Critique > Pixel Art

Help me with Bloodborne Hunter

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imonk:
Help me with Bloodborne Hunter...

daramon:
Quick disclaimer: I'm pretty new to all this and just learning myself. There's some good work here, you should be happy with this as a first draft!

Given that, a quick few points:

1: I love the shapes you have here, but it looks like you've taken almost every shape and just shaded from one side to the other. This is forcing unnatural angles for any given light source. Pick a light source direction and imagine which bits would be bright and which in shadow. I compare this style to pillow shading, where a standard pattern is applied to all shading areas regardless of light source, angle of component, etc. There are a few places where you've added in shadows, think about where else in the figure shadows would occur, and how shading will flow naturally around shapes.

2: The rear leg and arm may look better if they're one shade darker across the board. This will give z-axis information and provide more depth. The same for the rear side of the front of the coat, if you see what I mean.

3: The tops of the boots and the left side of the buttons down the middle are crying out for some shadows...

4: There are some jaggies in the outlines that could be tidied up. IMO outlines are best kept thin, one pixel thick, without clumping or steps at the diagonals. As they don't convey any actual information, another option is to just go round the edge and create an "inside outline" by using a darker shade (one value darker for each pixel) for all edge pixels. But it's a matter of style and preference.

5: The arms are a touch short, especially his right arm (our left). If you imagine straightening out his left arm, it will extend just past the waist. His right arm barely gets there. If you stand up and relax your arms, you'll probably see that they extend a little way into your thighs.

6: Shading again. Instead of taking roughly equal "bands" of shade and roughing them up with noise, have the bands occur very near each other with large areas of the same shade. thus you reduce "banding" and create more realism. If you look at how things are shaded around curves in reality, you'll probably see what looks like a sharp cut-off of shade from bright to dark across the face of the object.

7: Everything looks like the same material. Matt and dull. Pick some bright colors and add specular highlights to shiny objects. What is the jacket made of? Shiny leather? Matt suede? Are the boots polished to a shine? Is anything made of metal? Anything that's shiny should have point or near-point highlights to represent shininess. Larger areas of dull highlights (as seen across this image) convey matt surfaces like skin, wool, etc.

8: The only place where the outline of the coat reflects the crumpled nature of material is the lower part of his left arm. The rest shows straight, smooth edges but  contains noise attempting to suggest creases and folds. This confuses my brain somewhat. I'd like to see what happened with fewer folds, that match up to the edge disruption.

Phew! This is probably a lot to take in. I may have time to do a quick edit in a few hours, to demonstrate some of what I'm talking about. In the meantime, ask me about anything that I've been unclear about and I'll at least attempt to back it up with examples of other work! ;)

Edited to add:

When I started playing with this image, I noticed something. All the lines seem to be pointing down.

 - The hat is pointing to the ground.
 - The face is looking down.
 - The shoulders are rounded and hunched.
 - The weapons are angled downwards.
 - The arms are hanging a little limply.

I'm guessing you want to get across a fierce, dynamic character. Some things you could try:

 - Separate his right arm from the body to show he's putting some effort into the pose.
 - Square off the shoulders, thrust out the chest, pull the chin up, maybe add some neck height. The coat can pinch in the middle a little to emphasize the big chest and the flare of the coat lower down.
 - Try a more dynamic use of the gun. You could point it at an imagined enemy or even at the viewer. With the former we would be able to see more gun detail.

daramon:
OK, this is a bit of a mess but all I can hope is you get some ideas from it.



I tried to lift the saw blade and handle away from the body by lightening the color values. It was blending in a bit. I also added shading to follow the light source. The rear of the handle I made darker to place it behind the figure.

If you look at the feet, the rear foot is darker so looks more in the background.

With the hat, I tried to imply texture without drawing lines all the way across. Also, the shading follows the light source.

There are specular highlights on the saw blade, the gun barrel, the hair and the tape on the handle. Also on the buttons.

The rest is an abortive attempt to smooth out the jacket. Ignore.

When it comes to the pose, I cheated and very roughly traced an action figure, then filled the areas with color:



Then smoothed the lines:



Here I've started to add some detail. Where I'm adding creases to the cloth, I'm roughing up the outline appropriately.



In this one I attempt to add an internal outline to the arm and part of the side:



Edited to add:

This is my first attempt at a 256x256 figure. I'm normally at 64x64 or less. Working at this scale is very different!

Also this is my first attempt at a detailed character and folds in cloth. Thanks for the challenge! I may even finish this guy. :)

imonk:
Wow, a dedicated helper. I like what you did with the lighting to mine and the cloth wrinkles to yours. I agree, I think my hunter's feet still look uneven, hands too small, pose too bored torso too long, legs too short. But seriously thanks for going out your way to demonstrate your points. I'll touch up on the original and update here.

Chris2balls:
Daramon did a great job with that post! I thought I'd point out something too:


Notice how you can understand what's happening in Daramon's piece: the arms are not against the body, the gun's outline is recognisable, you can see a part of the weapon... you know what it is just by looking at the silhouette. By putting more detail in the outline, you give the viewer more information to work on to figure out what they're looking at.

Now an edit of your sprite's outline:

I separated the arm holding the blade from the body, so I was able to put more detail into it; I did the same with the pistold wielding arm. I took away more of the cloak and put it to the left, so that you could see more of the legs; I made the scarf smaller so you could understand that it's close to the face, etc.

Hope this helps  :)

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