Help with Non Metallic Shading

[Rosier]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch

An interpretation of the False God/Demon Moloch, depicted as a god of sacrifice through a Brazen Bull.

With that in mind, I've been trying to make it look like the sprite is made of bronze in most areas, but this is what I keep coming back to and I don't really think it's quite there yet.  It needs better color and texture, but I can't figure out how to do that.

Thoughts?

[yaomon17]

Well AlcopopStar has some pretty nice materials to reference
(Middle bottom). Try that but more red, and shift the hue of the darker shades to more purple. Also adding in some dents and holes and roughness would help it too. Also, I believe his head is too large and legs too short to be standing in that pose without falling over 

Ed: Editing pistachio's edit is a good way to learn.

[pistachio]

Skin looks like generic fake plastic, almost like a default phong shader, you know?
Bronze is a metal so it has more dynamic highlights, it has more imperfections in how much light hits it, and you can mess with the hues of the color ramp so it looks like metal (realistically speaking green or blue is somewhere there). Piece by Adarias that did this kinda literally... And two good refs.

These aren't really great to work from.

They are okay for being stylized, I can tell what they are, but the shading on most of these is pretty flat, the detail is pretty uniform, too much noise, not enough iconic shapes, etc.
AlcopopStar has probably improved from that point and it's possible they know about some of this now. If not, hey, here's some free C+C.

Work off of the best reference you can. You will progress faster that way.

EDIT:

I did mess with the proportions, here they are more realistic. If that's not out of the range of your sprite's goal I do recommend doing this to challenge yourself, because up to now your sprites' proportions have been the same.

Basic shadow ramp to establish value and separate materials


Making a metallic value ramp and applying it to our sprite


Colorizing to look like old bronze (you could add noise here if you want it to look older)


Another one following Gil's advice.

I don't know man. Too yellow and it looks like gold. But this still works IMO.
Darker green might be a gamma error because it looked fine through here.

The whole thing was kinda like making a model kit. Maybe drawing that parallel helps.

[Gil]

It still doesn't feel like bronze on your latest step Pistachio. I agree that the step before looks like generic metal, it's the colorization that seems off, pushing it back towards Phong territory. I'm thinking it's probably the specular green. If I squint, the green is darker in value than the lightest brown. I personally like my bronze to have a little yellow in it, to make it pop, rather than the green. Maybe something like this:




Rosier: your piece is leaning, a lot. His head is in front of his feet and it looks like he's about to topple over. Maybe you should do some pose studies first and present those to us, so we can help you work on that. Is this another fighting sprite btw?

[JoeCreates]

I did a little edit of pistachio's version, mostly changing the colors, but also adding a little more specular reflection.

[Gil]

Yeah, JoeCreates, that's pretty cool. How about introducing that green now?



I realize I might've gone overboard, but I like to exaggerate edits to show purpose, you can always scale it back.

[Rosier]

From the waist up it's 100% me, but I reused a lot of the legs and of course, the palette (Didn't care much for the really green one).  I keep a few details that I thought were worth keeping, like the 7 furnaces on his chest and the 'ports' on his shoulders, forearms and legs.  The furnaces because they're a common element on the original Moloch paintings, and I like the idea of him charging forwards spewing fire everywhere.  I also kind of sectioned off certain parts, namely the arms, to make it look almost as if it's armor, continuing the metal theming.



@Gil, no. This guy is more just character design practice and for fun.  I've made a couple of other sprites with posing in mind, but I think I'll leave those until I'm satisfied with this sprite.

[Gil]

There's a lack of anatomical knowledge showing through, but I do notice you're starting to pay attention to volumes here and there. The main issue seems to be the arms, which are of different length. The bent one actually extends lower than the straight one, so he looks like he has a gimpy arm. There's a distinct lack of elbows in both of the arms.

[Conzeit]

hey man, just wanted to say I'm glad you've giving portraying volume a try, you seem to have absorbed the idea of the edits pretty well 

on the whole furnace thing, I'd say try to simplify the overall shape of the thing into a single geometric shape.
Either a triangle

ｺ ｺ ｺ ｺ
  ｺ  ｺ
    ｺ
or an arrow from that Wiki you linked,
   o
ｺ ｺ ｺ     
  ｺｺ 
   ｺ

or going from your edit 2 concentric archs of 3 holes each radiating from one hole on his abs
o ｺ o
 oｺo
   o
kinda like this but with less vertical space

ooor maybe you can go crazy and make exhausts out of it. if you're gonna keep it there, make it look good so that it's a focus


I also notice you were really shy about using very contrasting shades in your original picture, I'm glad you're less so in this second one, but I think you could have more contrasting shades like the edit you were shown, specially because you're doing metal.

Metal is smooth and shiny so we kinda want to make it all gradienty ,  but that doesnt necesarilly convey metal. Metal's reflectivity is one of the easiest ways to convey it.

as you can see here pretty strong highlight next to strong shadows make for a good effect

EDIT:gil's right, dont be afraid to enlarge the canvas a little, it seems you might've cramped the left arm because it didnt fit the canvas. if you look at samples of real life muscles that you're doing and simplify them into basic geometric shapes, it usually looks a lot more secure and coherent.

[Rosier]

Hopefully fixed the arms fully, plus centralized the furnaces into a more defined shape.


Also, this is around the size of canvas that I usually use.  I usually make the end result transparent and with one sprite per GIF, so I tend to isolate the sprite in question and then post that for cleanliness.



And yeah, I'm a huge coward when it comes to shades.  One of my main flaws is contrasting colors.  They end up only a few ticks from each other quite a bit.

[Decroded]

off topic a bit but for technical reasons I personally tend to make a canvas that is a number of grid units of the tile size of the game.
the size is enough to contain the sprite in all its extremities (add a grid unit when needed) then image is aligned to centre based on the hitbox.
while wastful on memory (asif it matters) making most sprites in this way for me removes the steps of repeatedly aligning and checking in-engine as everything can just align to centre and feel free to go nuts stretching about inside its space.

[Rosier]

off topic a bit but for technical reasons I personally tend to make a canvas that is a number of grid units of the tile size of the game.
the size is enough to contain the sprite in all its extremities (add a grid unit when needed) then image is aligned to centre based on the hitbox.
while wastful on memory (asif it matters) making most sprites in this way for me removes the steps of repeatedly aligning and checking in-engine as everything can just align to centre and feel free to go nuts stretching about inside its space.

I'll keep that in mind, but this is just spriting for fun.  I might have to unify the animations I have, though.

[Conzeit]

what I meant with the chest was make it a really cool looking design, not just sort of arranging them a bit more. The chest is really big and in the center, if you're gonna put something there make it cool.

this was what more or less I thought of with concentric arches.


except the arches outside should be the biggest, like this

and maybe this vibe is more aproppiate for an ancient god, but of course with not nearly as much detail

I also mentioned the possibility of exhausts because you mentioned fire coming out of him

[Rosier]

I do kind of want to want to keep the seven different furnaces that are depicted on all the art of the wiki page.  I'm not sure arches like that would make that possible. 

I'll probably go for the exhaust ports or something similar.




Edit: Didn't think I'd have time so soon... 
I ended up increasing the "chest piece" and split it into three different sections that contain the furnaces.  Also made a version for ports opened/closed.

[Gil]

You need more shadows, everything has equal visual priority right now

[TMT]

The perspective on the arms needs a bit of work. The rest of the piece suggests he's facing left at a slight angle. In contrast the arms look almost the same which would suggest he's facing directly forward.

[Night]

Oh man, depicting bronze is pretty annoying.. It has to do with the colour changes that exist in bronze after being exposed to the air for a long period of time - patina. With the colours ranging all the way from a dark red to a cold light green.
Not sure as to how true this is, but from what I observed patina begins to form in parts with creases in sculptures (armpits, between fingers, nostrils, wrinkles, etc.); so you can try and use that to your advantage (it will be kind of irritating for a beginner though, I reckon).

Here's my take on this:


1. Plan out how everything's going to look (don't leave room for ambiguity), so that later on as you progress with the piece you don't run into unexpected problems that are going to waste your time and force you to come up with a half-assed solution on the spot.
 This stage, along with the second one which I'll get to in a second, is the most important one as it allows you to fix mistakes and think in advanced about what you're going to add before it spirals into something you don't want.

2. Figure out where your your light source is, where shadows are cast, and what colours you're going to use. The first colour your should figure out is your background colour (or if you have a background, you should figure out how it'll look first), I went with a somewhat desaturated blue to contrast with the bronze. The bronze itself should be much darker than how you depicted it in my opinion (bronze is a rather dark metal).
The colours I went with are a dark green-ish colour for the shadow (to create a vague simulation of patina), and a desaturated brown for the mid-tone (the main colour).

3. Add in some light - start to create a 3D form.
Just as a side note: I really don't like using dithering to the extent that I have in that edit; but in this case it was just a case of not wanting to add another colour for what is basically a single transition (colour control nomsayin).

4. Add in the highlights (remember to keep them sparse though, to give it a metally feel).

5. Add in the darkest and lightest colours in order to emphasise on those areas (this is mainly just something I like to do; I feel that in order to create a balanced palette, the single lightest and darkest colours most be used the least - imagine it kind of like a graph showing the use of colours, with the darkest and lightest colours on the edges of the graph being used the least and the mid-tone, in the middle of the graph, being used the most).

6. Add reflections, this is kind of pointless with bronze, but it doesn't take away from the piece if used carefully.

[Rosier]

You need more shadows, everything has equal visual priority right now

The perspective on the arms needs a bit of work. The rest of the piece suggests he's facing left at a slight angle. In contrast the arms look almost the same which would suggest he's facing directly forward.

Added purple to make the furnaces pop out a bit more, and hopefully fixed the arm perspective on the arms. 


@Night, I want the bright, shiny side of copper rather than the dull, faded side.  I'll keep that in mind in case I decide to go dark on another sprite, though, thanks.

[Conzeit]

k, so I know you're basically going from no shading to shading here, therefore making a  reflective surface specially one that takes as much subtlety as bronze is too much (you just had to go straight to metal didnt ya?) What you have does not look like metal at all, but it's good enough for now I think.

I thought the chrysler building would make it really clear, but you still dont know what I mean by making a design for the furnaces.
look at these, the smallest arches have 3 holes, each hole could be a furnace, then you have an extra hole below and it would look cool.

When you design that furnace shape, you probably want to temporarily eliminate all the shading, and just look at a black sprite with white holes, that way you know you're not being distracted by all the detail.

Your fire is just as bright and saturated as your gold and that will not do. Fire is a lightsource while gold is not, you have to make it lighter somehow.
I went and designed something myself, just white or black holes like this would actually be better than what you have, there is no distinguishing anything that's going on in your chest right now.
see how the fire here is emanating from the opposite source than the light, that creates contrast. You cannot have fire with shades similar to your gold because it'll all blend together. This animated version has a less saturated gold for that purpose.

Also, these have a lot less stuff going on, I pixeled most things iwth a 2x2 brush

Now for the Bronze, the reference posted here was lovely

But trying to achieve that in pixels this small, specially ones meant to be animated is madness. So I just went for the dark metal with red-ish highlights. as I shaded it I was thinking the same way I would've as if it were black metal.

I actually made it before the gold one,gold one is the same with some shades shifted around.
that sillouething light (a secondary lightsource coming from the borders) is a very easy way to achieve that reflective look. But I want to show some other ways it can be done

This is a good, simple example of dark shiny material from Galaxy Fight

This is a metal guy from Waku Waku. This one  just has really contrasted highlights right next to the shadows, that is the easiest way to fake metal, going right from lightest highlight (specular) to darkest (core) shadow.

Galaxy Fight and Waku Waku make good starting points for shading, good volume, no overcomplication...as I keep saying over and over :p

This guy is an example by me of that aproach. See his big metal fist? all I did was put a big bold core shadow right next to the higlight and BAM metal.


some more really simpy shaded metal objects by me for Deathroad to Canada

EDIT: I just had to bring St0ven's brass monkey into the party =)

You should look at proko's shading video for tips on shading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3WmrWUEIJo and maybe Arne's tutorial http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm#materials and if you really want to get deeper on how light works you can look at the "itchy animation" light tutorial http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm


After messing with your sprite for a while  I felt bad I couldnt really call it my own and made my own take at your idea. I know you probably werent going for tron-lines for furnaces :p

This is my full proces+refference file on this. You'll notice there are several frames that are just black with the white furnaces, that's to make sure I'm focused on getting that right. You should've probably designed the furnaces before you ever started shading

[Gil]

Conceit, that post is wonderful!

[Joe]

Hold up. Night's example is the bronziest in the thread by far, you shouldn't just brush it off like that. First the colors can easily be tweaked to a higher key. Second, he outlined a process resulting in a balanced sprite.
The biggest issue with your sprite right now is its focus on the parts (delineating every single muscle) rather than the whole, resulting in a busy sprite. Everything is lit uniformly and there's no sense of priority.
Another suggestion is to draw the legs without the loincloth and then paint it on, because it doesn't seem like they're attaching as strongly as other legs in the thread, like the top half is teetering. I would either thicken the obliques or the abductors, or both.
Hope that helps, your sprite's coming along quite nicely.

And yea the other thing I like about Conceit's that he didn't mention is it's looming, hunched over, like a giant would be doing.

[Conzeit]

Gil: thanks! I know rosier wants to learn but sometimes gets overwhelmed so I wanted to do somthing easy to get but still full of resources 

Joe: Knowing Rosier  I think he is not currently even considering doing bronze since it's one of his first takes at shading...he listens to crits but only so far
I felt my post was needed because although Night's is lovely I dont really see a lot of people being able to animate something like that, specially not Rosier that's starting out on shading, but his shades and sense of contrast could totally be applied by Rosier.Thanks for the hunching over thing....it just felt right you know ? :p

[Night]

Night's example is the bronziest in the thread by far

Night's is lovely

 

Didn't realise the sprite's supposed to be animated, my bad - it is kind of a bit too much for animation I agree. However the process of creation can still be applied (I sense that my post was just a tad too overwhelming for Rosier).

[Rosier]

TBH, I have no intention of animating something this complicated for a while.  There's a reason all my animations at the moment are all one shade.  Not to mention finding examples might be a tad bit harder than a human...



Anyway, I wound up with this.  It's kind of a mix of both Night's and Conceit's, though Night's is mostly the shading in certain parts.  I also kept the brighter bronze in addition, cause I do still like it, though straight fire rather than this ambientness(?) does make it harder to read.  I tried for a red-orange-yellow gradient spreading out from the center, but this was a lot cleaner.


Got rid of the furnaces having doors that opened, and just left it as constantly glowing.  And while not quite Tron lines, the shoulders, wrists and heels are now open to exposing the fire, and the ribcage area is visibly hollow and also spewing fire.  If the fire were to go out, it would be visible that this is a hollow statue with several places open.

[pistachio]

Damn, that's a major step up from where this started. Challenging yourself to stick closer to our takes now, which were stylistically massively different from yours, is the way to do it.

But I see you took some visual elements from the latest and turned it into visual noise.
Here I want to see the noise cut down, I.E. simplify the furnaces and speculars.
Also more core shadows formed by plane changes. Conceit's did that, Night did that and I did that.

Here's an edit with some ideas from all 3.

[Rosier]

Smoke everywhere.

I kind of want the furnaces, at least the main ones, to make noise, considering that's Number 1 on the list next to being made of bronze.  Plus there has to be seven distinguishable ones on the chest.  I toned down the rest of the outlets, though, plus added more shadows, especially in the stomach region

[Night]

Everything feels too noisy at the moment, try using more... clusters, for a lack of a better, and AA. For the smoke keep it more uniform, and perhaps even add an element of fire.
Like this:


Something I forgot to mention in my critique post - the waist, and consequently the legs, feel way too narrow in my mind, almost like they couldn't support all the weight that they bear. I suppose you could excuse it with stylistic choice, but just thought I'd throw it out there.

[Friend]

his anatomy at present is not very menacing nor apt for much physical pursuits.

Try lengthening and beefing up the legs considerably.  They need to be strong and ferocious.  Google "chimera"

[Rosier]

Played with the clusters and smoke.   Smoke naturally only comes out of the ports, which is why there isn't a large clump on the back, as it's from either shoulder.

Otherwise beefed up the waist and legs.

[Joe]

It's come quite a ways, but you've lost the metal. There has to be some reflection going on somewhere if it's going to read as bronze.
Since there won't be any animation to separate the smoke, I'd also lighten it or darken the left horn to make it stand out.
Current furnace design is a great improvement.

覧覧覧覧覧

I've been meaning to do an edit on this for some time. The pose is weak, it looks like he's sulking. And the muscles are wanting. This is a god.
Throughout the thread what's bothered me is he doesn't look like he's about to lay shit down. People sacrifice their firstborn to this guy.
I think in building off other's edits you've neglected anatomy to the detriment of the piece.
I don't know if you have separate layers, but it would work best if you built up the anatomy and the bronze first. After that's made clear you can add the smoke etc.

[Rosier]

A mix of everything cause I'm honestly getting a number of different schools of thought regarding just how much shadow to use.

Pose is at least a definite improvement.

[Rosier]

This time it's skin... Albeit I'm a bit more confident in my skin shading than my metallic.

This is intended to be Nisroch, a demon known as the Chief of Cuisine in Hell.  I sort of ran with the idea of Gluttony, so that's why it's got a sewn up mouth on it's stomach in addition to the widened one on the face.  Only other thing of real note is the shoulders have smaller arms that would cut up meat or something and that the skin resembles uncooked chicken.

[Gil]

If you're going for the uncooked chicken look, some sort of subsurface scattering might be fun? It'll allow you to keep the sickly chicken look and still get some interesting light variation in there.

[Conzeit]

heh, this is funny. I dont know if you're either channeling him somehow because you like the same stuff as he does or you have been directly influenced by SplatPixel, but it's defintively reminiscent.
http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/12647.htm
He's an old user of pixelation, he always did these light skinned doll-like characters. I'm not blaming you of copying or anything like that though, this monster is clearly your own, it's far fatter than anything I remember him doing and I dont think crotch faces or shoulder stingers were something he was into either :p it's just kinda nostalgic to me to see this light skinned doll character, thought you'd dig hearing about splat's work regardless of wether you knew him or not, since it has some similar tastes.

I made a quick search for sickly chicken and by reverse image searching the sickest chicken I saw google suggested "raw whole chicken" as keyword, which yielded this among other things

one big, easy to replicate feature I see is very very pale beige skin, with almost no contents of orange (makes it look alive and healthy), and patches of purple or reddish pink discoloration. Anything more would be simply adding sagging skin, subsurface traslucency like Gil said and other sickly looking features, but that sounds far more complicated, so if I were you I'd go for the easy thing first and then judge how much more I would get from more work intensive detail

[Rosier]

If you're going for the uncooked chicken look, some sort of subsurface scattering might be fun? It'll allow you to keep the sickly chicken look and still get some interesting light variation in there.

A quick google of this makes it seem like adding light underneath the skin as if it were somewhat translucent, right?  I'll look into it.

heh, this is funny. I dont know if you're either channeling him somehow because you like the same stuff as he does or you have been directly influenced by SplatPixel, but it's defintively reminiscent.
http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/12647.htm
He's an old user of pixelation, he always did these light skinned doll-like characters. I'm not blaming you of copying or anything like that though, this monster is clearly your own, it's far fatter than anything I remember him doing and I dont think crotch faces or shoulder stingers were something he was into either :p it's just kinda nostalgic to me to see this light skinned doll character, thought you'd dig hearing about splat's work regardless of wether you knew him or not, since it has some similar tastes.

I made a quick search for sickly chicken and by reverse image searching the sickest chicken I saw google suggested "raw whole chicken" as keyword, which yielded this among other things

one big, easy to replicate feature I see is very very pale beige skin, with almost no contents of orange (makes it look alive and healthy), and patches of purple or reddish pink discoloration. Anything more would be simply adding sagging skin, subsurface traslucency like Gil said and other sickly looking features, but that sounds far more complicated, so if I were you I'd go for the easy thing first and then judge how much more I would get from more work intensive detail

I've appreciated that at least once while exploring the top section of pixeljoint, but yeah, it's just similar ideas, though.  Still cool to see.

I'll try adding discoloration and maybe some more stuff.  The chicken skin was actually more of an afterthought, so I didn't check any references beforehand.

[Conzeit]

also up the contrast you're still picking colors that are hard to tell apart

[Rosier]

I couldn't figure out how to make the subsurface scattering work, but I upped the contrast a bit, made it paler and added some purple splorches.

[CelioHogane]

hmm, maybe try with a more purple color?

[IrresponsibleFreelancer]

I would suggest trying to get the goose bumped flesh of the chicken incorporated.  I think it would look super cool if you did it in a super wide dithering type of way.  I like the design of the character though.  They look super cool.

[BatElite]

I've made some (mostly) colour edits (ending up with the rightmost) with the help of the reference that was posted earlier. I don't really know anything about subsurface scattering either, but at least the creature looks less tasty now.
I can't really tell if it still looks like chicken/skin though.

[Rosier]

Bluh, I was right in the middle of posting the new version when I saw yours, Bat.

I do like the more emphasis on purple, but I feel like it's a bit more white/pale than blue.  I got rid of any sort of normal human skin color and made it all purple or whitish.
In addition, I littered a few dots around that hopefully emulate goosebumps.  I couldn't get any decent dithering to work on this size, but that's probably because I've never really used it before.