Altered Beast - a cluster study

[API-Beast]

The main issue with it is the lighting. Modified the colors a bit, has less colors than the original now though

[ptoing]

You strayed from the muscle physique quite a bit there Mr. Beast. Mainly by making his head so big, and also the positioning of the arm on the right does not read as strong. Also he looks quite alien in a way without a discernible nose and ears.

[API-Beast]

Well, the parts you mentioned looked very wrong to me on the original (anatomy wise) that's why I changed them. The head was kinda rushed so here is a version with slightly more work put into it.

[ptoing]

Don't you think they know that a tiny head and a physique of almost 9 heads tall is not realistic? It clearly is stylised to make him, as Helm stated above, look super human.

[Jeremy]

[PixelPiledriver]

I think the idea with tinyhead is to accentuate the beefy muscles

I agree increasing the head size doesn't necessarily improve the sprite. (unless its huge!)
The tiny head is appealing in the same way I find PJack to be.

the parts you mentioned looked very wrong to me on the original

While this might be an educated observation, don't let it be your sole guide for designing characters.
Anatomy is an important topic.
But exaggeration of proportions injects tons of character, and in a lot of ways emulates what "real" people look like.

It's interesting in your process you took the background arm closer to the chest but you put it back out later, is it to keep the silluette readable?

Yes, exactly.
While i like the fist pulled in tight I felt showing the space between the upper and lower arm was also good.
With animation both positions could work.

[pistachio]

I totally made him an 80s wrestler,

EDIT, BROTHER



Worked on making the musculature less "ball-and-joint" like, specifically the delts and biceps.
Avoided defining everything with 1px lines. Both to moderate success.
The stance is also a bit forward-leaning now.

That third level of shading (or the musculature it suggests) on the left leg seems misplaced/overexposed.
Boots refined, but their suggested construction seems wonky up close.
Left forearm too curved. Right forearm should be longer.
Cranium squashed by 1px, but the head's a gag anyway.

To be edited...

[Lóng]

My humble attempt:

[Reo]

a quick attempt by me. Tried making the head a bit more masculine and well defined. The legs are quite plain (partially because of my inexperience in leg anatomy) but I think it works with the rest of the sprite.

[Helm]

While I made many notes about the clusters, I didn't change any anatomy -- partially why I'm a bit underwhelmed with my edit



I noticed a few things:

- Foot on the right was very long and very pointed; looked unnatural.
- Arm on (our) right is very loosely defined, and while I didn't change much, adding just a bit more of the darker midtone helped a bit.
- Kneecaps and visible part of the shins were not really defined at all, did a quick touch up there.
- I had quite some trouble on the arm on (our) left -- I should have used references in order to better define some realistic-looking muscles, which the original did not really have.
- Belt blends into the arm colors too much, my edit doesn't fix it that much, but it's somewhat improved.
- After looking at Ptoing's edit, I realize that his crotch area isn't very defined in order to show male "assets" -- I didn't do much with that myself though, because I finished my edit before looking at the ones already posted in order to see what I could do on my own.
- While I was timid to fix this in my edit, the darkest color on the skin-colored ramp was very underused and could have been used to greatly defined muscle groups (which all of the edits previous to mine seemed to do.)
- Very many banding problems; not terribly noticeable however with the given skin-tone ramp colors, which didn't contrast much, at least not at 1x viewing.  At 2x it jumps out a bit.  Not much staircase banding, but a lot of fat pixel/long fat pixel banding groups.

Hopefully my written analysis will make up for my below-par edit   I think I'm going to do a better one sometime tomorrow having seen what many of you guys have done.  I think I'll challenge myself more on the next one, going for a more complete transformation.

Also, speaking of colors, I think many pixel-level decisions may be different for this sprite considering how close together some of the colors are -- I wonder what the edits would look like if the colors were like this:



Food for thought, perhaps.

All your observations were also my own. On arms, I used this reference which is era-specific



Check my sprite again to see how I tried to negotiate these shapes of the upper left arm in that cramped space.



Also, haha, you gave him aerobic workout legwarmers? Hahah


Jeremy, check out this area in particular in your edit



pistachio, the arms in your edit are close to the best in the thread I think, you'd need to fix that curved left forearm, though.