GR#197 - Golden Knight - Shading, Animation

[jahasaja]

Hi all,

I am trying to make a golden knight. But i cannot seem to figure out the correct colouring to make the gold truly shine.

I am not finished with the shadowing of the piece since I thought that first need to figure out the colours..

If anybody has an idea I would be very happy.

Thanks in advance.

[looaks]

I made a quick edit adding some contrast and shifting the palette towards brown.
I hope it helps.

[astraldata]

  <-- palette + lighting edit

<-- lighting only edit

(NOTE: I only modified the lighting on the chest/shoulder areas and some very slight modifications to the head and back portions of the silhouette's animation)

(I also tweaked the shines on your legs and your little tassel animation on the helmet for fun. ;P)



For the most part, you're doing a fairly decent job. The main issue is that your lighting is a bit extreme on the turns to the left/right for no apparent reason and this makes adding contrast very difficult due to only having a limited number of shades to work with. Even with ultra-shiny metal, there are still shadows and planes that must be accounted for.

With that said, your only other problem is that the palette lacks interesting colors and contrast. With my edit of your palette, I darkened the yellow next to the white, and went just past red, stopping just short of a purple hue at a rust red, with some of the shadows (making them more of a rusty red than a red-brown emphasizes the gold 'tint' on the metal when saturation is added and the rust color is darkened.)

There are many more additional improvements that can be made over the rest of the sprite, but my edits were meant to show you the main problems with your coloring/lighting by using the chest and shoulder area of the animation as an example of how to do the lighting of the forms more clearly. And although I understand the appeal in adding a lot of light/shadows to your turning in 3d, do this only when there is extreme movement into the third dimension (such as on the sword) because the number of palette entries (not to mention the amount of effort) will increase exponentially the more levels of depth you add to your sprite's coloring.

It's usually best to simply fake fancy 3d color depth like this by using extra palette entries only for certain limbs/attachments, and implement the forms with 3d planes and heavy contrast in your lighting (such as on the chest/shoulder areas of my edit) in order to keep from increasing the number of colors too much (which is why I didn't edit the entire animation -- too much work keeping up with all those similar color values). If you look closely at my chest and shoulder animation, I used 4-5 colors to indicate the 3d-form of the distance between both shoulders across the entire animation.

Since the additional color entries were there, I also tweaked them with a little more red to separate them from the yellow, to give the metal a bit more of a metallic feel, but please note that I spent zero time working on the forms and lighting after tweaking these entries, so they look slightly odd across the animation in certain places -- I meant only to show you ways to make the palette more interesting and let you play with that new palette to practice tweaking the additional forms/lighting in the animation.

[Night]

Try to add refection from the red crest on the helmet, from the background and armor itself as well, and keep the contrast between the brightest and darkest colours pretty high.
Also the colour palette needs some work, mainly reducing it so it'd be easier to work with, but it's not a major issue, perhaps making it a bit more yellow and stronger contrast would help.

[Manupix]

My take:



Saturation to the max, more contrast, highlights to white, hue shifting the yellows toward red as they get darker.

Other problems that I barely started to address (or not at all): too many colors;  inefficient shading (patches of bright and dark colors unrelated to volumes); wrong anatomy (proportions and pose); unclear/unrealistic armor details (look for references!)

[astraldata]

Left the head alone for the most part and really didn't spend any time cleaning up stray pixels and whatnot, but I had some free time so I addressed some other parts of the body's lighting for fun to give you an idea of how to go about it.

One important thing about metal speculars is that they stay still as the contour rotates. This is because they are generally relative to the viewer's eye relative to the location of the light-source in space, which shines on, and is reflected off the object toward the viewer. The intensity of all speculars on the sprite must take this direction into account as the object rotates in space -- note where the light gathers into a specular on the elbow and forearm of the closest arm.

Texture (like in Night's edit) can be added later once you have a better feel for lighting the overall forms. For now, I made sure not to modify the character much so you can get a sense of how to light the forms yourself a little better.

Thought about doing a BSG Cylon red-eye scanning back and forth but I somehow managed to resist the temptation. Go me! ;P

[wolfenoctis]

Metals are far darker than you might suppose, their "shiny" quality stems from the fact that their highlights have a high degree of contrast vs their base colors:

[jahasaja]

Wow Thanks for you all for your help!!


Looaks: I like your edit, it is similar to mine. However, I liked Astraldata and Manupix idea of using read to make it more shiny so I went with that idea.

Night: Like your edit too, However, it does not fit with the rest of the games style.

Wolfenoctis I wish my characters could be as good as yours.. I also try do make some of the parts darker but perhaps not enough?

Okay, I redid the animation with the help astraldata's edit as well as his colours and looked a lot a manupix's. I hope it is okay that I used you legs astraldata as well as the animation of the red flag thing.

I kept the shadowing exaggerated. I know it is not realistic but I think it add some depth to the animation. I also moved the specular.. I know it should not move as much but I think it also gives it some depth.

I also doubled the number of frames and just made one extra bright to give it some spark. 

So what do you think?

[astraldata]

It's a pretty bright flash of light -- like an explosion or something is going off in front of him or something -- and probably a bit too intense for the desired effect.

I would suggest a random sparkle or two around the sprite in the game engine before I'd suggest doing something like this sheen every step. It's very distracting in my opinion. I suppose it could work if he were an enemy that gave a special power-up or a score boost -- then it would be okay to draw the eye to him. Outside of that sort of context though, I really would advise against the flash and use a sparkle instead if you simply want some sparkle aesthetic.

Aside from that, it looks much better -- definitely has a 'gold' appearance now.

The one thing I would suggest is being careful with putting the specular at the very edge of the chest/helment like that -- it really flattens areas of the character into planes, making it look like separate pieces of flat sheets of metal when you reach the brightest points of the animation. As mentioned before, highlight speculars tend to gather into a point on the curve of a surface, but when you have long speculars such as those on the front of the chest and helmet, it's best to keep them off of the very edge like that -- once again, it creates the look of a flat sheet of metal. It really fights against the 3d depth you seem to be going for.

Finally, not sure if it was intentional or not, but there are some flickers of pixels here and there in your sprite (on the wrist/sword/hand) just in case you didn't notice.

[jahasaja]

Thanks again for all your help!

Yeah I agree with the specular. I changed iT on the breast plate to get a better roundness. I still kept it on the helm I think it looks okay there even though I agree with the flatness.

Thanks for finding the stray pixels (too many frames).

I changed the spark effect into several frames to make it less like an explosion. Perhaps it still too much but the game only has one enemy on the screen at any given time so they should be in the centre.

[Probo]

im no expert, but i dont think youd get that full-surface 'flash' effect on a suit of armour, its more for when flat surfaces revolve and face the light source like a mirror or a gold coin. which is probably why your knight looks a bit splatted, youve shaded it for the effect you had in mind, but that doesnt line up with the actual shapes of the knight

[Manupix]

im no expert, but i dont think youd get that full-surface 'flash' effect on a suit of armour, its more for when flat surfaces revolve and face the light source like a mirror or a gold coin.

This. It's nice on the sword though.
Good improvement!

[HarveyDentMustDie]

When I see this animation I feel that helmet is like axe head (sharp on the front and wide at the back). This is all because of the lighting. When something is darker eye thinks it's farther away from light source. Vertical yellow line on front of the helm is much brighter than the rest of the helmet in most frames, which make it look sharp. I don't know if anyone else notices this, but it makes helmet looks very flat (in 3d sense).

[astraldata]

Looks a lot better spread over a few frames like that for his sword/upper-body, but the style of flash on his legs and none on his waist really makes it look inconsistent. It'd just about be better off removed if you want to keep it like that on the lower half of his body.

Vertical yellow line on front of the helm is much brighter than the rest of the helmet in most frames, which make it look sharp. I don't know if anyone else notices this, but it makes helmet looks very flat (in 3d sense).

Yeah, I mentioned this in my previous crit, but he said he agrees with the flatness but wants to keep it.

I suppose I've seen some helmets that are fairly sharp-ish on the front, so all I can assume is that's what sort of helmet he's trying to reference.

[jahasaja]

Peer pressure got to me. And it was for the best, the helmet looks better (I think.. I am getting kind of blind looking at the same thing over and over)

as for the sparkling effect on the legs, I totally agree that was more a test than anything.



Probo and Manupix, if I understand you correctly you think that the "spark" effect makes it look flat. I agree with you to a point but it is more there for the gold material and I do not think it takes away the 3d feeling too much. But maybe I am wrong as I said I have grown blind looking at this walk animation.

[PixelPiledriver]

He's waddling a bit.
Try opposing his arms and legs.
Also go pick up a stick and try walking like that.
It kinda works.
But definitely feels weird.

[astraldata]

@jahasaja
Looks much much better dude.

Might want to bring out the shine on the legs too at around the same time as the upper-body, but do what PPD says first before you bother with that:

Try opposing his arms and legs.

Heh, I didn't mention that yet because I kinda liked the 'robotic' look to it and I figured somebody else would beat me to it anyway.

I was kinda right... I just didn't expect it to take this long lol xP


With that said, I also sort of assumed it was possessed or magically controlled since he mentioned it was an enemy, and so the walking with stiff legs/back/etc. added to that characterization, which, in such a case, wouldn't look too off -- I wouldn't think even a skilled magician controlling it from afar wouldn't have great/perfect control over human locomotion anyway.

If there's a real human in there, then that movement does look a little wonky -- but I doubt it'd take much more than copy/pasting the upper-body and lower-body on opposite frame-timings since the lower and upper-body look like they were made separately for the most part anyway. Just make a new animation with only the upper body in it and paste the legs where they belong (i.e. on leaning right, left foot back and right foot forward, and vice-versa).

[jahasaja]

Thanks for all the help! you guys or girls are amazing.

Yeah you right about the balance. In the version in the game the lower and higher body will be detached so I did not pay much attention to that yet.

Here is a version with the correct feet. (some pixels seems wrong I will fix that)



Yeah he looks kind of possessed. But alas he is not. It will actually be the final enemy in the game. (as soon as I am don with the attack animations I just have to learn how to draw backgrounds  )