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Topics - Gil
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11
Pixel Art / Rock Artists - Marc Bolan / Syd Barrett
« on: March 17, 2014, 11:38:14 pm »
Hey guys, long time no see :)

I made some pixel art and for once I didn't forget to save the different stages, so I thought I'd post it here for a change :D

Marc Bolan


Process:
First off, here's my reference, Marc Bolan from T-Rex:


I started with a silhouette, keeping the hair line for later:


Then I defined the core facial features as clusters:


Next, I defined two more important clusters, overlapping the previous clusters:


Highlights were next on the list:


To finish off the facial part, I added in more tones. At this point, I also added some rather abrasive colors in the palette, to make the picture more interesting. It kinda works, but it makes certain parts hard to get right.


Next I did a color reduction of a filtered version of the original, which I then put into an indexed palette. The result is not pixel perfect of course, but I proceeded to put the face on. I also wrote Marc's signature by hand, and added AA (which is not stellar, I realize).


Next, I re-evaluated all the clusters created by the color reduction, tightened them up back to pixel perfect level, to make for a finished picture:



Being a big Marc Bolan fan, I know the likeness of the original reference and thus, my version, is not too great. I might rectify this. The issue is mainly that the eyes need to be a bit different and the lips need to be more pouting. Also, I'm debating whether I should give him a hat.

Edit:

Gave him a neck and improved the likeness (I'm now happy with the likeness):


For now though, critique time. Rip it apart gents. I could especially use some help on the AA of the lettering. I seem to have lost my touch with AA.

Syd Barrett


Process:


I'm working on the hair right now, trying to emulate the style of my Marc Bolan picture. The trick will be to get better clusters going. Right now, the hair texture is noisy, which is not good. Also, if someone could help me figure out the likeness with Syd Barrett, I'd be much obliged. There don't seem to be any perfect photographs that I can study. It's mainly the eyes that I want to change to be closer to something like this: http://art.game-designer.org/pixelart/rocknroll/SydBarrett-ref1.jpg

Thread starts here, read below for the process on Syd:

12
Pixel Art / Side-view RPG sprites
« on: June 10, 2013, 04:53:55 pm »
Hey guys, long time no see.

I'm at a point with my art that I don't usually ask for comments anymore, because I can self-critique sufficiently to get it to where I want. For these sprites though, they evade my attempts at making them shine and I don't know why.

I can tell the palette is bland and I can tell I have confusing volumes and all that, but I can't seem to fix it. I know the anatomy on the naked version is off. I feel like I could fix that myself, though I haven't attempted to yet.



I've made a sample animation too, which is fine, I think. Feel free to critique though, I'm sure it can be made better. I know the light source turns around with the character. I'm not sure if that needs fixing or not. What do you think?


13
Pixel Art / Head without a cause
« on: March 23, 2010, 11:14:52 pm »
I don't usually post doodles here, but I thought I'd show this one off for kicks.
It started out as an XXL RPG template, which would be crazy.

I used Arne's palette for extra lulz...



Edit: Regular palette and a modification to see if it can be used to create portraits


14
Pixel Art / Postmortem: Sacrada Guardians
« on: January 27, 2010, 08:33:51 pm »
This is all from an old project of mine. I recently got permission from the owner (Elder Prince over at Blossomsoft.com) to show these off, as the project is cancelled. The project was a collaboration between me, Sonic_Reaper, DayDream, Xavier Dang (OCRemix), Min "Keiiii" Kwon (Haru-Sari.com) and Elder Prince (Eternal Eden). This was supposed to come out for Nintendo Gameboy Advance under the name Western Lords. It was a wild west kind of story based on an old cartoon series called "The Mysterious Cities of Gold".

Here's the lovely concept art I had to work with to create the sprites:

http://www.game-designer.org/projects/blossomsoft/WL/concept/Bandanna.jpg
http://www.game-designer.org/projects/blossomsoft/WL/concept/Zilia.jpg
http://www.game-designer.org/projects/blossomsoft/WL/concept/Anuk.jpg
http://www.game-designer.org/projects/blossomsoft/WL/concept/Willem.jpg[/img]

These concepts were put into sprite form by a guy named Adam, then perfected by Daydream. I came on board afterwards (together with Sonic_Reaper, who did enemies) and started animating them. All I had was very rough pixels, so from here on out, 98% of the work is mine. I did a whole series of animations, but not all of them are complete (only the horizontal walk animation of Zilia is done). These are very high in saturation, because the Gameboy Advance required this. Some of the sprites look too busy as a result though (Anuk). This was a few years ago, I would fare better now of course.

Zilia:


Anuk:


Bandanna:


After this the name was changed to Sacrada Guardians and the decision made to start developing it for the upcoming Nintendo DS. This might have been the reason the project was never finished, as we had to redo most art assets. I proposed the following new art style (based on the new concept art), but it was rejected through a fan poll:






Since the new concept was rejected, I was asked to redo the originals in the new size. Zilia's sprite was updated to fit the Zilia concept art (the originals were done based on older concepts). This is the result:

Zilia, Willem, Bandanna, Anuk


As you can see, there was still some work left on the back sprites (Anuk's anatomy was dreadful). After that though, the project was put on hiatus. We worked on a project called Oracle. We finished it (same team as Western Lords, minus Daydream), but the publisher never released it. You can read the postmortem here:

http://www.blossomsoft.com/gamezopher/?p=4491

I left the company after that. Elder tried to do another rendition of Sacrada Guardians, a prequel called Western Lords (after the original title), but it was put on hiatus again. After that he started to create games on his own and released the very successful Eternal Eden, which you can buy on the Blossomsoft site (I recommend it highly). Dorian Tokici (Sonic_Reaper) did some of the sprite work in the game.

So, that's the history of my work for Blossomsoft, I hope you all had fun reading this.

15
General Discussion / Your choice of background color
« on: December 04, 2009, 12:44:40 am »
I think this is a very interesting discussion. What is your preferred background color to work on. There's a few popular choices. First off there are people who like to work on pure white. I don't like this, it usually screws with your gamma perception, creating unfavorable palettes.
Then there's pure black. It tends to screw more with perceived shapes and silhouettes and if you're creating saturated artwork, it can be a little hard on the eyes, seemingly lacking cohesion. Here's what Henk Nieborg has to say about it, concerning his work on Flink:

"I Think there were a few reasons I started drawing everything on a black background, not just on the MegaDrive. First, back in those days I drew most of my gfx on a black background, I just liked that. You could get away with a lot of stuff by fading it into darkness. It's also quite handy when you're dealing with systems like the MegaDrive which didn't give you much memory to play with. I also prefer to draw to blackness because the contrast on the megadrive system was insane, if i would have anti-aliased everything to white i would have probably gone blind." [ref]

The next important one is the mid grey background. It's one of the more useful ones, because you're basically drawing onto the shade that has the most use in any palette. Almost any palette you create can be augmented by greys to buffer between shades with different hues. Since midvalues take up the biggest part of an image usually, drawing onto a midvalue grey canvas gives many advantages. One problem is that the lack of any hue can wash out the other colors, because you always try to work towards the background color subconsciously.

The obvious fix for the mid grey is a slightly tinted midvalue color. I think this might be the weapon of choice for most artists. Desaturated, dim midvalue backgrounds work easier, have no apparent issues and are probably the easiest on the eyes. I like to take a color that doesn't appear in the image to get a little hue contrast going, which usually turns up richer palettes.

Then there's the last one, which is a bit controversial, the saturated background. Many hate it, some swear by it. The usual suspect is pure magenta RGB(255,0,255), because it's used by many graphics libraries as the default background color. Obvious disadvantages are that the canvas can become tiring on the eyes and that the palette will usually go towards pure saturation. It doesn't seem to have any apparent advantages, yet I see myself turning back to it time and time again. Let me explain why.
As a lover of high saturation, high contrast palettes, I love how the magenta automatically pushes me to use bolder colors. I get very colorful palettes, with usually a good range, because you need them to get a good visibility of your image on the background.

My favored approach so far seems to be magenta for sprites, desaturated midvalue for other work. The extra oomph in the palette when working with magenta tends to work fine for sprites, since I like them to pop on top of the tiles or backgrounds you created.

Please share your own workflow in terms of background color.

16
General Discussion / KOF XII Dot Art
« on: August 17, 2009, 08:38:14 pm »
http://kofaniv.snkplaymore.co.jp/english/info/15th_anniv/2d_dot/art/index.php

Be prepared to weep. When advertising meets pixel art. I'm very unimpressed by the graphics presented in the gallery. The marketing speak is just laughable. Rotoscoping is apparently used for the very first time in this game! Exciting!

17
Pixel Art / Tile set - Cliffs, grass
« on: August 16, 2009, 05:37:32 pm »
Two hours of having fun. Tile set is still a bit bare without vegetation, etc, but I like it so far.



Tilesets:



18
General Discussion / Excellent resource for anatomy studies
« on: August 05, 2009, 11:14:47 pm »
For those of us who create muscle babies and want to tighten up our templates. The greatest reference I found so far.

http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/resources/scandb/

It's a research website that offers pictures of different body types, both male and female. You can use it to find the perfect anatomy reference for your template, wether it's an old, skinny or fat guy/gal.

The viewer is a bit awkward, so here's the images behind the screens: http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/resources/scandb/gallery/

A sample animation of what to expect


I'm going to try to get some more different angles to work with by exporting the models into mathlab (links on the page), but it's great to start with. There's 115 different body shapes to have fun with.

19
General Discussion / Enterbrain tutorials
« on: July 31, 2009, 02:12:32 am »
Hey there. I always used love reading through the Enterbrain pixel tutorials once in a while. Something nostalgic about them, etc. (I also reread Tsu's once in a while)

The old url is dead though, anyone keep a copy?

The old one: http://www.enterbrain.co.jp/digifami/digiweb/dot_teck/3nen/3_01.html

20
Pixel Art / Knights, rogues, pirates and medics
« on: July 09, 2009, 06:32:40 pm »
This is the clothing so far.



The original template:



And some combinations possible:

http://www.game-designer.org/fto/graphics/knight-preview.png
http://www.game-designer.org/fto/graphics/light-armor%20preview.png

C and/or C?

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