Cube and Sphere critique please

[hachimannpixel]

Hi Im new to the community, Im a digital artist and Im trying my hand at pixel art, could I please get a critique of these simple primitives that i created? for instance are they accurate and your opinion on the shading and colour palette?

Im trying to improve and master the basics so any criticism to improve is helpful!

thanks

[Vinik]

They are competent studies on solids, the cube is better, the sphere needs work. You might want to experiment with different light positions for the cube, and also with different alignments, like front aligned cubes, or trimetric perspectives.

As for the sphere, the shading cells are a bit too many and too evenly spaced I believe. If you were aiming to keep a matching material with the cube, it would be best to have less bands, two larger areas for a light and a dark shade at most, a highlight and, perhaps,  if you are looking for a challenge, a terminator, but that is not so easy to tackle with pixels. Look for references on spherical shading on art guides, spherical objects on your house, and maybe even rendered "toonshaded" 3d meshes on google to get a feeling of how spheres are typically made on pixel art.

[hachimannpixel]

Thanks Vanik, i should have mentioned that I had no intentionto have the cube and the sphere be the same material. I'll work on the sphere study as you suggested having less bands and less reguarly spaced. It was my thinking that more bands would create a more denser looking sphere though.

[pistachio]

On sphere. 2 things.

1:
Via Arne:
(Oldie but a goodie. As simple as it has become, and remains, I recommend it.)



As you can see it's not just that you have your light steps spaced out evenly. It's that outside of an indexed form like pixel art, it would show a weak color identity (left example). It should show like the right example.
Basically most solid materials like what you are trying to portray could be broken down into a diffuse and specular component.
Pretty complex math as to how they are balanced, I won't get into that (as far as I understand it).
But chances are you're not going to get blown out highlights like left without killing the balance between the two.
More intuitively like I said (and as image shows) it also kills color identity.

2.
Highlights don't work like this. They wrap around a form, they're not flat like here.
Also if the light is coming from the angle I think it is it should be closer to center.
There was a good diagram on this and I'll dig it up if I can find it. But basically specular does not reflect to our eyes from where it hit, but from halfway between that and our view (in 3D jargon it is view-dependent). That's basically what sets it apart from diffuse reflection.

Try out a few more materials, this stuff can be fun.

[Decroded]

headline: don't evenly space the bands of ur gradients.

there's lots of detail behind this, different materials etc. but hopefully that starts u on a path of discovery.
u can get photos or make 3d renders of objects with various materials, then colour reduce them and u will see how gradients are rarely linear in life.

[pistachio]

@Decroded, yeah, this is basically what I'm getting at (welcome back btw.)

Quick ex:



To show you plastic-like stuff in pixel form.

[Vinik]

For the record, this is what I meant by my first description of a similar material to the cube in spherical shape. I am not sure if I did it right but that is how I would render the toon feel of the that clean cube material into a sphere. I think the even spacing artifact is somewhat related to banding, as in not selling the shape and make it plain.