AuthorTopic: Earthworm Jim's "Animotion" Technique  (Read 18033 times)

Offline rikfuzz

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Re: Earthworm Jim's "Animotion" Technique

Reply #10 on: March 06, 2012, 09:11:28 am
I would try and reduce the palette first, then maybe try resizing with RotSprite?  A lot of your problems may just be design problems, and you may need to try enlarging or simplifying important areas. But still, your distorted mess wouldn't be impossible to sprite over, especially with the larger version as a reference.  

Offline yrizoud

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Re: Earthworm Jim's "Animotion" Technique

Reply #11 on: March 06, 2012, 09:46:44 am
You may want to process your picture with a 'Minimum' filter, so that the black outlines get fattened. Then the reduction is more likely to keep those edges as full pixels.

Offline HughSpectrum

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Re: Earthworm Jim's "Animotion" Technique

Reply #12 on: March 06, 2012, 02:28:54 pm
I think I might have gotten it...

Study the actual .gif of the transformation.  Notice on the 2nd and 3rd frames they digital paint over the line art (which is NOT colored before being scanned in) with a palette that's limited and very clean.  If you resample the colored digital art, you'll get a result very similar to the first frame of the .gif where the sprite is small and there is no outline.  They draw an outline after they resample, rather than attempt to fix broken details.

Offline Conzeit

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Re: Earthworm Jim's "Animotion" Technique

Reply #13 on: March 21, 2012, 08:01:17 pm
Amazing, hugh! I've always been a huge fan of EarthWorm Jim's artwork but I never went to the lengths of research you did here, I thank you very much for the work you put to this.
Now all that is left is for us to figure out how they went about making their setpieces into tiles =O

Something that might've made the character's face glitch out so much is how similar your whites are to your skincolors. Look at Jim's very pink skintone, that would never be confused with the white of his eyes, the mouth is pretty far from the eyes and usually includes some strong skintone outlines and black areas beside the white teeth to distinguish it furhter. Pre-planning this sort of color matching would be great, and even if you plan to use black outlines in the final product I think colored outlines like those of Jim's would still be beneficial, as any antialiasing that came from resizing (use of rotsprite mentioned below sounds like a good idea) could serve as base for your cleanups.

You might want to tweak the specific alignment of your character's face features since they all seem to converge on the same area and it just doesnt seem like the sprite form can ever communicate all the detail you have

Can you please update on how your process went? I'm curious about what process you finally chose.
« Last Edit: March 21, 2012, 10:00:54 pm by Conceit »

Offline junkboy

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Re: Earthworm Jim's "Animotion" Technique

Reply #14 on: March 21, 2012, 09:46:19 pm
Am I confused, or are you under the impression that they invented some magical technique to turn drawings into perfect looking pixel art? What they most likely are talking about in the answer you bolded is that each character is made up of several sprites, due to system constraints on the Mega Drive et al.

Offline Rakukojin

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Re: Earthworm Jim's "Animotion" Technique

Reply #15 on: March 22, 2012, 09:06:45 am
I was a bit confused about that quote, which is why I bolded it, but I figured it out. Even though I knew from the start that their process wasn't anything special, I was just really curious. Secretly I wish they did have some magic technique for creating awesome pixel art from drawings ;D

Progress with my own work is slowing down to a crawl because of life, but I found some other images that suggest they did redraw the sprite after scanning and before rescaling. Supposedly, these were part their animation tests.



I guess I just gotta practice more in general, whether it's pixel art or hand drawn.

Offline Conzeit

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Re: Earthworm Jim's "Animotion" Technique

Reply #16 on: March 23, 2012, 12:32:27 am
very nice stuff Rakukojin.

All this talk of EWJ and Sega Magazine has reminded me of another Sega game with very neat timing and drawings, except it attempts emulating human form unlike our cartoony Jim here, it's Comix Zone....

http://vividgamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/comix_zone-suphero.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azIZwsCGjW0

have you ever heard about anyone doing a feature on it like this? it's probably later than EWJ so they might have some added techniques for the scan-optimization of drawings :p...the humanoid fetaures might give you hints on how to fix the cluttered face of your character.

Also...it's kinda unappropiate because we're at pixelation but I cant help but wonder....why are you shrinking your drawings down to pixelart size in the first place? HD art is all the rage now, it's even old news now that GuiltyGear happened so long ago
« Last Edit: March 23, 2012, 03:10:54 am by Conceit »