[WIP]Dude - Animated, Isometric & Breathtaking.

[Bohne]

Jello!

After many a wax and wane of fruitful and rewarding lurking I have decided to try and make some noise of my own around here. Kudos to all those of you who have gone before me, you have taught me all I know. Anyhoo, onto the good stuff. Meet isometric man.



Isometric man's grand ambition in life is to star in the lead role in a little game that a friend and I are making. (I'd obviously be the graphics department).

Now, as is to be expected from a pile of pixels shifting about at fairly high-frequency intervals, isometric man has to be able to do all kinds of cool in order to actualize his napoleonic ambitions. The first step on the long and winding road to awesome is trees - yes, trees - more specifically the art and skill of cutting them down.



Here we have him, hard at work honing and sharpening his tree killing wit and instinct. A healthy dose of C&C is probably just what he needs in order to finally cut that beast of a plant down to size. Can you help him?

I'm not aiming for anatomical corectness per se here (Big heads, you see, are a staple of computer games as old, time tested and steeped in venerable tradition as the inventory slot or even the pointless fed-ex quest itself), but I would like the motion to look fairly accurate given the circumstances (You figure out what that means, because I'm not exactly sure myself).

Obviously these things are very much WIPs, at present I'm mostly interested in getting basic motion down (Should he really shift his entire body mass when cutting? Isn't that leg-work unnaturally fast?). I haven't drawn much in my life before I picked this up a couple of months ago - so a real beating with the crit-stick would probably do me alot of good.

Well, gentlemen, bombs away!

[vedsten]

Welcome to the forum Bohne, your lurking obviously paid off as these are both wonderfull first entries.

Crits and suggestions:
- Walking: The black inner lining of the top of the hat doesn't work. Depending on what style you're goning for iether replace it with a highlight or get rid of it all together and increase contrast between top and base. Some of the features don't read too well. Beard is hardly visible and shirt/pants blend a bit. I suggest bigger contrast or some kind of lining. There's a lot of pixels jump around, but it might be your animation program fucking it up?

Treechopping: I can't say i've done a lot of woodchopping myself, but i'd imagine your feet don't move at all? It looks kinda jumpy as it is, but fixing legs might help alot, so i refrain from commenting further on the anim. The detail on the tree looks rather copy-pasted, i suggest you mix it up a bit.

/vedsten

[sharprm]

Breathtaking? I hope you were being sarcastic 

Its not too bad, especially if you are new. Look for a topic by chaos tayoke because there is some good information about using guides to get the perspective right. Also there is one by dragonrc.

I would try to fit some hair on the face or hint at a nose, because it looks like a scare crow man. Also, try to use a pallete with less colors, it seemed wasteful. Less colors makes animating easier.

For chopping, the right leg needs to be up, its out of perspective. Also arms dont seemed connected at right spot; there is no shoulders.

I like how you have drawn the top part of the tree.

[Salvage]

Welcome, I am new here too.
I like the shading on the tree.
Iso animation can be hard, but I think you have gotten a good start.
Lots of iso animations don't have a noticeable knee bend like yours, so kudos on that.
However:
Your heel strike is looking more like a strangely alternating toe/heel strike.
The right arm does not bend at the elbow.
The chopping man skates back and forth on his feet.

[Rydin]

On the tree animation, it looks like you have some .gif dots---zoom in real close and you'll see a bunch of randomly placed dots moving with each frame.  Maybe reexamine the way you're saving the .gif?

[Bohne]

Thanks for comments and compliments everyone!

@vedsten

The hat was mostly a placeholder, but you were right about the lining nontheless. And the "beard" was actually supposed to be his jaw so I guess we had a little problem there as well  . With regards to woodchopping: Well, your feet certainly can't be static. That being said, I suppose you´re right in so far as that they don't dance this kind of rumba either. I wanted him too look as if he was basically throwing himself violently against the tree, but this just looks sub-par.

@sharprm

Are you, good sir, insinuating that Isometric man is not breathtaking? I hope you are being sarcastic! 

You're right about the palette, it's a mess at present. Big thank you for the topic tips, I'd seen them before sometime while lurking but just plain forgot about them, they're a treasure trove of wisdom.

@ Salvage

Good spot on the heel strike, it does look strange, hadn't thought about it at all!

@ Rydin & Vedsten

Yupp, my animation program manhandled the poor darlings a bit. Since animation is actually done by our game engine, I hadn't been concerned about it until now, will think about proper saving in the future.

Anyhow, one of the threads that sharprm recommended has got me thinking that I need to give Isometric man a complete overhaul. While I get cracking on that, here's Cthulhu to keep you company! I'll be back in a jiffy!

[infinitegames]

I like your trees a lot. Their leaves look great, but don't fall into the procedural, expected look. The trunks are pretty plain, though, and don't really seem to have been focused on (yet, probably). They look cel-shaded, so I assume you'll get to them. Make sure you have a good wood grain and some depth.

[Sherman Gill]

Why are everything leaning right?

[sharprm]

Because its part of a giant song and dance routine where all the animals are singing about the swamp. Yeah, try using flip horizontal Bohne to pick up on that.

Hue shifting to purple dont make no sense imo unless the sky is purple. You need some consistency between the two types of trunks, but i guess its a wip. Also, with the tree with light green leaves, if feel the shadow on trunk is too dark. If the trunk seems able to reflect the white light from the sun almost as well as the leaves (ie. the trunks brightest color is bright) then it should also be able to reflect the purple sky light as well (ie. the shadow on trunk needs to be brighter and more purple). The rock and the small green bush are excellent though. Its a bit strange that only some things are sunken into the swamp.

Yeah, I took the breathtaking thing too seriously - I even first thought you were referring to an idle animation where the character breathes and I was looking everywhere for it.

[Hatch]

Ho there, Pixelation! I'm going to try to get serious about critique.

My initial reaction to the swamp mockup is confusion. The ground tiles are very busy and distracting. Some things, like the logs and the green rock (?) are half submerged, while others, like the trees and the person, are fully on top, making it look like they're walking on water. If the other elements are meant to be half buried rather than submerged, well... That's not really how it reads, at least not to me, especially in the context of a swamp, which I think of more as water than mud.

Speaking of the logs. At first glance, they look inverted--like textured, log-shaped depressions in the ground. To me it looks like one of those 3D optical illusions where the image seems to 'pop' in and out if you stare at it long enough. But I may just be tired

Also, the trees seem really disjointed and somewhat inappropriate. I know leafy and evergreen trees can and do appear in swamps in real life, but of course the more typical appearance, the one most people have in their heads when they think "swamp", is that of dead, broken trees, like the one you have on the left. That's why they also think of rotting, half submerged logs--the artists formerly known as trees.

Lastly, the whole thing seems to lack cohesion. I'm sure you had a blank patch of ground tiles onto which you simply pasted various elements, and that's exactly what it looks like. I saw a great post by Ben2theEdge that I think is very applicable.


SO, in conclusion, what I would do is:

• Simplify the ground tiles with fewer colors and less contrast.
• Decide once and or all if it's mud or shallow water, and redraw everything accordingly. Or have patches of mud and patches of water, I guess.
• Maybe revisit the shading on the submerged logs--I'm still not sure if it's just me being slightly nutty.
• Ditch the leafy (deciduous?) and evergreen (coniferous?) trees in favor of more typical dead trees.
• Think more in terms a full scene rather than individual elements.