the contained colors.
  • Controlling palette indices exactly (as opposed to letting the paint program manage them automatically) because they also have some conventional meaning: transparency (e.g. index 0 is transparent), metadata about a game sprite such as whether a pixel is a solid part of an object, special display-time palette tricks (e.g. indexes in a certain range are subject to color cycling) and so on.
  • Allowing use of tools, like semi-transparent brushes, compositing transparent layers, blurring, etc. that are fundamentally unsuitable for simple palette-based image representations. For example, editing a high bit depth greyscale image and mapping grey ranges to palette colors, as popularized by Dan Fessler (1,2).

1. http://www.danfessler.com/blog/pixel-purism-process-vs-results
2. http://www.danfessler.com/blog/hd-index-painting-in-photoshop




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