Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - Squiggly_P
Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 7

1
Devlogs & Projects / Re: Pixel Proof - Innovative pixel editor
« on: August 25, 2016, 02:12:25 pm »
I'll try it out. Always interested in new pixel art apps. I actually started learning C++ a while back with the eventual goal of making my own pixeling app, but I ended up stumbling upon aesprite and I've been using that ever since, as it tends to handle things a lot better than other pixel apps.

I'll try it out, but you should be aware that I run various antivirus / malware apps and all of them started freaking out about your executable, apparently because they've never seen it before and don't know what to make of it. I honestly don't understand. I've written my own apps that they would have never seen before and they've never freaked out like this. Avast is especially enamored with it and has blocked it while it awaits results of what I assume to be some kind of automated testing that is apparently going to take about 90 minutes at some other location. My PC isn't scanning it, it sent it off somewhere else to be scanned.

I highly doubt that it's malware or that it's been compromised, but you might want to be aware of that. I know there was a guy writing some painting software called "Verve Painter" who had a somewhat similar problem in that several antivirus software would nail it as malware and straight-up delete it off your hard drive. He was working to try to figure out why, but as far as I know he hasn't figured it out yet. So I'll let you know what happens. Just thought you'd like to know.

2
Mobile reply, so ill keep it short. I just had to reply as soon as possible cause this is already looking great. My (admittedly amateur) eyes see no real anatomy issues anywhere. Composition-wise, i think the only element that weakens it is the big circle. The guy isnt centered in it, but if you did center him in there, it would either shift the cirle off center or the comosition would feel too centered if you shifted the guy. I think its unessessary to the image.

As an alternative, if you want to have something to border the upper half of the image or something around the guy, the chain could be brought back from behind the guy on the left to replace the circle. It would make the chain a bigger element. Or, if you want to keep a graphic element for the background, you could do a silhouette behind him of a landscape element or relevant location (church, mausoleum, somewhere else that might have grave stones?).

Looks freakin awesome so far, tho. Cant wait to see where you go with it. Love the colors, too.

3
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP][C&C] Pudgy alien dude
« on: August 22, 2016, 11:37:47 pm »
I'd never heard of Puggsy before. I'll have to track down a copy and check it out.

Your eye stalks look a lot better than my periscope-eyes. I'll have to fiddle with them some to get them looking nice and bendy. I always have a problem with the parts that have a really limited pixel budget but need some specific details. I'm terrible at shoes and feet and hands as well :P

Guess I should work on those.

Thanks for the edit, man. I'll check out that game, too.

4
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP][C&C] Pudgy alien dude
« on: August 21, 2016, 10:54:49 pm »


A different approach to the coloring style. I like the more graphic look to it, but the eye stalks are still problematic. Went a little bolder on the shading as well. Still not entirely sure which direction to move with it...

EDIT:

I'll try not to bump the threat every time I update :P

edit ->

Had another go at this shading. I kinda like it. I think I may keep the eyes white for now. I like the higher contrast. The outline is slightly more saturated and a wee bit lighter. It makes it not look so great on a pure black background, but anything with the black level above 15 (that's HSV -> Value level) keeps it looking good. Wasn't planning on using much pure black in anything in the backgrounds, but I guess I won't know for certain until I actually start making them...

Edit 2: Fixed his right shoulder a smidge. It was bothering me.

5
Pixel Art / [WIP][C&C] Pudgy alien dude
« on: August 21, 2016, 06:44:31 pm »


So this guy is supposed to be a scrap merchant sort of dude. The color choice is a bit cliche (and maybe a bit over-saturated), but he's theoretically going to exist on darker, more muted backgrounds and I want him to pop out.

I'm not sure about outlines. Black? Colored? None? I've got outlines in some bits and none in other bits right now as I was experimenting. I tend to start making one-pixel changes and getting carried away with details and adding too many colors if I get blocked, and that's what I started doing here, so I decided it was a good time to post and get some broader crits I could focus on.

What's wrong with it? It should be noted that at fullscreen, the theoretical game I'm looking to make would be 3x resolution on a 1080p monitor.

6
Challenges & Activities / Re: The Daily Sketch
« on: August 20, 2016, 03:39:51 pm »
Been a hell of a long time since I used to post here, and even then it wasn't regularly or anything. Decided to get back into the swing of things and finally start working on some games and pixels and stuff. Some doodles:





Started cleaning this one up and decided he looked too human, so I doodled some more alien looking variants and goofed off. He's supposed to be a humanoid alien that's kinda dumpy and out of shape. A grumpy packrat sorta guy who wanders the backwoods of space looking for derelicts and wrecks to scavenge for scrap parts and salvage. Wanna make a mildly metroid-ish game with him cause I like the notion of having the player cast as a character who is not equipped to handle a game like that, so you'd be trying to just keep the guy alive, killing a few enemies and avoiding most of them instead of rampaging through caverns blasting things. This guy would not survive Zebes.

Boss fights would be about trying to escape, not trying to kill it.

EDIT: more exploring. Think the bottom left guy looks like a winner...


7
Pixel Art / Re: my atempt at getting better - pikachu pixel art
« on: August 19, 2016, 09:19:26 pm »
I will be honest about colors: I have no idea how to pick them. I just kinda do. I'm protanopic (red/green colorblind), so I tend to pay more attention to lighting and contrast. The colors I used in this are mostly just the result of the color reduction, although I played with them a bit. The 'black' color in mine is actually a really dark blue, which is something I picked up a long time ago.

Really, I just try to stick to a few values for whatever I'm painting. That's a 'ramp'. There are a couple in this to pay attention to, as illustrated in this little edit:



The dark background of the ramps is the darkest color in the image. Like I said, they're mainly the result of the color reduction that I did with a couple of tweaks to separate them a bit. But once you figure out the ramps (and the colors they share, which is important), you can screw around with some color experiments or tweak them to set a tone or whatever.

Quick edits:



Just a little pushing around of colors. Like I said, I'm mildly colorblind, so I don't generally let colors worry me a lot. Once you start recognizing where your ramps are, you will find yourself trying out all kinds of crazy color combinations. Pretty sure there's a post on here somewhere from eons ago that went into color theory and had a lot of good ideas on how to pick colors. Probably written by Ptoing or Helm or maybe Arne.

8
Pixel Art / Re: my atempt at getting better - pikachu pixel art
« on: August 19, 2016, 07:54:55 pm »
I did an edit:

yours -> mine



Step one was to reduce the colors. Yours had over 100 colors. Mine has eight. Seven for Pikachu and one background color. I'd suggest using a pixelling program like aesprite, graphics gale, proMotion or something similar. These have indexed color palettes which allow you to keep control over how many colors you're using.

After I reduced the colors I went in and redefined the lighting using the light source from the left and slightly above. Your image also seemed to have light coming from the bottom, so I got rid of that. Having really well-defined shadow shapes will make your images feel nice and solid.

From there I just went in and used the available colors to redraw the outlines and do a wee bit of AA here and there. With a few more colors you could smooth out all the little jaggies and such. I didn't want to redraw your entire shape or anything, so the outline is more or less the same, but I made some alterations to the ears and butt area and cleaned up a few issues with irregular outlines. I like 'em to be nice and smooth if at all possible.

The biggest change is probably the mouth shape, which I redrew to make him a little more happy, and I gave him some eyebrow ridges.

Lighting is probably the biggest factor in the edit, as well as contrast. Don't be afraid of your shadow shapes. I could have pushed the contrast more, in fact. Shadows define form, and if there's no contrast to the light and the shadows the image won't feel solid.

Keep pushin those pixels, man. Practice, practice and more practice.

9
General Discussion / Re: Official Off-Topic Thread
« on: August 24, 2010, 07:26:50 pm »
Wow, I'd love to have a few of those hanging on my wall. Bookmarked for possible future impulse shopping binge :P

I have a pro motion question for anybody out there. When I loop the animation, in the animation window the frames go ridiculously fast- even though the delay is only 4 frames a second on all frames. if any one could help that would be greatly appreciated ! It's currently bugging the hell out of me and made me lose all motivation to animate since I suck at it anyway - _ -

I'm having the same problem. There's a "+" and "-" button that's supposed to speed up or slow down the animation as well, and if you use them it will remember that. I got mine down to less than 1 frame per second and it was still playing the animation at about 5000 fps. Something is obviously not right.

Question: Are you using a 64bit OS?

EDIT: I figured out how to fix this problem. I'm running Win7 64bit.
I just right-clicked on the shortcut and selected "Troubleshoot compatibility"
It pulls up a window and looks at it then says it's gonna try running the app in WindowsXP SP2 mode to test.
In the test run the framerate issue was gone.
Save the settings and boom. That app will run in that compatibility mode until you tell it otherwise.

10
Pixel Art Feature Chest / Re: Death Walks
« on: February 10, 2010, 06:40:33 am »
Maybe from a purely academic point of view you could say it wasn't 'pure' pixelart, but if you consider the original to just be a base that was then heavily edited at the pixel level, I don't see why it wouldn't be considered acceptable.  On the other hand, if tracing is considered unacceptable, then using the actual image as a base might also be considered 'cheating'...  I dunno.  I guess it all boils down to how you feel about it.  Had you not shown the process and just posted the finished piece, would you be comfortable with that?  I mean, it's not like you traced a photo or something.  You drew something, then you applied pixelart techniques to that drawing.

It might not be 'pixelart', but it's definitely pixeled art...

It's also awesome, btw.   ;D

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 7