(WIP) tactics character(s)

[AdamAtomic]

outside of animation concerns and style concerns, your guy's torso is too long, and his arms and legs are too short; he looks more than a little like a dwarf in ill-fitting lavender spandex.  this has nothing to do with a "tactics" style or an "SD" style - regardless of the overall body's proportions, your guy's limbs are out of wack.  I would take sharpm's advice and not bother pillowshading your design until you have a good base that has more acceptable proportions and better lighting.  Notice that in sharpm's edit, even though it has basically NO details, you can read the form of the figure instantly?  This is an important quality that you do not want to leave out of your final product.

[Kren]

the mayor error from this piece is all the colours it is using, and the colours aren't at their best..this is my try..


not the best.. but I tried..
well you were using 26 colours and I am using 12.
not a good idea to use green in blue ..I was just testing..

[InvaderLupus]

I think that your sprite would look a lot better if you upped the contrast. It's metal: it should be shiny. Make the outlines darker, and the highlights lighter. It will make the sprite more distinct and less of a hard to see blob.

Here's a quick edit to try and show what I mean. I'm not very good, but hopefully it will get the point across:



just updated with a decreased color count. Down to 11 colors now.

[dragonrc]

Wow, a lot of helpfull comments .

Let's start with the edits:

@AdamAtomic

outside of animation concerns and style concerns, your guy's torso is too long, and his arms and legs are too short; he looks more than a little like a dwarf in ill-fitting lavender spandex.

First, I think you see things a little wrong, the armour part (also known as 'butt like thingy') is actually part of the legs, and if you look at it that way it looks like the legs and arms aren't to short (to me). Maby the picture below will clear things up.
         
(older) version (newer) version

and here is the (new) version without the lines

I don't know if this is better, It looks like the legs are to long now.

this has nothing to do with a "tactics" style or an "SD" style - regardless of the overall body's proportions, your guy's limbs are out of wack.

I don't know if there really is a "tactics style", the only tactic thing about my sprites is the isometric part, the style has nothing to do with tactics style.

I would take sharpm's advice and not bother pillowshading your design until you have a good base that has more acceptable proportions and better lighting.  Notice that in sharpm's edit, even though it has basically NO details, you can read the form of the figure instantly?  This is an important quality that you do not want to leave out of your final product.

I dunno if its pillowshaded, maby the leg...
But sharpm's edit has helped a lot

@Kren

the mayor error from this piece is all the colours it is using, and the colours aren't at their best..this is my try..

not the best.. but I tried..
well you were using 26 colours and I am using 12.
not a good idea to use green in blue ..I was just testing..

@InvaderLupus

I think that your sprite would look a lot better if you upped the contrast. It's metal: it should be shiny. Make the outlines darker, and the highlights lighter. It will make the sprite more distinct and less of a hard to see blob.

Here's a quick edit to try and show what I mean. I'm not very good, but hopefully it will get the point across:
just updated with a decreased color count. Down to 11 colors now.

These comments were VERY helpfull
I realised that you can use colours for more things (like the highlights on the armour for the eyes)
I should have lowerd the colour amount much earlier. Here is the new version:


13 colours

I could have lowerd it to 10 colours because of the hair, I didn't do this because the hair will most likely not be like this (the man I'm working for wants to make more characters with this armour, one with green hair, one with brown, one with blue ect.  And maby we are going to place helmets on them)


Thanks for your comments

[sharprm]

I think you have a lot of problems with this sprite. 1. Perspective angle thing. Can you post the shape of the tiles that will be used in
game (eg. 45 degree lines or whatever) 2. Shading. It is pillow shaded, pick a light source and do correct shadows. Don't just reply
to everyone's criticisms with "i actually think its right but thankyou", fix it. 3. Animation is lousy. 4. Armour costume is dodgy.
You repeatably make small edits and post them, but overall the piece won't improve. Imo you should start again. Start with a naked
sprite for platform perspective, get a four frame animation done, get it criticised, then increase frames to 10 (or whatever you're using
now). Then do a sprite with your funny perspective. Get it criticised, then do 4 frame animation, etc. This is a hard sprite to do imo because
of the perspective (my attempt sucks again). But if you show us the tiles you're using and listen to advice it could turn out okay.

[AdamAtomic]

your proportions are so wrong that even when Kren was only trying to edit the colors he couldn't help but change the arm and torso lengths to be more appropriate.  Don't throw away good crits; this is a bad sprite that needs a lot of help and you're crapping on/ignoring everyone's input - ESPECIALLY when you claim to be accepting it!

[dragonrc]

I think I understand what you all mean now , I’ll try to explain a few things by replying to your posts.

I think you have a lot of problems with this sprite. 1. Perspective angle thing. Can you post the shape of the tiles that will be used in
game (eg. 45 degree lines or whatever)

This is a Very useful post, this helped a lot with the edit below.

2. Shading. It is pillow shaded, pick a light source and do correct shadows. Don't just reply
to everyone's criticisms with "i actually think its right but thankyou", fix it.

I think the problem here is that I may not understand the term pillow shading.
I thought pillow shading meant this:  (2nd image)

But if you look at my sprite it isn’t shaded like that….or am I wrong again? :S

3. Animation is lousy.

I know it’s not a masterpiece but I think it’s a huge improvement with my older animations.

My friend said: it is a game sprite, not a static pixel art piece that has to be perfect with every pixel, keep it simple but make sure it looks ok. People often forget this and spend hours on a sprite making it look perfect while with lesser work the sprite could have looked good to in the game itself too while it may have looked lousy as a sprite on its own.

4. Armour costume is dodgy.

Dodgy?

You repeatably make small edits and post them, but overall the piece won't improve. Imo you should start again. Start with a naked
sprite for platform perspective, get a four frame animation done, get it criticised, then increase frames to 10 (or whatever you're using
now). Then do a sprite with your funny perspective. Get it criticised, then do 4 frame animation, etc. This is a hard sprite to do imo because
of the perspective (my attempt sucks again). But if you show us the tiles you're using and listen to advice it could turn out okay.

First of all, I’m sorry I may not have used all of the comments that were posted but the reason is I don’t understand what  they meant… I know it’s a lousy excuse but It’s true.
And if I posted ‘I think it looks good this way’ then the project leader think’s it’s ok. But I’ll try to give more attention to the comments next time;)

We don’t have tiles yet but we do know the tilesize:

It will be either one of them.

I made a whole new sprite based on most of the previous comments:

I remade it without looking back to my old sprite so they wouldn’t be alike, also I want to thank my friend for his advice, especially with the legs and the eyes (1 pixel up).

I shaded the head and the arms, I was planning to shade the rest to but I wanted to let you all give a chance to look at it and post comments so I can edit it early. I'm not sure about the head, somethings bugging me about it

I must say I like the new sprite and that I’m learning a lot by working on this

your proportions are so wrong that even when Kren was only trying to edit the colors he couldn't help but change the arm and torso lengths to be more appropriate.  Don't throw away good crits; this is a bad sprite that needs a lot of help and you're crapping on/ignoring everyone's input - ESPECIALLY when you claim to be accepting it!

Proportions
Again a word that I don’t really understand:
Does this mean that the size of the limbs is wrong compared to the rest of the sprite?
Does this mean that the size of the limbs is wrong compared with a real human being?
In that case I have to say that it doesn’t really matter, look at some other rpg sprites, if the limbs were that way in real live we would look really weird but it looks good for the sprites.
Or does it mean anything else?

Anyway, thank you all very much for even taking time posting a comment, it may not always look this way but I really appreciate it

[Rox]

Proportion basically means "the size of something compared to something else". Or something. It may mean that your character's arms are too long compared to the legs and torso. Or that the legs are too short compared to the size of the rest of the body. What stands out the most to me, proportion-wise, is that his legs seem to be much too short. Even super-deformed characters follow pretty strict proportions. I believe proportion is what makes humans look human, after all.

Your new sprite looks much better, though!

[sharprm]

The new sprite looks much better. My previous post was a bit rushed so I will expand on the comments. When you shade it,
make sure you take into account where the light source is. So make areas dark where there should be shadows. For the blue
sprite, you didn't have a dark enough color for shadows as well. I agreed it was pillow shaded because some areas should have been
in shadow (like his right leg) but they weren't.

When someone walks, they bend their legs and arms. Your animation doesn't have that bending. Thats why I htought it looked lousy. If you are deliberately doing that to make the character more cute, then that is okay.

I guess there was no justification for the "costume is dodgy" comment.   

[ndchristie]

two good iso walk/runs.  see how the feet hit the ground, how they move aross the ground.  yours are doing the novice-bop atm.