NES Eyeball boss

[Lazy Brain Games]

Hi all! I've been working on this eyeball boss for quite some time, I feel like he's okay, but certainly not great. I'm not sure what I'm missing.

The character was originally conceived in this pose:


A newly added segment calls for him to just be on the ground. This is where I've been struggling a bit:




I think part of my problem is that the color for the veins and arm things are the same as a shading color (red), so I getting confused where one starts and the other begins. I tried to do some black veins near the back but they seem to have a similar issue. I'm sticking to NES restrictions, so the 3 color thing is kinda killin' me lol.

Anyways, I'm not quite sure what I need to do to get this guy lookin' a bit less odd Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Thanks to all who reply!

-Johnny B.

[YellowLime]

Firstly, in the "original pose", the cable lines are inconsistent between the two frames. This might have been on purpose, but it looks sloppy.

Secondly, and I guess this also was intentional: the iris is about three times smaller than the size it would be in a normal human eye. I point this out because it could contribute to the reason why it looks odd.

About the side view: in a perfectly (or nearly) spherical object, the shades should be . In this case, the white area is irregular (not round). I think you should render the whole white circle and not worry about isolating white bits from the main white area (because they'd be between the red veins and the red shade. I hope you know what I mean).

And finally, the shades are probably too abrupt and might benefit from a little dithering.

I hope this was helpful 

[Lazy Brain Games]

The gif got messed up for the "seated" pose, here's what its supposed to look like:


I get the dithering part of what you're saying, but I'm not quite sure what "in a perfectly (or nearly) spherical object, the shades should be."

Either way, I think I'm just going to do a redesign and take a closer look at human eyes and try to figure out how exactly he's supposed to move on the ground.

Thanks!

-JB

[Applzor]

with the animation of the pipes, you could try having a cartoon style 'bump' the transfers through the pipe to the eyeball.

example:
watch popeye's throat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kpOqrKsXO1k#t=129s

I think what yellow lime is saying is that your eyeball isn't shaded fully and from a top down lighting scenario, you would have a perfectly spherical shadowing on the eyeball

[YellowLime]

Thanks for explaining, Applzor 

When dealing with a completely spherical object, the shades look like circles, one inside another.



There's the first frame of the sideview animation (without the iris). Then, an interpretation of how the shade on the eyeball is, without the "veiny thing" Then I put a messy approximation of how a sphere would be shaded like, and finally, some quick messy dithering to reduce the abruptness of the shades.

[cirpons]

Thanks for explaining, Applzor 

When dealing with a completely spherical object, the shades look like circles, one inside another.



There's the first frame of the sideview animation (without the iris). Then, an interpretation of how the shade on the eyeball is, without the "veiny thing" Then I put a messy approximation of how a sphere would be shaded like, and finally, some quick messy dithering to reduce the abruptness of the shades.

I dont really think the eyeball would benefit from dither, i mean it really breaks the nes style, and there is no need for it what so ever now.

Also, you current sprite takes too much space! it uses 44 8*8 sprites and is 8 sprites wide, if you know the nes restrictions, then you probably know that the screen can only draw 8 sprites per scanline, so you have a problem if in your game it lines up with the character. Plus, 8 of the sprites are only using 6*1 pixels of space in the tile, so i reduced it to 6*6 sprites:



Well, thats only if you REALLY wanna stick to the nes restrictions.

[Lazy Brain Games]

Thanks for all the pointers guys! So, I had to rethink the design as a whole, and do something less goofy, what I came up with is this:



Overall I think its okay, although I'm totally lost in lighting the tentacles. The right tentacle is just a staggered and flipped version of the left tentacle.

I'm working on some jumping and "rolling into a ball" animations as well, but I'm hoping someone might have some pointers on lighting this thing

Thanks so much!

-Johnny B.

[Facet]

Hey, I really like the NES-y fever dream stuff you do, these are proper old-school mutant-robot-monsters.

To get more out of your lighting I'd try separating everything into flat light or shade, thinking solid comicbook shadows. The white I'd promote exclusively to the really important bits and select highlights. Don't be shy about leaving large areas of form in the shadows unmodeled; it'll actually read as more dimensional with less information due to clearer signals. I also removed outlines and the blobby pattern for simplicities sake, you might want to reintroduce some for consistency with other graphics but watch out for single pixel line mid-tones dividing blocks of colour: this fringing is a type of banding that highlights the pixel grid unfavourably (look at the border of the sclera in your original).

I liked the idea of it moving caterpillar-like on those tentacles, the antenna is for extra robo-cool. I missed a trick not adding a nice tight specular or two on the tentacles; give it a go on my behalf!



Trying to clarify the sphere-shading thing:

Disregarding any perspective distortion here for simplicity: the shading of a sphere is actually only going to be a true circle if the light-source is directly aligned with the viewer. Given a single point source, half of the sphere (a dome) is lit at one time; if the light-source is aligned then this lit dome matches the dome of visible surface area; if the light were perpendicular then the lit half would divide the sphere at the centre in a straight line; all the other positions of the terminator are midpoints between the circle and the straight: ellipses. You can picture it accurately by imagining the cross-section through the sphere. Any gradation of tone runs parallel to the terminator so they mirror that ellipse, only smaller.



Edit: I done .gif'd the diagram. Hope that's clearer. Maybe I should have just labelled the first two as 'top' and 'side' out of context though.