my avatar

[mirage]

Since i plan on sticking around here for a while i decided to make an avatar aswell:



It's my own face as an april-fools-joker-mask  16 colours including transparent

I'm not going to post any photos, but i think the likeness is ok

C+C welcome, although i'm not sure if i'll be changing it much after this since i want to start animating it

[Stwelin]

Ani...mating? *eye twitches*

Looks pretty flawless, nothing that i can see wrong with it.

[Omenith]

I like it. All the usual techniques are done well, not much to critique on that area. Lightning is good (REFLECTED LIGHT YESS)! I would like to see more green hues in the grey part of the face though; just to give it that extra kick and contrast, don't have to go overboard. You already have one green shade in there.

Looking forward to seeing the animation.

[Skull]

It's just.. amazing. Lovely detail and the rich purple is superb. It's just sheer awesome.

[Serendor]

I want to have that mask...

I'm not good at colours... I can't see the green shade can someone point it out for me?

Extremly nice

//Albin

[Xion]

Looks like the white/purple division gets off-center at the tip of the nose.
Otherwise awesome.

[Malor]

Very nice , I love the coloring. All in all, a very nicely executed peice. I can't wait to see the animation o.0

Off-Topicness-mmm is seems the JPEG monster has invaded the forums for april 1st...

[Omenith]

I'm not good at colours... I can't see the green shade can someone point it out for me?

I just went over the colors he used in photoshop (i always do this to screw around and try to rethink what choices the artist made) and noticed one of the greys he used in the mask had a slight green hue. Colors like white, grey and black are hardly ever just that; most of the time they have a bias toward one color (unless you work in RGB and do perfect greys like 115,115,115 which is unwise imo)... Afterall, in-order to get these colors, you need to have a mixture of hues.

ps I KNOW ABOUT CMYK, DONT MAKE ME HURT YOU 

[kakikukeko]

simply amazing,
concept and design are great, and execution is just perfect..

[Souly]

The highlight on the bottom bend of the red ribbon is a little low.
That's the only flaw I see in this at the moment.

[Helm]

-

edit - original

It's a very nice pixel, excellent tech. The only 'problem' I can see is with large jumps between a few shades that could be equalized with min-maxing the lightness and saturation values a bit. Generally happens more on the darker shades. Also generally shines and speculars are okay to be more jumpish (have more of a lightness difference between themselves and the shade before them in their ramp) because that's how speculars work, they're sharp. But if you have a big difference between two shades that you'll be trying to gradient between a lot in your image, it pays to min-max, or even add a buffer shade for them to be smooth where you need them to be.

Otherwise, anatomy wise, I can't really tell because I don't have any pictures to go by, but I bet your eyes aren't more than a single eyeball apart, while in this image they're significantly more. Right (ours) eye is too far away, probably, but it complicates when you calculate by the ridge of the nose as well. It's very possible in a realistic situation, more of the right eye would be obstructed by the nose.

[mirage]

Hi again,

Thanks for all the comments and critiques... i'll definately take some (if not all) of them into consideration when i start to finetune... After i've finally calibrated my not-so-new-monitor-anymore better, since the gamma seems to be way of at 1.6 or something when it should be at 2.2

For now, i wanted to do a _quick_ test animating the thing, simply because i haven't done much animating in my pixel-carreer and i really want to get better at that:



Just 2 frames, i'll do the inbetweens and some other fancy stuff later after i've got your approval

Tried some subpixeling stuff in parts of the eyebrows, which i think works very nice, but for other parts i ran into problems because i didn't have enough shades to fade from one pixel into the other, but i'd really like to stick with 16 colours only since it compresses so much better

I'm also not sure about the closed eyes... i tried a more squinted state, instead of the relaxed state that they are in now, but they kept looking like walnuts or something

That's it

[AdamAtomic]

i think it looks great - 1or 2 tweens and you'll be in good shape.  I agree that the color split on the nose is slightly off-perspective though!

[mirage]

Yep, I agree... plus it's a really harsh vertical line

I also think the shadows are way to dark and take away from the overall shape of the picture, which i'm surprised nobody has mentioned yet

I got home a little late today because of some next-gen pixelshader stuff that cropped up when we put a new character in our game, so i didn't have a lot of time to do anything constructive when i got home... Thankfully there's a long easter weekend coming up

[mangust]

Wonderfull! No commetns for shading, amazing!
Just some questions for form face and ribbons
When ribbon is bend maybe she must more thin? Something like this:

And face on violet side differ from gray too much? I am understand, if paint different faces on sides, but this similar as one face. Maybe do left side face more similar on right, or opposite paint more and more different (another color of eye maybe)?

  very good 

[mirage]

Latest version... took most of your advice into consideration again (eyes closer together, highlight on ribbon, nose, smaller ribbons at turning points etc.):



Also tried to get a bit more complementairy colourpalette going (purple vs. orange)... Not sure if that was a wise decision

The right eye (ours) should probably be moved up a pixel or 2 when closed... looks weird now

[Sharm]

I liked the silver much better.  The first bend after the loop on the ribbon hasn't been fixed yet.  Mangust's edit is a good example.  Look at a real ribbon, it's not going to show the front and back like that.  You're right about the eye, moving it up will help.

[Gil]

Silver was 1000x better...

[Omenith]

Also tried to get a bit more complementairy colourpalette going (purple vs. orange)... Not sure if that was a wise decision

Orange and purple aren't compliments, my friend (well atleast not the purple and orange you have chosen). 
THE MIGHTY COLOR WHEEL!!!


Complimentary colors would be directly across... Since your purple side is more of a red-violet the compliment would be green or green-yellow. Which you were closer to when you first started.

I think the original palette you had was more interesting because of the contrast in saturation. But this doesn't mean you can't change the hue which was what I was originally suggesting.


Can you tell the difference?

Edit: Found a smaller less offensive color wheel..

[philipptr]

Orange and purple aren't compliments, my friend (well atleast not the purple and orange you have chosen). 
THE MIGHTY COLOR WHEEL!!!

Well you're right about the thing that violet and orange are no compliment colours, but you're post implicates that there was just one right colour wheel.
And furthermore I think it doesn't make too much sense to post a subtractive colourwheel when this thread is about something shown on a screen that works with the additive colourmethod.
Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I know there are different colourwheels for subtractive and additive colours and this one is as far as I can tell for the subtractive.

[Gil]

[ptoing]

That is the additive colourwheel, the other one is subtractive. Both are valid.

[mirage]

Thanks Sharm and Gil, your initial comments were a lot more useful to me at this point than all the big ugly colourwheels

[mirage]

Latest version, with an improved animation:



(Wait for it, it blinks... eventually... wait for it... now!)

Took one colour out and put another one back in for smoother shading, added wrinkels around the eyes and mouth, fixed first bend after the loop on the ribbon, etc.

Don't want to go overboard on the animation, as i think avatars should not move too much since they can destract from the actual posts

I also don't want to drag on a thread with 'i added a pixel here and there', so this is it... i'm reasonably happy with it... on to a more elaborate animation next, i think

Thanks for all your help, appreciated

[Xion]

I think it would be cool if, he blinked once, then when his eyes opened he was looking at the viewer, then wait a sec, blink again, then close his eyes for good.
If he is already supposed to be looking at the viewer, I get the feeling he's looking over my head, at some spot on the ceiling.

[Panda]

There is one thing that has been bugging me since I first saw this thread, but the highlights on the purple curves, are placed in such way that the curves themselves look rather flat and angular (hope you get what I mean)
I'm specially looking at the top ribbon loop highlight, top of the purple half highlight, and that curve next to the silver cheek.
I think if you add some color in between the lightest and second lightest pink to smooth them out it'd be solved (also the highlights could pixelled differently so they aren't just on the higher points of the curve, but they could drop on the sides aswell)

As for the animation, I think (again in my opinion) it should stay with the eyes closed and ocasionally open them (like every 30-60 seconds) instead of that often.

[mangust]

For animation maybe something like this.... spying and little smiles more (like you do this, just s bit more up corner lips)  Face too much serious in my opinion

See on avatar of Helm - he is serious man and guru on pixel, but his nervous eye and lip make me smiles - "one more word and you will DIE!" . It's very good! Not to offend you Helm.