AuthorTopic: Altered Beast - a cluster study  (Read 38179 times)

Offline Carnivac

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Re: Altered Beast - a cluster study

Reply #20 on: December 01, 2012, 02:39:33 pm

Would you care to critique my take and receive some critique for your take of the sprite?

If you want but after reading some of your comments on other people's edits I think there's a lot of personal preference in all of this.   There's certainly things I do not agree with on some of the edits that you do it seems.
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Offline Helm

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Re: Altered Beast - a cluster study

Reply #21 on: December 01, 2012, 04:03:20 pm
Well, sure, it's all preference. I'm just interested in whether some things have been brought up to your attention. I'm not interested in changing your methods. For example



Is it a matter of preference you are omitting a very characteristic muscle (check Arnold reference) when you draw arms? In this way the arm you drew looks insectoid, somehow. Of course that muscle could be more or less developed from steroid abuser to steroid abuser, we know body building is not a natural process of muscle growth, but it's just something to keep in mind :)

Offline Carnivac

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Re: Altered Beast - a cluster study

Reply #22 on: December 01, 2012, 07:20:44 pm
Yeah, I tend to leave that middle muscle out a lot to the point I do sometimes forget it completely even when I shouldn't.  I don't often consider it that important myself (and I assume other people feel the same as I've seen it ignored on many large pictures and as you say on some men it's not even that well developed when the rest of the arm is).  For this sprite though I just flat out ignored it for space reasons and to define the arm using just the main bicep and tricep for the shape and the bicep itself as a sorta focal point to show his supposed strength, particularly with the arm bent like that to make it look a lil swollen and ready to beat up some... weird... monster things...  in a really clumsy manner...

This be one of those games where it sounds cool in concept but just didn't work for me.  Can't be the age of it though cos Final Fight only came out the next year and I still love playing that, especially on PSN (almost always a second player to play it with online).  It's a torturous game as I was reminded when I received the Mega Drive version again as a freebie on PS+ and tried to get some trophies.   Actually it's the kind of game I feel deserves a good remake to fulfil the idea's true potential.  I remember Konami's Metamorphic Force was like a cross between this and their Turtles/X-Men/Simpsons games and was a lot more enjoyable.  Sega must have been really short of choice when it came to picking the game that would be supplied in the first release of the Mega Drive as a 'showcase' game that would wow all the 8-bit console owners and convince them to 'upgrade'.  Though my Mega Drive ended up being pretty much a Streets of Rage 2 machine.  I enjoyed some other games but overall I was more into the SNES's seemingly greater variety.

Anyways I'd never say I was an expert with anatomy though and I have been meaning to do some more sketch practices.  I did use to have a dynamic figure anatomy book but that went up with flames with a lot of my other posessions at the time several years ago.  :(   It is something that has been on my mind though with my frustration with a lot of modern cartoons that in my opinion over-simplify character design and form and have me missing the greater detail of older cartoons, particularly those of the 1980's (ok so the animation often wasn't great but I still prefer a lot of the actual character design work on stuff like ThunderCats and Visionaries to most of the stuff in the last 15 years or so... I let the Bruce Timm DC cartoons from Batman TAS to JLU off the hook cos I loves them).  But yeah that's probably just my own tastes.


Man, I'm terrible at explaining stuffs.  I tend to do what I feel rather than what I think.   ???
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Offline Conzeit

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Re: Altered Beast - a cluster study

Reply #23 on: December 01, 2012, 07:29:27 pm
First thing I thought of when I considered doing this, was a modern  far more beefcakian sprite, that isnt even garish at all.

Leo From Warzards


Regardless of how ridiculously beefcake it is we dont mind at all, I think because it's more succesful at imitating what a barbarian beefcake game ought to imitate

Frank Frazetta

There's something undoubtably Frazetta that works regardless of color limitation, strong undiffused lightrource on top and good action lines in posing. So I set out to imitate frazetta with Altered Beast limitations.

my hi-Contrast Altered...Barbarian

Nothing here related to pixels, just hi contrast and a tweaked pose, but I think it already makes for good Barbarian Beefcake gameart. The pose tweak was minor, I think it would work without it but I would've been frustrated working with that horrid pose without tweaking it even a little insignificant bit.

This is the way I pixeled it.

I did the best I could pixelwise, but I'm out of shape so it might not be the best.

EDIT: higher contrast sprite

I wanted to make the shading more Frazetta-ish...and I also tried to make his face more AncientGreek/Roman than Amerigan/English...


He ended up looking a bit like a Charlton Heston in a purple dyed Liono getup...right?
« Last Edit: December 01, 2012, 10:39:44 pm by Conceit »

Offline Redshrike

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Re: Altered Beast - a cluster study

Reply #24 on: December 02, 2012, 02:22:05 am

Nothing terribly profound here.  I kind of liked a bit of the softness of the original sprite, since it made me think of him as having a solid layer of fat over the muscle (sort of a trucker physique?).  I tried to emphasize that some with mine, to rather mixed success.  I wish I had more time to work on it, but finals are coming up...  :(

Offline Conzeit

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Re: Altered Beast - a cluster study

Reply #25 on: December 02, 2012, 04:26:38 am
hahaha that is awesome Redshrike. it reminds me of something I saw in a documentary which said that in the time of Vikings you could eventually have some time of hunger, so having no fat would seem like a weakness, so most likely Vikings champions would be fat and they would imagine Thor and other gods as fat hahahah. Your sprite would seem to fit right in with that :p dunno if it applied to romans or barbarians tho :p

Offline yaomon17

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Re: Altered Beast - a cluster study

Reply #26 on: December 02, 2012, 05:37:34 am

Offline Geti

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Re: Altered Beast - a cluster study

Reply #27 on: December 02, 2012, 07:09:44 am

Here's as far as I got in 30min, not happy with the front shoulder or the far leg, really. could probably shave a pixel off the eye. Didn't like the brown pointy shoes, or how dickless his crotch was in the original.

@Conceit: good inspiration, but I think your final sprite is godawful  :( Your intermediate one is much better.

Offline rikfuzz

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Re: Altered Beast - a cluster study

Reply #28 on: December 02, 2012, 12:33:05 pm
I actually really like the original sprite despite it's flaws   :lol:  I really like large areas of flat colours in sprites, it was a shame to lose some of that with my typical pixel placement rules. Nothing super unusual here, as I kept the silhouette mostly in-tact, but I guess you can see a bit more definition:


Offline Adam

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Re: Altered Beast - a cluster study

Reply #29 on: December 02, 2012, 08:06:49 pm
Looked interesting, so I gave it a try too. That low contrast palette is really hard to work with.


Helm: I like the way you sculpted the legs. Great volumes. I think I will study it a bit longer.
Nice. Now do the whole thing with the EGA palette!