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

º º º º
  º  º
    º
or an arrow from that Wiki you linked,
   o
º º º     
  ºº 
   º

or going from your edit 2 concentric archs of 3 holes each radiating from one hole on his abs
o º o
 oºo
   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.