AuthorTopic: Help me improve my dumb tree!  (Read 5740 times)

Offline GDawgTheFab

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Help me improve my dumb tree!

on: May 06, 2018, 01:56:03 am
doesn't look right to me



Basically the idea is it would be the trunk with a sort of leafy canopy overlayed on top sort of like the pure land in secret of mana as shown in the pic below



but just doesn't look right, anyone got any critiques and ideas on where I might have gone wrong?


Edit: Been a while since I updated this thread and wasn't sure if I should necro this thread or create a new one, regardless here are my most recent attempts, looking for critiques.





« Last Edit: October 06, 2018, 08:33:15 am by GDawgTheFab »

Offline GDawgTheFab

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Re: Help me improve my dumb tree!

Reply #1 on: May 06, 2018, 03:54:48 am
2nd attempt

Offline RetroNuva10

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Re: Help me improve my dumb tree!

Reply #2 on: May 06, 2018, 05:47:52 am
It looks pretty good! I'd recommend using slightly more saturated colors, and make sure to slightly alter the hues of colors as they get darker/lighter. Additionally, you'll want to pick a color that better fits the tree color. Look up some pretty pixel art trees from games and observe the relationship between the leaf and trunk color.

I did a quick edit and improved the leaf part. If you're set on the canopy-like aspect of the tree, you'll want to draw something much more dynamic-looking than what you have at the moment. Don't just have it be a slow gradiant that gets lighter as it goes lower and darker as it goes higher. Instead, have "chunks" of leaves that are slightly in front of/above the rest that have slightly different rates of light change. I'd also recommend drawing an arrow that denotes what direction the light is coming from. It might not seem to make a difference, but, oddly enough, having that arrow kind of puts your brain in the right mode when it comes to drawing shading.

Additionally, you'll want the branches you made to actually be visible. If you don't (which is its current state), it will seem very flat and not connected to the tree. Even if the canopy is supposed to appear way in front of the tree trunk itself, you'll still want some kind of signifier that it's connected.

To draw the leaf part, I simply denoted 3 different shades (remembering to gradually alter the hue), and drew large rough circles and cleaned the pixel edges up. Then, I did the same with the lighter shade, and then finally the lightest, making sure each circle was within the darker circle of its leaf "sphere." Then, I added pixel dithering.



I hope this excessively long post helped. Keep up the good work!

Offline MysteryMeat

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Re: Help me improve my dumb tree!

Reply #3 on: May 06, 2018, 11:00:19 am
apart from some of the things the above poster has to say, I think it looks perfectly fine.

I think you might have a case of familiarity poisoning, go work on something then come back to this

edit: actually no a lot of what was said above isn't right,  for the perspective you want you don't want to have many branches showing. especially for a tileset.
« Last Edit: May 06, 2018, 11:02:14 am by MysteryMeat »
PSA: use imgur
http://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=19838.0 also go suggest on my quest, cmon
MAJOR BORK TALLY: |

Offline GDawgTheFab

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Re: Help me improve my dumb tree!

Reply #4 on: May 07, 2018, 08:15:42 am
Thanks for the advice guys, decided to turn the trunk I was working on into a stand alone tree, here it is just the trunk without leaves



And here it is turned into a cherry blossom



Will revisit the whole forest canopy thing later but for now I might work on some other stuff and come back to it with a fresh take

Offline GDawgTheFab

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Re: Help me improve my dumb tree!

Reply #5 on: October 06, 2018, 08:35:54 am
Not sure if I should necro or start a new thread, is it generally preferred that if a topic hasnt been posted in for 30 days that a new thread is created even if it is on the same topic? Or is it better to necro?

Regardless these are my most recent attempts, again what I am going for is something similar to the mana pure land in Secret of Mana







Any suggestions on how I can improve these?
« Last Edit: October 06, 2018, 08:37:31 am by GDawgTheFab »

Offline eishiya

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Re: Help me improve my dumb tree!

Reply #6 on: October 06, 2018, 01:26:59 pm
I think it's fine to necro your own thread :]
https://i.imgur.com/iXHc8VZ.png
I think this looks nice!

The colours feel a little dull and could use more hue-shifting, maybe something like this?

(I seem to have introduced a bunch of extra colours while recolouring it with blending modes, please don't mind that.)

Try making your vertical/horizontal edge tiles less straight, make them more winding, give them a more interesting silhouette. Right now, in the example, they make the tile grid very obvious because they're so straight. Same with the edges of the corners, to a lesser degree.

There are some single light-coloured pixels in the interior, they look like noise rather than like leaves. I'd get rid of them.

I have a hard time believing you need that many variants of the dark interior tiles xP They all feel samey since they use the same leaf shapes and similar arrangements, so you can probably use fewer of them and achieve the same effect. Or, you can add more variety by having some thicker clumps, and maybe even some tiles that use the next colour up the ramp.

The bottoms of the thick trunks feel a bit off for a couple of reasons:
- the roots slope down too vertically on the sides, making the tree look like it's standing on its roots rather than like we're seeing the parts of the roots that are visible above the ground.
- the roots have very similar sizes and shapes. Try to vary them more, in particular the shapes.

Offline Vinik

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Re: Help me improve my dumb tree!

Reply #7 on: October 06, 2018, 10:06:19 pm
Hmm, given that the view isn't straight from above, shouldn't the top highlighted tiles of the canopy/crown set be much shorter than the lower ones, or even be obscured by the angle of view? The way I see it, the "lower" tiles are actually south facing (front tiles), the upper ones are north facing (back tiles), and the light is quite oblique/frontal, so that we have a darker "roof" on the middle tiles, and we should at most see a very short upper rim of highlighted leaves, mostly for decoration purposes and keeping with the style, because if it was rigorous they wouldn't even show at all. You know what I mean?

Offline GDawgTheFab

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Re: Help me improve my dumb tree!

Reply #8 on: October 07, 2018, 05:14:56 am
I think it's fine to necro your own thread :]
https://i.imgur.com/iXHc8VZ.png
I think this looks nice!

The colours feel a little dull and could use more hue-shifting, maybe something like this?

(I seem to have introduced a bunch of extra colours while recolouring it with blending modes, please don't mind that.)

Thanks for the critiques, to be honest I do have a little bit of trouble when it comes to colour as I find it hard to find that middle ground between too light and too dark or too much contrast or not enough contrast. I do know basic colour theory where lighter colours tend to shift hue more towards yellow while darker colours. I think the edit you posted might vary the hue a little too much for my liking however I get what you are saying and this is what I have done so far.



I will also need to do variants for different seasons as well.





The colours are something I will probably have to constantly revisit as I expand the tilesets.


Try making your vertical/horizontal edge tiles less straight, make them more winding, give them a more interesting silhouette. Right now, in the example, they make the tile grid very obvious because they're so straight. Same with the edges of the corners, to a lesser degree.

There are some single light-coloured pixels in the interior, they look like noise rather than like leaves. I'd get rid of them.

I have a hard time believing you need that many variants of the dark interior tiles xP They all feel samey since they use the same leaf shapes and similar arrangements, so you can probably use fewer of them and achieve the same effect. Or, you can add more variety by having some thicker clumps, and maybe even some tiles that use the next colour up the ramp.

I had a bit of extra space to fill in the middle so kind of overdid it with the interior tiles :p, designed the tileset for readability so there are a few duplicate tiles on the outer edges as well, just so I know where each tile is supposed to go.

The problem with some of the outer tiles being too straight is that I kind of want the tileset to be as modular as possible where most tiles can seamlessly blend with other tiles while trying to hide where the tiles connect together, as such it is hard to create outer tiles that bend and flow that also connect seamlessly with the other tiles, I suppose I could create multi tile clusters that are only supposed to be used in conjunction with each other and only the outer edges of tiles of the cluster line up with the other tiles in the set?

The bottoms of the thick trunks feel a bit off for a couple of reasons:
- the roots slope down too vertically on the sides, making the tree look like it's standing on its roots rather than like we're seeing the parts of the roots that are visible above the ground.
- the roots have very similar sizes and shapes. Try to vary them more, in particular the shapes.

Yeah got a little bit lazy with the roots and mirrored the outer most roots just to get a quick shape together that I could try different colours and textures on



Mostly trying to get the texture right on the trees, not sure how to texture and colour the bark.

Offline GDawgTheFab

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Re: Help me improve my dumb tree!

Reply #9 on: October 07, 2018, 05:20:08 am
Hmm, given that the view isn't straight from above, shouldn't the top highlighted tiles of the canopy/crown set be much shorter than the lower ones, or even be obscured by the angle of view? The way I see it, the "lower" tiles are actually south facing (front tiles), the upper ones are north facing (back tiles), and the light is quite oblique/frontal, so that we have a darker "roof" on the middle tiles, and we should at most see a very short upper rim of highlighted leaves, mostly for decoration purposes and keeping with the style, because if it was rigorous they wouldn't even show at all. You know what I mean?

Yeah, if you look at the tileset I kind of tried to do that, the southern edge being the thickest, the east and west edges being slightly less thick and the northern edge being the thinnest, however I do also want tiles that continue the leaf pattern all the way through to the other side in certain sections to serve as sort of a hint to the player that they can travel underneath this section of the leafy cannopy and find hidden paths.