First let me start off by thanking you, snake, for the time and effort you put into your C+C. The following isn't for the sake of bashing in any way, but instead are things that i believe are valid arguments. I've noticed, in some form or another, the things you have said while i was creating this peice, but chose to do otherwise for very specific reasons. let me explain...
here is the skeleton you traced of mine plus your edited skeleton to the right of it.
lets start off with the legs:
there are two things you did wrong or didn't realise when tracing my image to get that skeleton. Firstly, you drew the hip line a bit low which then exaggerates the shortness of the upper legs, but this is only the minor issue. Secondly - when looking at your traced skeleton, one can easily say that the upper legs look too short, however, those lines are not taking into account fore-shortening. Since they are nothing but lines, the eye can't easily comprehend the foreshortening. I have drawn the two leg scenarios (from the traced skeleton + your 'fixed' one) you have presented from your skeleton in a side-view perspective. Now to support my case, we'll just be doing a little triangle mathematics. As you can see, with the upper leg being more horizontal in this scenario, the actual height that you'd be able to see from a front view is roughly 24 pixels, while the lower leg - being more verticle - we would see about 32. now in your edit, you changed the posture that the legs are in, which just about flips the amount of pixels seen respectively; the upper leg now has 32 visible pixels from a frontal view and the lower leg now has 24. The actual length of the leg segments remained roughly constant, but the visible amount of them does not. Your edit is not wrong by any means. It just shows a different possible pose the legs can be in. Either way is a right way, but saying that my upper legs are too short is not a very solid argument to give reason to change it. But given if i was to change the legs according to your edit - alot of your other balance and posture critiques/edits would make more sense. also notice (at the bottom left of the image) that when adding cylinder forms according to the skeleton you provided, it doesn't look half as bad as without them. This is because we could comprehend the foreshortening more easily. I will give you this, though: The actual design of the sprite may seem more appealing if the lower-legs were shortened. and also i'll have to play around with what you said about moving his left (our right) foot more to the right.
The arms:
As i agree with you about his left arm - like you said, it's not exactly wrong the way i have it. I dont find it important to change it since that arm is nicely designed as its currently placed.
The shoulder:
2 things i'd have to argue about with the shoulder. Firstly, I actually had the shoulder sticking more out, as you suggested, in an older version of this sprite. The reason I had changed it was pretty simple. I used the horrizontal-flip-test to see what was looking arong with the sprite and noticed that it was the shoulder that wasn't following the perspective of the rest of my sprite and was throwing it partially off-ballance. (see bottom right of image) I shrunk it a bit to fix this problem. Secondly - i imagine the ork sort of arching his back in a concave manner while roaring. That was my intention - but if i didn't portray that well enough, that might be one problem. But with that in mind, this would also cause the shoulder to be a bit more hidden given perspectives. See the top-view sketch i drew to demonstrait what i was aiming for with the back.
lastly - the two pose sketches you provided are good, but aren't exactly what i was going for. the first one is a bit too stiff, and the other is a bit too rag-doll. I was aiming for a sort of tense/roar type stance as mentioned earlier. I'll also keep in mind the thing you said about the blue shade in SF3 style.
now let me reiterate that i'm not trying to be a prick and just give a bunch of reasons why not to edit my sprite. I'm not trying to do the whole "i'm right, your wrong - no matter what you say" thing. But i do believe these are valid points that I have. If someone else (a well credited one, i might add) where to come here and second the things you say, i'll be glad to give em a try.
alrighty, i'm out for now
