AuthorTopic: Splatterhouse sprites *NEW* 10.1.14  (Read 4880 times)

Offline Daimoth

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Splatterhouse sprites *NEW* 10.1.14

on: September 23, 2014, 12:41:45 am
I'm starting a little Splatterhouse tribute project. I love the game's aesthetic, but it badly needs an update. And no, the abortive 2010 reboot doesn't count.

I'm using a style reminiscent of 90's vs games. Might even make a few of them MUGEN characters to cut my animator's teeth.

Anyway, first up is Biggie Man WIP. If you've a strong foundation in anatomy this character will give you an aneurysm. Go ahead, count the biceps.  :hehe:

original


resprite

progress GIF

Lots of rendering and re-working will happen before I start (*gulp*) animating his idle animation.

« Last Edit: October 02, 2014, 04:13:58 am by Daimoth »

Offline Probo

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Re: Splatterhouse sprites

Reply #1 on: September 23, 2014, 02:25:09 am
good start, splatterhouse rocks!

the image could do with more contrast, and yeah you might want to try making the chainsaws more ridiculous and violent looking. if youre using a colour limit try and think about how colours can be reused, like you could use a chainsaw colour in the clothes

Offline Daimoth

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Re: Splatterhouse sprites

Reply #2 on: September 23, 2014, 04:07:22 am


Is that enough contrast, or more?

Offline Probo

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Re: Splatterhouse sprites

Reply #3 on: September 23, 2014, 04:43:56 am
definitely more mate, and if youre using the contrast function in a program, that often doesnt cut it. you might need to do some of it manually

Offline Daimoth

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Re: Splatterhouse sprites

Reply #4 on: September 23, 2014, 04:48:05 am
You might be surprised how far simple tools like that can get you. Just ballparking anyway.

How about:

« Last Edit: September 23, 2014, 05:14:40 am by Daimoth »

Offline jtfjtfjtf

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Re: Splatterhouse sprites

Reply #5 on: September 23, 2014, 06:03:52 am
Specular highlights should be pretty bright. If you want more color contrast you can try bending your shades towards purple and your highlights towards yellow.

Offline Daimoth

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Re: Splatterhouse sprites

Reply #6 on: September 23, 2014, 08:29:36 am
There's already a hue shift like that there. I'll push the darkest shade further purple and see what it looks like. Speculars where, the meat? I haven't settled on shading for his muscle lumps. I'm pretty happy with how the chewed up meat on his forearms turned out though.





I took both your suggestions into consideration, pushing the purple and greatly increasing contrast.

Changes:
  • dithering experiments
  • saws embiggened
  • dark colors saturated
  • refined shading
  • red-yellow ramp ---> purple-yellow
  • Palette/contrast tweaks, color balancing
  • saw experimenting

Alright, I've been staring at it so damn long there's no way I can make any objective headway on it for a few days. Could be finished? No idea at this point.

Next up Bellyache. The original design:

« Last Edit: September 28, 2014, 06:38:44 pm by PixelPiledriver »

Offline Cyangmou

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Re: Splatterhouse sprites-9.28.14

Reply #7 on: September 28, 2014, 06:10:45 pm
blood is red and we all know that, but usually just making things from the color spretty dark and adding a lot of red isn't enough to make it scary.

It's possible to go pretty nuts with the contrast and colors and add really strong contrasts, to get a more comic-esque look, which should be more powerful from the impact side if you want to limit yourself on a small palette.
If the amount of colors isn't that tragical you also could render it more realistically.


Aside from that there is a lot of noise going on, which you could easily remove, if you remove a lot of the small detail pixels scattered all over the piece and if you reduce down the dither.

However something about your contrasts seems to be pretty bad in general.
Either your monitor setup is bad (check it here: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/)
Or you might want to consider to buy a moders ips-panel flatscreen or something comparable, which are in general pretty clear and good if it comes to display color.
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Offline Daimoth

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Re: Splatterhouse sprites-9.28.14

Reply #8 on: September 28, 2014, 11:27:21 pm
Interesting take on the head. You've given my saws depth and weight, and the blood is a better shade. Cool edit.

Quote
blood is red and we all know that, but usually just making things from the color spretty dark and adding a lot of red isn't enough to make it scary.

That confused me a bit, do you mean that just making everything dark red isn't enough to make it scary? Yours seems to be primarily yellow-orange, almost like a Warcraft-esque ogre. Whatever changes I make, I still want it to be a very red sprite, like he's made of bloody muscle tissue with no skin on top.

The contrast problem is endemic to my work, and I am working (struggling, really) to pinpoint what makes it happen. It is not a conscious decision. Perhaps it's too much space consumed by dark colors. Or the lack of an outline around the dark shades. Or I'm choosing my light shades poorly, and rendering the sprite with those not-light-enough highlights in mind.

My monitor is a Proscan telivision, which may very well  be the culprit. Perhaps a short term solution is to compare my stuff with pixel art that has strong, effective contrast, then adjusting my palette throughout the rendering process accordingly.

Regarding noise, there's an ugliness granted by noisy single-pixel details I actually like, but that doesn't lend itself to animation and as such I am indeed moving away from it.


Palette experiments
Alright, something's gotta give with the contrast. Time for YOLO palette experimentation:




Not as good as Cyangmou's contrast, but it's closer I think.

  • Like the new head? It and the clothes are WIP again.
  • Fewer and smaller ambiguous clusters
  • Slowly working out the noise



10.1.14



Better, but more divergent palette:


Head's on the way. Color count ended up at 11 rather than 16. For lols check out the rope around his neck up close. Fuuugly. At 1x it somehow looks brown, at least with the second palette :crazy:


10.2 - Contrast musings
May have discovered two components of my contrast problem. My background color, regardless of hue, is always at exactly 120 lightness. looking around, I notice that others tend to use a significantly brighter color, usually well above 140. My background being dark would explain why poor contrast feels alright sometimes. My monitor is also a 32 inch television, and relatively close to my face. When I shade from across the room, all the contrast gripes begin to occur to me as well; my palette tweaks are far more successful when I work from across the room. Problem is my Wacom doesn't reach far enough, so I have to draw with a mouse instead, but I'll deal with it if it means I can better my contrast

I've also got to get more brave regarding placing very dark shades right next to very light shades. My instinct is to shade very softly.

Even more contrast:

« Last Edit: October 03, 2014, 02:25:54 am by Daimoth »