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Messages - Arachne
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71
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Mushroom Scene
« on: April 03, 2009, 07:10:40 pm »
Looking good so far, but Fool doesn't really use dithering much in his pieces. I think that's what separates this the most from his style at the moment, in addition to the lack of anti-aliasing. Looking forward to seeing the foreground elements. :)

72
2D & 3D / Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2
« on: March 26, 2009, 05:24:26 pm »
Still, it shouldn't be too far off.
If the distances between the head and the crotch and the crotch and the toes should be about the same, then I would say it is.

73
General Discussion / Re: Ramblethread! A brainstorm approaches!
« on: March 11, 2009, 02:50:38 pm »
(Should I write a Banding 202 article here for this or is it beyond the scope of this tutorial?)
Personally, I think any elaboration would be a good thing. Not necessarily for the beginners, but for those who will be offering them critique. :)

74
General Discussion / Re: Ramblethread! A brainstorm approaches!
« on: March 06, 2009, 11:32:06 am »
It also mentions something else which is important for newbies, IMO: because of gamma, the midpoint of the RGB values of two colors usually *ISN'T* a 50% mix of the two. (eg black #000000, white #ffffff -> wrong result = #7f7f7f, right result = #bababa). Knowing this can help avoid ineffectual shading as well as ugly AA.
This is a good tip. And it also makes decent monitor calibration a must.

I think what's mentioned in this post by Ilkke, with the principle of looking at diagonals, is a very good way to check if your AA makes sense. Most of the time, though, I have to compare what I'm working on with the previous step to make sure I don't over-AA. If it's actually blurrier than what I had, I have to redo it, and I haven't found a better way to make the AA look good than to go through this tedious process. :blind:

75
General Discussion / Re: Official Off-Topic Thread
« on: March 06, 2009, 01:19:27 am »
Introducing the latest additions to our family:

Lucy
:-*

Lucifer
>:D

Bonus cat picture

"Waiter!"

 :lol:

76
General Discussion / Re: Ramblethread! A brainstorm approaches!
« on: March 06, 2009, 12:52:16 am »
Yay, lines. ;D

A mistake I see done every now and then, is to go from a [1 1 1] line straight to a [2 2 2] line.



The right way to draw a smooth curve in this case is not very intuitive if you think of lines merely in terms of number sequences. I like to think of it as AAing with angles instead of colors. You have two "colors", a [2 2 2 2] line and a [1 1 1 1] line. Halfway between the two would be [1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5], but we only have integers to draw the line with so we get [1 2 1 2] instead. Substitute the middle with that, like [2 2 1 2 1 1], as shown here,



I think it's always important to explain why you're using a rule or put it in some kind of context. If there's no other way to remember these rules than to memorize them to the letter, beginners might find themselves trying too hard to adhere to all the rules and forgetting to actually look at what they're drawing.

I think the most important thing you can do in pixel art is to look at the result after placing a pixel. Did it look better before or after and why? If you keep an eye out for a pattern in what looks good and what doesn't, you will find it in time (and after a few thousand iterations :P).

77
Pixel Art / Re: Breathe some color into the old robot
« on: February 05, 2009, 03:27:29 am »
I think the new planet colors are great, but I think the robot is too separated from the rest now. I think it needs some color from the planet in there somewhere to truly make it a part of the whole. Maybe some colors reflected in the metal, some colored lights or wires or something? Otherwise, good stuff. I love that ilkkeness it has. :D

78
Pixel Art / Re: Tree Practice
« on: December 14, 2008, 08:47:00 pm »
First, I think it might be easier if you know what kind of tree it is. Trees vary a lot in shape and how their leaves and branches are arranged. In any case, I think it would be a good idea to find some reference.

Tree trunks are more straight than that of your tree. Think of branches as the trunk split in smaller parts. That means that branches shouldn't add up to be larger than the trunk they originated from. In your tree, the base of one of the branches alone is thicker than the middle of the tree trunk. A tree like that would easily break in half in a bit of wind.

Now, if you want something stylistic instead of realistic and want to keep the solid tree crown, I would still recommend looking at some references to get the shape right. You have the right side of the crown drooping, but the rest is not. Trees aren't usually perfectly symmetrical, but the positions of the branches and leaf clusters follow the same principle throughout the crown (same branch thickness, same leaf size, etc.), so if you make the whole crown behave in the same way (not necessarily at the same level, but repeat the droopiness elsewhere in the crown to show that it's a recurring thing), I think it'll look more natural. And there is no sign of leaves in the background, which makes it look flat. The lack of shadow cast on the trunk adds to the flat look. If the crown extends a bit away from the trunk, the shadow should take up a much larger area of the trunk.

If you want to go with something more realistic, leaves are spread out more with gaps in between. You can see individual leaves in and around the tree crown, and you can also see branches in between the leaf clusters. This is of course more painstaking to pixel, so a simplified approach might be more suited for your first tree, but it's something to keep in mind.

Regardless of the style you're going for, I think it's important to know the shape of a real tree before you simplify it, since the shape is what makes us recognize it as a tree (it could even be a neatly trimmed tree, which is just a sphere on a stick, but I suppose it's still a kind of shape we can accept as a tree since it can exist in reality). I think getting the shape right should be your first priority before working on the shading. :)

79
Pixel Art / Re: Hide and Seek [WIP]
« on: December 14, 2008, 03:44:14 pm »
There's not much difference in brightness between foreground and background, making it seem flat as if everything is the same distance from the viewer. It's much too bright for a night scene, and it's difficult to tell where the light source is. Some cast shadows would show where the light is coming from. You could simply show the moon in the picture to make it more obvious that it's night. The pose of the kid looks a bit 1-dimensional as well.

It's not clear to me what the relation between the kid and the lizard is. Is the kid its friend or its prey? The lizard would seem more like it's hunting if you gave it a pose to look like it's sneaking up on the kid. And it could use the tail to either grab the kid or distract him before the lizard makes its move, which seems fitting since it's already there and the kid is looking in the opposite direction.

Your color ramps seem to have very random leaps in hue and brightness. The result is a bit jarring. Maybe you could try to start out with straight ramps with more regular steps in brightness, and then compare the ramps and look for similarities. For instance, if you find two colors that are fairly similar, you can replace them with either one of them or a mix of the two. This way, the mixing of the ramps would serve a purpose, and it would also be more subtle.

If you start out with a grayscale or more or less monochromatic palette, you can add more interest to it by looking at where the colors are used. If you have large areas of a certain shade on elements that are supposed to be the same color and not much of it elsewhere, you can add color to that shade to fit those elements (shades on leaves or flowers, for instance, could have a green or purple tint, respectively). The color would mostly be on those elements, but it would also be a little bit of it in the rest of the image, so you'd unify the image without blending everything together.

Desaturate the darkest shades. Keep in mind that the more light there is the more color will be reflected and vice versa. There's not a lot of light at night, and that would make the scene look more monochromatic.

The darkest green seems really out of place in the background since it's very saturated, and too different from the blue colors in the rest of the ramp. For a night scene, it would fit better to move the darkest shades towards blue. Blue colors also seem colder. The warm colors of the kid's skin, shirt and the lizard's tongue would stand out more this way, since red and yellow seem warm. You have too much red in the rocks now, and that makes it blend together with the kid, making him more difficult to spot. You want to draw attention to him with either contrast in brightness or colors, and right now, there is neither.



Composition is also important when it comes to making things stand out and making a scene comfortable to look at. You can use lines to guide the viewer through the image, and add interest by using bright and dark areas and balancing them against each other. There's a lot to keep in mind, and I'm sure there are a few things in my edit that could use improvement. I think someone posted a link to this blog here. It has a lot of tips regarding composition, and I've found it really useful, so take a look and see if that makes it any clearer. :)

80
Pixel Art Feature Chest / Re: [WIP] Red Dragon
« on: November 21, 2008, 10:34:22 pm »
the way I'm looking at the problem is more like if we have 3 colors, a light, medium and dark, the dark and the light can't touch, except for the corners, and you have to bridge the colors using the medium color. Problem with this is that i feel like I've seen a lot of good pixel art where you have a really bright highlight, and to 1 side you  have smooth blending, but to the other side you have the darkest color in the palette. I'm not sure if this is a lighting thing, a style thing, or what, if anyone knows, please let me know :)

If you look at the second image I posted you'll see that I've put the light and dark together. The trick is to keep in mind that bright plus dark equals medium, and you can take advantage of that to get rid of banding, like so:

bb
ac
bb

ab
ac
bc

(if you imagine drawing a line between the two b's in this one, you'll see that you end up between the light and the dark, which kind of cancel each other out)

instead of

bc
ab
bc

ab
ab
bc

And you can extend it in many different ways:

bab
cac
cbc

cab
cab
bbb
cab
bbb

aabcc
abbbc
aabcc
abbbc
aabcc

instead of

bab
cbc
cbc

cab
cab
bab
cbb
bbb

aabbc
abbcc
aabbc
abbcc
aabbc

And it can work for double pixels as well:

cb
cb
da
da
cb
cb

One thing to note is that you end up with coarser dithering patterns this way. The most important thing is to try and notice where you can place a pixel so that it looks best. After a while, you'll begin to see a pattern. :)

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