GR#026 - Brawler - Sprite Process

[st0ven]

edit: upped the saturation a bit so that the vibrance ive intended to comes across on most monitors
nother edit- really had to adjust some things on the low gamut monitor

I wanted to give a go at something i havent tried in a very long time. A 2d brawler sprite. My figure drawing has sadly only mildly improved over the years, so for you anatomy experts, i definitely would love to hear some of your comments! I havent gone all out to completely finish the sprite so that i would have some energy left to adjust him according to the feedback i receive.

for the sake of conversation, ive also saved some procedural step-by-steps as well to chart my progress along the way.

Step1 : drawing out my character - so this is probably my weakest point here and is probably true for most artists whod want to make a sprite like this. Its not my favorite pose nor the most dynamic, but i thought it was functional enough to work with. Sketched it at about 800x800 pixels for about 30 mins or so and scaled down to the size i wanted to work at



Step2: basic fills - Next i want to choose my overall palette hues. Ive lumped this in with my rough outlining of the lineart in pixels because doing some paint bucket fills hardly qualifies as a step worth explaining. Im picking darker values for most stuff, except for the skin, where i like to pick a midtone in the lighter range of the ramp (pretty much always with skin). Its just a personal thing, but usually i try to keep the values consistent, aka 'use this materials shadow tone and this other materials shadow tone' etc.



Step3: hitting some basic shading. im using the color replacer brush in paintshop pro (which essentially is a value swap brush) so that i dont disturb the rough lineart too much more than it already is. I am trying to keep the contrast pretty high (note it could probably be a bit higher).


Step4 : just colored some outlines here so that theyre not all black - this sprite isnt the best example for the relevance of this step :/


Step5: adding first blending values. Trying to smooth out my shapes and give it some softness where needed.


Step6: addin other values and hit with highlights - err i combined this stage but it should be seperate i guess. if i had gone through and finished it it would probably be worth separating into two stages.


it was certainly a fun exercise to get here but there are some small details that im just not that confident about. in particular the forearm musculature, the fist in the foreground, and some of the specifics of pantfolding. of course if theres anything else glaring that im missing too feel free to comment ^_^.

[Reo]

Looks wonderful...except for all the banding on the legs
cool to see your progress!

[EvilEye]

Very nice. Reminds me of a KOF sprite. Nice work on the baggy clothes.

Something about the forearm did not look right to me and it took me a long time of looking through reference photo's to find out what it was. I did an edit that I think explains it.

The shoes are pretty bad. I included a non-detailed edit of how they should probably look, though I'm no feet master myself.

The left heel was too far off the ground for a stance like that I think.

Edit:



A couple of other things.

I think his right hand looks a little smaller then his left hand. In fact it almost appears that his right hand is behind his left hand. The left hand just stands out for some reason, maybe because of all the dark shadow near the right hand. In the final edit you might darken his left hand a bit to make the right hand pop into the foreground. And the right hand looks a bit misshapen now that I think of it.

It's one of those difficult things to measure, but the entire left forearm may be bigger then the right one, this could account for the left arm coming to the foreground more then the right one.

Or it's possible I may have been staring at it too long too , I'm open to second opinions.

*EDIT*

Meant right hand not left hand sorry

[Helm]

Hi, stoven. This is a pretty wonderful sprite. I think there's a few problems, though. Here's my edit



It seems to me you hug your lineart too much with the available shades you've got, especially on 45 degree diagonals. This not only creates banding, it also makes everything blurry looking and indistinct. A fighter sprite should have some edges, right?

The second frame of the animation is a circling of a lot of places where there's banding for you to inspect in your pixel app of choice. I've written extensively on banding and I don't know if you're aware of the concept and to what degree. There's a lot of ways to remove banding, most of them rely on *doubling* the antialias, or *removing* the antialias. Before you look at how I solved the problems, I suggest you take a stab yourself and then compare with my solutions.

There's a few other things I dealt with. On the pants, I don't know what type of material you were going for but I found that removing some contrast and the pillowhuggy lighter shade helped a lot. I don't think you need more highlights than those in the pants. I added a color in the shirt instead, which I felt was sorely missing.

On the skin color before you shout 'oh this helm and his constant tinting', there's a reason I did the tint. I've found in a lot of film that people with dark skin tend to get desaturated teal/grey highlights.



I thought it was worth a try.

A lot of your highlights on the arms don't follow the shapes they belong to, they instead look like large, indistinct speculars. And because you hug the single pixel with a square's worth of antialias, you end up with banded highlights.

A lot of my critique is based on that this is a showcase piece as it is, not animated, not in a game. In a game situation the eye probably won't have enough time to be bothered by a lot of the things I critique, but I'm not sure that's a good enough reason to disregard the issues anyway.

Hope I helped.


edit: as far as the foreward arm looking off, I used this reference



to do this

[st0ven]

EvilEye: yes THANKS! that forearm posture looks much better to me. Also, now that youve edited what a pair of bobo's should look like when rendered in pixels (i completely agree) - im thinking of taking it a step further and making them a bit more flashy overall, maybe whites with some reds and maybe even yellow? that could be neat!

Helm: Very indepth analysis. first glance i think both you and evileye give a better angle on that back foot for sure. As for the banding - im going to read your thread, but before that im going to state that im aware that there were areas that werent yet super crisp. However, after reading your thread on it, i can see that its quite a bothersome trait to be found ^_^ ill take a pass at that for sure. I really like the feeling your shirt has, though in some placesi t felt like it was a bit too much more detail than i wanted to convey - i think though it looks empty on mine by comparison. i had contemplated using a bit more lineart in the shadows to convey some more cloth folding there. will readdress that. I do agree that dark skin usually has a particularly alluring quality to reflect greyish/sometimes blueish highlights in natural lighting. ill see what i can do to integrate that.

[Tuna Unleashed]

helm's colour change is definitely the way to go. also, this is more of a style thing, but i find the variable line thickness on the original sketch much more appealing than the 1px all the way through outline.