Here goes a little robot guy

[Vinik]

Would you say he looks correct regarding rotation and perspective? I suspect this "jaw" should cover a larger are of the chest in front view, but would make harder to read him as a humanoid shape. Next step is diagonal view but I want to get this right first.

Thank you all in advance as usual 

[eishiya]

Nothing jumps out at me, so I think it's fine! The side-view feet should probably be closer together, but that would damage readability, I think having them "wrong" like this is better.

Looking at it too long, the character appears larger/taller in side view, I think the head would cover a bit more of the shoulder.

[Helm]

Hi, Vinik!

I love your sprite. Two small pieces of critique, though:

1. Your darkest shading color and your outline color are a bit too close and so at 1x or 2x they merge a little bit. I'd both darken the outline color and brighten the shadow color and pick from either or both, against a backdrop of what you are planning to use this for.

2. The million dollar question: is the robot head square? If it is, I understand your solution when you are doing a sideways version of it, but if it's more irregular rectangular (taking into account top-down videogameified perspective) then the side view should have a more vertically long/horizontally short head than the front view. Even if logic dictates you should keep it as is, experiment a little bit for the value of perception versus reality.

I like the design, though. Perhaps a bit gribbly on the body in the front view, though? Could simplify some bits if you want to experiment, but it's honestly solid as is.

[Vinik]

Thanks everyone, great critics and questions!

@eishiya, you are right, as the ratio is 2:1, a two pixels wide gap in front view would equal to a 1 pixel gap on side view, which would actually be obscured because of overlap so I fudged it. I actually learned that from your critique on my side viewed doors/rooms in another post, and I have been using it time and again, thank you . As for the length in side view, I think it is geometrically right because although he occupies a ground mask that is square before perspective, the rectangle formed by his feet is  indeed wider than longer in front view, so it should be taller than it is wide when rotated. Now, one thing is being right, another is looking right, maybe I should cheat on that too.

@Helm, first of all, its an honor, really, I've read all your stuff about three years ago and it was very helpful and enlightening to say the least. Now to business:
1- Agree and agree. I just noticed I have used an outdated palette, the current one has more distance between the darkest color and the shadow. I hope it is better now, I have also made a few tweaks to make the curved parts look a bit more defined:


2- Yes, his head has a square base. It fits the game's voxel/block unit, which is at a 2:1 ratio topdown perspective (think 2:1 isometric, but aligned with the sides of cells, not the vertices), so the basic cuboid in game looks like this: , and naturally would look the same when rotated, because the base is square. It is not exactly a cube though, since a cube wouldn't have the top and the front faces with equal lengths at the typical isometric perspective, so its a cuboid with square base but shorter than a cube, which ends up looking 24x12x12.

I never had to describe it before, and now that I did, what a weird shape I have chosen as a block unit, but it is convenient. This guy's head is similar but a little smaller, 16x8x8, and the whole robot fits two blocks stacked on top of each other, 24x12x24 . As I answered to eishiya, I have to consider if it looks good to casual viewer.

Thanks again both of you for the excellent feedback. The very point of this guy (besides using it as an asset) was trying to correct errors I always make when designing top down humans/organic shapes, the squareness of the robot helps making these more evident. All my side characters until now were total garbage.

[Rydin]

Wouldn't a Top Down perspective make the front face of a cube longer instead of shorter?

Top Down is an exaggerated distortion and not realistic to the eye.
But its use is that Top Down can show details on the front face that would be "squished" in a Parallel perspective.

[Vinik]

Well, I might be wrong, but I think "top down" is a game term and not formally defined in math like parallel perspective, isometric, dimetric, axonometric etc. Topdown, as far as know it, refers generally to any game which uses a perspective which is seen more from above than from a side view like a platformer. In that sense, zelda is topdown as much as the current true 3d perspective diablo III. Isometric games are usually also "topdown" in this sense, because the top face is visible, although they are usually aligned with the vertices of the grid instead of the sides of the cells. This is what I meant as topdown, I am sorry if it caused confusion.

If your "camera" is at 35.264° from the ground you are in true isometric and objects aligned at their most frontal vertices with the camera are 30º from horizontal lines if memory serves me. Pixel art isometric uses a slighty different angle to ensure diagonals are at 2:1 ratio, and that is the perspective I have been aiming for in all my stuff for a while, although I am looking at the sides/fronts, not the corners. In that perspective, which i might have wrongly called topdown because it is a bit from above, a cube resting on the ground aligned with the camera at a frontal face would render as a square, with its top face covering the higher 1/3 section, and its frontal face covering the lower 2/3 of it, and here I am taking cyangmou's word for it in his great tutorial on cuboids, as I am math-retarded. That would be the opposite of your parallel example .

So a true front facing cube at said perspective indeed has a longer front face and a shorter/squished top face. My block inst a cube, it is a rectangular prism with a square base, but shorter enough that both visible faces end up looking mirrored and the same. So its is not the perspective which is shortening the front of a cube, it is just not a cube

If by top down you mean typical nes/snes era rpgs where all tiles are squares, in those both to top and front faces are usually squares, and is indeed very distorted. However, many other old games use half a tile to render the faces of square base cuboids (not cubes), for example all walls in the dragon quest/dragon warrior games and some of the final fantasy games.

[Kiana]

Wouldn't a Top Down perspective make the front face of a cube longer instead of shorter?

Top Down is an exaggerated distortion and not realistic to the eye.
But its use is that Top Down can show details on the front face that would be "squished" in a Parallel perspective.

Depends on what is meant by “Top Down” - in true top down view, the front face would not be visible at all. This generally looks pretty terrible in games because it’s hard to tell what characters are doing, and you can’t see important details like doors on buildings.

Here’s one of my favorite images depicting the true nature of many games we consider to be top down (the type of perspective you reference in your post):


(Unsure of source for this image, if anyone knows it, let me know)

Objects are tilted towards the camera in an unrealistic way, in order to reveal more detail.

[32]

A simple trick for drawing cubes (or any shape, really, once you wrap your head around it) from arbitrary angles, is to draw the object from the angle which has the axis of rotation (imagine you're twisting the object on a stick, whatever direction the stick is pointing is the angle you should draw) and just use the rotate tool to put it on the correct angle, and then you can project the lines across and voila you know where important landmarks are. This is especially useful in animation!

[Vinik]

How about a baddie?

This guy is supposed to be a jumper, same perspective and size, cheated on the height of legs on side view as suggest by eishiya. I wanted to try something without arms, as the arms makes things easier by hiding a harder part of the anatomy on side views. Edit: another one: