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Messages - SwapBrain
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41
General Discussion / Re: Pixel Fonts
« on: September 10, 2010, 07:50:11 am »
http://pentacom.jp/soft/ex/font/edit_canvas.html

This is a link to an online bitmap font creator I cam across a bit back - it is bare-bones but if it doesn't totally suit your needs it may at least give you a rapid prototyping tool.

42
Pixel Art / Re: Metools!
« on: September 10, 2010, 02:34:07 am »
If you are doing a 'dark metool' as in Evil Ryu or Shin Akuma, then I think they tend to use a dark purple or gunmetal.

It might look something mhrrrrrrrlikethis;



Probably darker.

43
Pixel Art / Re: Tree
« on: September 09, 2010, 02:10:57 am »
A key to any form of self-expression, artistic or otherwise, is the faculty for observation. This is because at its root nearly all expression is a form of communication, and if the subject of the communication is not mutually intelligible then it fails. The fastest route to mutual intelligibility is proper reference of common experience, i.e. the world around us. The failure to observe and communicate shared experience creates a lot of bad, bad art.

Not to beat this horse much longer, but the reason you need to go back to the world and draw actual trees that you actually experience in person is while you may have an intuitive and/or symbolic understanding of what a tree is, but you seem to have no real understanding of a tree as a process or a holistic system of objects and processes, or, in other words, why trees do what it is that trees do? Why do trees have roots? bark? leaves? why do they grow up rather than sideways (except when they grow sideways, and then, why do they do that?) The answers to these questions, far from being academic, will help inform and improve your art, I promise.

By way of illustration and entertainment I present an excerpt from Mark Twain's essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences":

Quote
If Cooper had been an observer his inventive faculty would have worked better; not more interestingly, but more rationally, more plausibly. Cooper's proudest creations in the way of "situations" suffer noticeably from the absence of the observer's protecting gift. Cooper's eye was splendidly inaccurate. Cooper seldom saw anything correctly. He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly. Of course a man who cannot see the commonest little every-day matters accurately is working at a disadvantage when he is constructing a "situation." In the "Deerslayer" tale Cooper has a stream which is fifty feet wide where it flows out of a lake; it presently narrows to twenty as it meanders along for no given reason, and yet when a stream acts like that it ought to be required to explain itself. Fourteen pages later the width of the brook's outlet from the lake has suddenly shrunk thirty feet, and become "the narrowest part of the stream." This shrinkage is not accounted for. The stream has bends in it, a sure indication that it has alluvial banks and cuts them; yet these bends are only thirty and fifty feet long. If Cooper had been a nice and punctilious observer he would have noticed that the bends were often nine hundred feet long than short of it.


The whole essay which is worth the read and easily available online is, in fact, a rebuttal to willful amateurism, something that I know that I, for one, need to be careful of.

44
General Discussion / Re: Official Off-Topic Thread
« on: September 08, 2010, 02:54:30 am »
True dat. Plus it would be expensive to host all of the 1024x780 bmps where someone posted once and never again. I went through the ramblethread, the featured threads, the challenges, and a heap more, but I am the kind of person who reads the textbook before the first day of class, if you know what I mean.

Anyhow, fwiw there have been tons of gems in there.

45
General Discussion / Re: Official Off-Topic Thread
« on: September 07, 2010, 04:20:39 pm »
If this is the wrong place to post this, sorry - please move it.

So, I am a firm believer in lurking more - I have been trying to go through the pixel art forums sequentially from the beginning, I know it is the nature of the beast, the past is past, etc, but there are a huge number of threads that have been rendered effectively useless by broken links and missing images.

I am sure I am not the first to gripe about it, it is just sad.

That is all.

46
Pixel Art Feature Chest / Re: Dwarf Fortress Platformer Mockup
« on: September 03, 2010, 02:33:43 pm »
Sorry if posting on a topic this old is bad form.

I just wanted to say that I really like this and think it suits the tone of DF pretty well.

One thing that may help it appear more lively is to represent veins of ore running through - this would give you the opportunity to play with color and texture. Also, while I like the color for the flat background, if you could add something to up the visual interest without making it too busy that might help. Lastly, in terms of the individual tiles,  you might make them a little more dynamic, so that the lines internal to the tiles carry the eye from one to the next and so on, kind of like text. As it stands the eye sort of seems to get trapped by the pattern overall, but that is just, like, my opinion, man.

A good reference, since it seems to fit the overall style you have going here are some of the more recent side-scrolling Castlevanias - SOTN and the GBA titles in particular.

IN fact, it occurs to me that the Castlevania brand on gothic horror (gothic in the original sense) is particularly suitable for DF due to the inevitable fun you face.

DF is one of my current obsessions and I am mightily disappointed by many of the existing tilesets.  I saw that in General Discussions a DF tileset project had been kicked around and I would like to also express my interest in such a project. On the other hand this may be a case of my reach exceeding my grasp.

Incidentally, my inclination is to think that Zelda-style would work better than isometric.

Additionally your mock-up made me think of how well a DF-themed Lemmings would work (particularly appropriate based on how dwarves often act).

Regards,

Edwin


47
Pixel Art / Pixel Practice Excercises C+C
« on: September 02, 2010, 03:28:44 pm »
These are both images I picked to practice pixeling. Done using The Gimp.

The first is from page 21 of the Dover edition of Constructive Anatomy by George B Bridgman http://www.archive.org/stream/constructiveanat00briduoft#page/40/mode/2up (it ends up being on page 40 on the online version):


The second is a portion of Hive by James Jean (http://www.jamesjean.com/blog/C47057/hive)


In both cases I picked someone else's content so I could focus on technique without fretting over the original too much.

I am actively working on the second, though I will take C+C/suggestions on either.

Thanks,

Edwin

48
General Discussion / Re: Read the Rules, then introduce yourself here.
« on: September 02, 2010, 03:14:15 pm »
Hello, I'm Edwin, always enjoyed pixel art on its own terms nack in my NES/SNES days and want to experiment with it now as a medium.

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