[C+C] [Nudity] Game Main Character: Female Spy

[basstabs]

Hey everyone~ Newbie here. I've been doing pixel art off and on, but haven't posted anything before now because I was never happy enough with anything Finally I decided just posting something and getting some feedback would be a better way to improve than just toiling away by myself, so here I am!

I'm trying to make a sprite for the main character of a hobby game dev project. She's (at the moment) going to be a spy with the ability to change hair and outfits, so I started out with a basic, nude body here:



The idea is to make different hairstyles and clothing options and overlay them like so:



I'm a programmer at heart, I don't really claim to have much of an artistic eye, but here are a few things I'd like some input on if people have the time:

-I'd like to keep the style simple so that animation (when I get there) isn't a painstakingly long process. Is my current style TOO simple, though? I'm worried about whether or not I have enough pixels to add some nice details to her, or to do subpixel animation when I get to that point. I tried a little shading, but especially on the arms, legs, and gun I felt like there just wasn't enough room for me to work.

-I'm not quite sure about her overall shape. Her legs and breasts in particular look off to me, but I'm not really sure what's wrong or how to fix it. If I had to guess the chest looks a little boxy and a bit too high, but when I move it down by one pixel it looks too low to me, so I'm not sure what to do there. I'm a little happier with the look in the dressed version, but I think that's more luck than anything

Of course I would love to hear any input on how to improve my skills, those are just the things I'm most worried about for this particular image. Thanks in advance for your help, everyone~

[32]

First off I will say choose an outfit you like and stick with it. Customisable outfits is a massive task. In fact just animating one outfit is a massive task. Multiple is just too much, maybe consider customisable colours or something that won't require you to reanimate dozens of frames.

Secondly your pose is really good! Usually not something I see from newer artists

I've done an example of how you could draw the character to make her a bit more anatomically correct (or at least interesting if not totally correct , the legs especially are obviously pretty stylised)



The main issue I see is that your character is very spindly. This is usually a result of trying to draw using lineart. You'll find that lineart is not a very good approach for pixel artists because a single pixel line is very very thick. It would be like trying to draw on paper with a massive poster marker. I suggest drawing using block colours and then add the outline after the fact.



On the topic of boobs always try to make them smaller. Unless you specifically want the character to have giant boobs even drawing them as small as possible they're still going to be pretty big. I wouldn't outline them generally, just try to keep them more as shaded forms. Unless you're viewing the character from the side or something they aren't usually going to be an important defining shape and you want to be emphasising the chest and shoulders more so. Especially once the clothes go on in most cases you'll probably just want to define them as "top of boob" and "bottom of boob" using different shades and highlights and not outline them at all.

On colours you need more contrast. Way way more, I can't even see that there are separate shades. 3 shades per colour is more than enough to have a nice artstyle and you definitely want to keep it down as low as possible. You can still subpixel with this if you know what you're doing. Don't be beholden to black outlines. Colour them in where it looks good or you need to define shapes a little better.

You're right about the chest being a little high, you could either move it down or move the hips up like I have. I always prefer longer legs though.

The outfit has come out pretty damn well so I don't have much to comment on there, if you work off a bit of a chunkier base sprite I think you'll be in pretty good condition.

[basstabs]

Thanks for the input~

Yeah, I figured making multiple outfits would be a big job. My plan was to stick to one outfit (with palette swaps potentially) and then maybe make extras if I had time later.

So I redid both versions with much higher contrast. Do I need more or is this a good amount?




As you can see in the nude version (although it's obscured by the dress), I made her legs thicker and raised her hips a bit. I also lowered her breasts and made them a bit smaller. I tried to make her arms thicker, but I couldn't do that without making them look like beefy man arms. Maybe it would be easier if I chose a different pose? The left forearm in particular I can't thicken without making it look weird to me: I tried to change the color of the outline to my darker skin tone and tried moving the border out a bit, but both made the arm look to thick to me.

One thing I'm not sure what to do with is the face: I'm going for a look where the characters have big, noticeable eyes and no other facial features to speak of. However, going this route makes her face look kinda boring IMO. Is there a better way to do the eyes so that they have a bit more detail to them?

One other question: I've been thinking about making the dress black instead of red, as I think it looks a little classier. However, I'm not really sure how to shade black. What I tried was to use dark grey instead, but even then I think the dark color obscures the details a bit too much, although I could be wrong:


In general is it better to stick to lighter colors so that shading/contrasting is easier?

[32]

Looking better. Contrast is better but your darker skin tone could still be a good bit darker, try pushing it a little more orange/red as well. Makes the skin look a little more lively. Honestly you probably don't even need a highlight colour for the skin. You can use the white if you ever need to make a specular or something.

Arms still need to be thicker. Don't be afraid of having beefier arms, she's a spy she should be ripped But really just make sure they bulge at the forearm a bit and try to puff the shoulders up a little more than the upper arms.

Make the hips bigger. That's going to be the single easiest way to make a character look feminine. Take a look at some references and how the abdomen connects to the legs. As you have it the crotch is pretty close to where the hips bulge out, remember the pelvis is quite tall.

Try putting a little bit of shading on the dress, a couple of crescents indicating that the fabric is hanging. Don't define the bellybutton through the dress. Also soften up the shading on the breasts a bit, remember that (generally speaking) clothes don't ride up under the breasts but rather peak at the tallest point and then pull flat down toward the abdomen.

Your colour choices for the black are pretty solid. I wouldn't outline in the light colour unless you're specifically trying to make it look like it has a lighter edging. If so you'll need to add some shading of some kind so you can make that clear.

Try outlining the shoes, 1 pixel is pretty much too thin for anything.

Give her a chin. For eyes at this resolution generally you want to focus on the pupil and the upper eyelashes(which probably combine with the eyebrows at this size.) the whites are not so important. The hairline isn't going to make your job easy.

[basstabs]

Honestly I just feel like I'm out of my depth at this point. I darkened the contrast on her skin, but at 100% it still isn't very noticeable in the clothed version, and at larger magnifications it looks more like a skin rash to me. Plus I don't really know how to shade the legs with the dress on, adding shadows from the dress looks way too heavy, but without a shadow the natural shading from the shape of her legs look odd coming out from beneath the dress.

I thickened up the arms as best I could while trying to keep her on the slender side. I think she looks a little too muscular now, especially her right arm, but I'm not sure how to fix that without making her back into a string bean.

I moved the hips up, although the difference is pretty minimal. Especially in the dressed version since the dress pretty much covers all of the detail work around the hips. I also widened them a bit near the top, although not much: I tried widening them more noticeably, but that forced me to spread her legs further so that her legs didn't turn into Chun Li's legs. Spreading them further put her into a kind of doofy-looking Megaman pose, though, which I wasn't a huge fan of.

The shading on the dress is a lighter color now. I tried making some crescents to add flow to the hanging part of the dress, but I couldn't get anything that looked natural. So I looked up some reference images, but all of those had more of a vertical ripple, at least in pictures where the models legs were relatively unbent like my character's are. The dress still looks quite flat to me, though, and I'm not quite sure how to add in detail unless I add a design to it. Maybe just reworking the entire pose would make it easier to add life to the dress, having her bend her front leg or something.

I have no idea how to work with the shoes. Maybe just scrap them altogether or make her feet a lot bigger. I couldn't figure out a way to outline them without making them boot-like, which doesn't really go with the dress. For now I just turned them into regular heels instead of open-toed ones, but I'm not too happy with the result.

I just don't like the eyes. They just don't seem to express anything, and barely look like eyes unless you zoom in. Maybe I'll just give up on the current style and give her a proper face.

[32]

Just a little bit too dark but definitely better. And looking much better overall. When shading avoid hugging one row of pixels completely with another, this is called "banding" and it reveals the pixel grid in an unpleasant way. Try to stagger them.

At this resolution you have to let the pixels control your character design to some extent so if you can only make thicker arms look good just flow with it.

Technically your proportions are pretty close to real life but pushing these things will make for a better and more easily readable character.

Nice move looking at reference. The vertical stripes look good, do whatever you think looks good but I went with crescents.

A different pose or different dress design could certainly help but this dress is totally workable (though it will be a bit of a pain to animate)

Take a look at what I've done with the shoes. The yellow is holding you back a bit I think, the colour is just too close to the skin. I used the pink so that should give her a stronger colour identity.

They're looking better. Eyes at this resolution are tough. Maybe try a different hairstyle that gives you a little more room to work with. You probably aren't going to be able to give her a "proper" face any more easily.

I did a more subtle edit this time. I'd suggest flicking between them and your drawings to see what I changed and how I've pushed pixels around to make stuff read better.

[basstabs]

Okay, after giving it a few days so my frustration could wear off, I took another crack at this. I thickened the legs and left arm like the sample. I also adjusted the ripples on the dress so that they added a bit of a curve along the top to make it look a bit less flat.

To fix the eyes, I moved the hairline up one pixel and made the hairline a bit flatter so I had more room for the eyes. Then I moved the eyes down a pixel to make a little more space so that the eyebrows don't merge into the hairline as much.

I also looked at making the dress red again, I still couldn't see the detail too well in the dark colored dress at smaller magnifications.



Honestly I'm not sure which one I prefer. The black thematically is probably a better fit and is more what I envision for this character, and the red dress seems to wash out her pinkish hair color some. The red seems to pop a little more to me, although that could just be because I need to tweak the colors of the black dress.

Overall I'm still not enamored with the way her legs look around the dress. I don't want to do a full-length gown, but I may change it into a shorter cut so that her legs are more visible.

[32]

Looking good

Consider not using pure black for the outlines also. Using a lighter colour might allow you to shape the character more effectively. Tweaking the colours for the black should help. You're only using the lightest shade (which is a little too light) on the upper body, see if you can't bring that down to the rest of the dress a bit.

[MysteryMeat]

What he said! I tend towards a darkish purple/blue usually, but others go for a darker brown. Play around a bit to see what works!

[basstabs]

I started out trying to use blue and purple to make the black dress as suggested, but I ended up with a purple dress instead I'm actually happy with the colors, though. It's light enough so that the shading shows up better than before, and the purple doesn't clash with her hair like the red in my opinion.

In trying to use some of the light color on the lower part of the dress, however, I ran into some issues. The riffles I had earlier made it hard to do much with since they were just single lines of pixels. So instead I changed the shading a bit so it looks more like the dress is tucked between her legs with the darker parts in the middle. I'm not too sure about this look, honestly, it looks sorta funny to me, but I'm not quite sure why.

[MysteryMeat]

At native rez it looks excellent. Don't flip your brain over it, sometimes things don't look as good zoomed in as zoomed out. Kind of the nature of pixels as a whole really!

Next, let's see some of the animations! A good idle seems like a place to start. Gentle sway of the clothing, maybe a bit of a bob?

[basstabs]

First and foremost, what would be a program some people recommend to do pixel art and animation? I've been using Gimp, which I'm fairly comfortable with and works really well for static images. In trying to do animation, though, I've found that Gimp's "animation" tools are really lackluster and I couldn't figure out a way to export my animation as a gif without changing a bunch of things around and even then it was a really jumpy, broken mess. (So right now I just have links I found to a renderer, not actual files for the animations ) It also is surprisingly hard to find a program which cuts an image with frames in a grid and exports them to an animated gif, or at least I couldn't find one. That seems like a basic thing you'd want to be able to do, but I digress. Most of the tools I found wanted you to upload separate images for each frame, which doesn't work with how my game engine handles sprites. Basically software recommendations would be highly appreciated ^_^

So after multiple attempts, I've given up on making something good and just vomited what I have currently on here to hopefully get some feedback on how to make it good I initially tried to make her bob in place in something like a fighting stance, but with her hand on her hip it looked awkward. So now I'm trying to make her shift her weight slightly onto her right leg and then back to the front, which causes the dress to sway a little. Needless to say my results haven't been very good.

Right now the upper body's movement is really jerky, as is her hip movement, and the hip movement seems really out of sync with the movement of the dress. The movement of the dress seems sorta okay to me though?

(Links to the animations actually playing, hopefully:)
Dress
Nude

[MysteryMeat]

Aseprite, no contest. Best animation interface I have ever used.

[basstabs]

So I downloaded Asesprite and messed around a bit, I must say I like it a lot

I didn't have any time to work on fixing the animations yet, but I did export them as gifs so they can be embedded here rather than linked to.




I'd definitely like some tips on how to make it feel less jerky overall, or whether it would be better to forego a breathing animation and rather to just do like an idle animation that plays every so often.

[Curly]

Add more movement! In order to move the hips you have to move other body parts. I rotated her leg and torso for the hip movement and added some more little movements to make her look more dynamic. It still feels a bit weird, animation isn't my thing

Edit:

Original:

[basstabs]

Phew. So I tried quite a few different things, but I wasn't able to make them look smooth enough for my liking. Finally I settled on adding the foot pivot and shifting her torso a little further total to make it less jerky. Would speeding it up/slowing it down make it work a little better? I'm thinking about adding a little bit of a bob to her hair, but I'm not sure if I can do that while keeping it subtle.

[MysteryMeat]

Try some subpixeling stuff! Basically the concept is changing pixel colors to imply subtler movements, metal slug used the concept a lot

[basstabs]

So after trying a bunch to animate her hair but failing to come up with anything that looked convincing, I decided to move on to a basic run cycle. Two weeks and about 10 failed attempts later, I decided to say screw the run cycle for now and work on something else. Right now this is what I have for the crouching pose:



I'm... not unhappy with most of it, but I have not at all been able to figure out what to do with her right arm. My initial idea was to turn her shoulders and have her hold the gun with two hands, but I'd like to have her shoot one-handed because I think it'll make animating her running+shooting and jumping+shooting animations easier. Also I struggled to make it visually clear that it was both arms rather than a single, gigantic, mutated limb. Any suggestions on what to do with her second arm would be much appreciated. Also, is the gun detailed enough? I wasn't quite sure what to do with it, and I struggled to add volume to it now that it's sideways and not at an angle.

Also, my plan is to have the crouching "animation" be very static and minimal, like maybe blinking every couple of seconds. Ideally this is because when she's crouching she's trying to remain hidden/stealthy in theory. She's already pretty stiff, though, am I missing out on an opportunity to make her "alive" by not doing much with her crouching pose? In general I found from her standing position that a breathing animation is beyond my skillset without looking like her breasts are alive

Lastly, some input on how to start a run cycle would be lovely. I have a copy of "The Animator's Survival Kit" by Richard Williams and I tried using some of his runs as a starting point, but I just couldn't get it to translate to the screen like I wanted. In general I had issues keeping her limbs "in proportion" with those of her standing pose, it felt like they were stretching and shortening unnaturally when I watched it in motion.

[PypeBros]

--

I note the gun is closer to the head on left picture, which looks like a more natural posture. Holding it 20cm away is likely to put more stress on the arm's muscles.

There's also something with the shape of the elbow that should be fixed. If you can find some reference picture, it might help.

[MysteryMeat]

I'd argue against the more natural posture there since it muddies the silhouette. The legs might be a good change to look at though, they're a bit thicker and the feet taper out of them a bit more naturally than they do in the current sprite.

[eishiya]

I think a good middleground between the two arm positions would be to have a vertical forearm. Clear silhouette, but with less uncomfortable-looking extension of the arm (the upper arm/shoulder would still carry most of the weight).