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Messages - Argyle
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261
2D & 3D / Re: Official Anatomy Thread
« on: September 30, 2008, 10:53:29 pm »




These are scans from a page of Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit (by the director of animation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit), a book which I cannot recommend to enough people.  A while back I was ambitious about getting better in my drawings enough to go to the local college's life drawing sit-ins to draw nude models.  Although I only got a chance to go about 2 or 3 times, the studies drastically improved my knowledge of how a body should look and understanding what separates a drawing of a character from looking like a hunk of ridiculous ground meat shaped like a stick figure.

Drawing from picture references helps out a ton in the understanding of anatomy.  But drawing a model in person with time restrictions for poses ranging between 5 and 20 minutes is invaluably helpful in getting your mind trained to cut to the core of defining a body's truly defining shapes and restrictions without becoming overburdened with spending 20 minutes making sure the eyes look nice and pretty on your picture while the rest of the head looks like a melon.

Anyone seeking to pursue a study of drawing human anatomy should seriously consider looking up life drawing sessions that are hosted in your area.  I plan to look into going back and doing more of this regularly for a couple years in the future (after life settles down... moving in a week and our first baby due at the ending of October :crazy:).  This thread was just the driving inspiration that reminded me of this goal.


If the recent flood we had didn't destroy my old huge sketch pad I'll look into snapping some photos of the sketches from the sessions later on tonight.  I have not done much studying of anatomy in the 5 or so years since I did them so some critiques should still help me learn more  :)

262
2D & 3D / Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2
« on: September 30, 2008, 01:02:58 am »
Just bought my first scanner ever so I went nuts scanning all my old sketchbook pieces and art.  The reason for the purchase was the tragic defacing of mostly all my pieces when the apartment flooded a few weeks ago, leaving much of my stuff warped with bled colors and smudged to all hell.  Realized how much it really bummed me to have them ruined like that, so got the scanner to make harddisk / CD / Online backups, not to mention how much more convenient it will be from now on when translating my sketches to digital media from their references (I used to sketch it then completely redraw it looking up and down over and over again.)

Thought I'd just post a few of them, nothing too special.




Both of these were for a flash cartoon I was making a long time ago that I completely abandoned after drawing WAY too much stuff.  I've got tons of these but don't wanna scroll the thread with a bunch of vector art and links to flash player files.  ;D


Drew this in highschool back before I practiced any pixeling or studied it in any way.  Most of it was looking at sprites and mindnumbingly outlined on a handdrawn grid then colored with PrismaColor markers on a 12x12 cardstock sheet.




Got some really amazing artists in this community, I'm grossly happy with google for uniting me with these boards!

263
Challenges & Activities / Re: Hixel it!
« on: September 29, 2008, 03:31:39 pm »


Wanted to do a background for this eventually, smooth out the animation with more frames, and add some more elements to it to adapt into an avatar, but spent long enough on it as is  :-X

Found this hixel idea very intriguing so had to try it out!

264
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Canine Private Eye
« on: September 27, 2008, 11:08:37 am »
Did a quick (ha, yeah right.  takes me almost half an hour per frame) update on the blur effect, and the jacket bulge has returned





Will definitely work on the rest of the frames, wanted to try your advice on the blend, which I found much more polished and sensible.  Thanks!

265
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Canine Private Eye
« on: September 26, 2008, 12:51:45 pm »
Mainly started out as a shticky gag to include with a character concept animation.  Not sure the direction I'd like to take the character when it comes to writing the story for the adventure yet.  It could be a high-tech gun shaped like a bone.  It might be just a bone and this particular dog has way too much of a hyperactive imagination.  For now, though, let's just keep it as a bone that he's gimmickingly holding like a gun :P

And yes, Yo-Yo-Master I agree.  I never planned to keep it how it was with him shoving it back into the jacket just as quickly as he pulled it out.  It was just something I threw in as a placeholder until I draw out the inbetweens from him holding it to it going back in.  With the size of the character, it will likely just be a title screen art splash where he pulls the bone out of his jacket and stays in that pose, never putting it back away.  More than likely I would like to animate him putting it away properly just for the completionist in me.

I hope to work on it a bit more today if I have time between playing with my new gadgets and packing up more of the apartment; preparing for a move in a couple weeks.   :y:

266
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Canine Private Eye
« on: September 26, 2008, 09:36:29 am »
History thus far:

->

-> <-newest


Before going in to redo the rest of the arm frames, I thought I'd take a step back to look at how I'm doing with the whooshy blended arm zoom frames in comparison with the first version.

First draft:

The left one is what it looks like under the layer of other harsher lines and discombobulation that can be seen on the right image.


Second draft:

Kind of looks like somebody smeared chalk and gunpowder across the canvas and called it a day to me still.

I think the blend done on the left image of the first draft was the best I've been able to do to pull off the effect so far, with maybe some more toned down elements from the first draft blend picture to the right carried over.. still cannot arrive at a rendering method that looks cohesive yet, if anybody has any advice for pulling this effect off more fluidly I'd be interested in studying it.  Will work on knocking out the rest of the frames next probably, and if nothing surfaces between now and then I may try doing a representation of the blur on paper or work on it in vector then attempt marrying them into a pixel form.

Thanks for feedback so far once again!  I've enjoyed the learning stages this piece has put me through so far.

267
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Canine Private Eye
« on: September 26, 2008, 03:22:47 am »
Updated version (non-animated) with shading, and considerations of critique / shading resources I went through since the original post:




The whisker holes your edit had were too amazingly adorable to not include so they were adopted.

268
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Canine Private Eye
« on: September 25, 2008, 07:37:56 pm »
Great suggestions, Tremulant, they help out a lot!  The ear fading out of noticibility was something I took a mental note of as it was being worked on but I had completely overlooked it during the export to be posted, so thanks for bringing it back to my attention  ;D

The new feet position and head do make more sense with your edit, going to have to go back and reconsider my body structure approach with him.  Could not find a happy medium that looked right during the initial conceptualization, so I tried framing a stick figure skeleton to show how he sits under the jacket.  Still couldn't find a -perfect- form, but this might give me a better picture to work on.  Will do more updates on it later today, after some packing.

269
Pixel Art / [WIP] Canine Private Eye
« on: September 25, 2008, 03:56:04 pm »
Greetings!  I am a long-time lurker of Pixelation but this will be my first post.  Did not want to make any posts before I had some real work to put up, of which this is my very first item I really put effort and time into!  I always try to dive straight in when learning things so I went ahead and made my first project an animation as well.  I aspire to eventually make an adventure game in the style of the Sierra classics such as Leisure Suit Larry or Space Quest, and this character is likely going to be worked in as the main character of it.  When time to do that comes, the dark outlines will probably be removed and character model simplified a bit to make animating and presence against the background more fluid, but that bridge will be crossed much later.

For now I am simply interested in growing as a pixel artist, and feedback from the members of this outstanding community would be something I consider invaluable criticism!




Some things I know need worked on:

  • The palette is something I am sure could be changed for the better, but what direction I want it to go in is something I find myself unsure of.
  • When the bone gets put back into the jacket, it's just the frames that led up to it playing in reverse.  I might try to at least change a few frames of unique  positions that have him slide the bone back into the jacket instead of the blurred ZOOM frame shoving it back in the same way it came out.  But it flows better than I thought it would when I put it all together, so I thought some criticism may open me up to options I hadn't considered before tweeking.
  • Work on the shading of the character.  Since I didn't get very into the specific details until after I had drawn all the frames of this, I got a bit overwhelmed by trying to go back and try, and didn't want to overdo it when I'm so inexperienced with methods of AA and dithering - feared I'd hurt the presentation more than help it.
  • Smoke rising from the cigar - I planned originally to have smoke waving above the cigar continuously but I'm a little out of my element working with GraphicsGale.  Having been almost exclusively a flash artist when it came to animated graphics, I couldn't find a simple way to have the smoke loop smoothly after defining frame delays.  I didn't have the patient persistence in me to add 40 frames (or however many more it would take) to keep the motion timing that exists already while having consistent timing for changes in the smoke direction.

Thank you in advance to anyone that replies, I had a great time making it!

Edit: My fiancee said "I hope they don't think it's too Sam & Max-y for 'em." "Whatya mean?" "Cus it's a dog in a trench coat."  Had never played the game and never knew about that.  I assure you I did not have the game in mind when I made this  :ouch:

Also, here's the individual frames.  I tried pretty hard to make the blurred arm frame not look like an MS Paint picture some kid took the spray can tool and went to town on.


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