GR#082 - Rat Warrior

[0xDB]

This was originally done for the weekly challenge at The Pixeljoint... however since I got some very detailed feedback from Arachne(thanks again) and as I also was not that satisfied with the original myself, I decided to work on it some more and turn in into a version 2.

original challenge entry


feedback from Arachne:
I like the concept, and the execution isn't bad, but there are a bunch of mostly minor things that bother me. I think some color changes would help a lot.

I think the purples and the sand are much too saturated. Palette variation is not a bad thing, but right now it looks a bit too garish. I would replace the yellow on the tail with light gray and white so that it's easier to tell it apart from the sand. You can also use the lightest fur color instead of the purple dithering on the tail if you desaturate the purples. The brightest yellow could also be darker. I would use a darker gray on the fur and maybe give the darkest red on the fur a more yellow tint because of the yellow sand surrounding him.

I don't think the dithering on the metal works. It makes it look too grainy. The dithering on the sand dunes doesn't do much other than make them look hairy in a sense.

The green on the middle gun should be shaded with a solid color since they're flat surfaces.

Why is the shadow cast by the rat a checkerboard pattern while the shadows cast by the sand dunes are solid? The sand dunes and shading on the minigun suggest that the light is coming from the top left side, while the rat casts a shadow as if the light is coming from above.

The top of the image is a bit cramped while the bottom is just sand, so you can move everything down a bit.

I edited the colors to find something a bit more realistic. Even though it's not as interesting as your colors, you can see if you think some of this works better:

Arachnes edit:


my changes so far, based on that feedback and edit:


Haven't had time to tackle the shadow on the ground yet, will get back to working on this tonight...

[Feron]

i would probably lose the dither on the gun, on try and go for a smoother more metallic style shading.

nice job!

[amerup]

Maybe you could darken his fur like Arachne's edit?

[0xDB]

Made the fur darker and changed some pallette entries some more. Also tried to get rid of the dithering on the gun, but...



...the strange thing is that my eyes are refusing to accept the un-dithered gun as metal. It seems blurry, less sharp and not as much as metal to them as the dithered one. What's wrong here? Are my eyes too used to the dithered version? Did I do something wrong when I removed the dithering? It's not obvious to me, so any further help with that or some explanation is appreciated.

direct comparison between dithered and un-dithered gun:

[AdamAtomic]

undithered is way way way way way

way better.  keep at it!

[0xDB]

Ok, changed the palette again, pulled some of the colors more close to yellow, most importantly one of the greens to have a color that works well on aa-ing the dunes, added the ground shadow, not sure if the projection is 100% accurate but it seems ok and added reflections of sky and sand to the gun, which is probably unrealistic but I think it looks more cool/dramatic that way:

gun progress:


current version (which I consider finished now but if there's still something that really needs improvement, please say so):

[TrevoriuS]

I'd articulate the fur much less and simplify it more. This way you can make it seem much more like hairs and not plush. How do you perceive the structure of fur? Definately not in strokes like this, and not hair by hair either. When it's too small to articulate, draw it's perception.
If we'd look up a photograph of a rat you can recognize fur, even though it clearly isn't articulated hair by hair. Rather, the structure is interpolated and embedded into a smaller surface.

Allow this to clarify:

[tocky]

I think what looks wrong to me is that the rat has all right angles and straight lines... it's the belt, more than anything. Edit is me trying to do a wierd sort of contraposto thing with the hips and shoulders, so disregard that if you want. Gots to fix the belt, though.



(also, it looks like I copied two different versions as the unaltered base/the one I edited, somehow - so ignore the dithering changes, etc.)

[0xDB]

Ok, I did soften up the fur by making the bright parts even brighter, by applying one of the tails shades as the color underneath the highlighted bunches of hair and I merged some of those individual(actually they were not intended as individual hairs already and rather as grouped up bunches of hairs but maybe that was not done radical enough) hairs some more.

To address the right-angled-ness, I tilted the belt a bit. I did not think I was allowed to bend it like you did in your edit tocky, because it is practically directly located at the eye-level and thus not allowed to form a curve like that there but I can justify the tilt by the fact that the mini-gun is resting on it a bit, pulling it down a little.
I also moved the right (rats left) foot to the left a bit to provide more support for the heavy gun and when it came to the shoulders, I did pull down the opposite shoulder that you had in your edit and justified it to myself as being pulled down by the heavy minigun.

Frankly, I think the belt in your edit makes it look too much like the rat is bowing forward (it collides with the horizon) which she is not supposed to be doing. If anything, she's leaning backward a bit to provide some counterweight to hold up the heavy gun.

I hope this does not sound like your edit is completely useless to me, in fact it is not, it's helpful, as it helped me see that the right-angled-ness was indeed looking a bit too boring and that some variation of those angles makes the image more dynamic... still not as dynamic as your edit, but I did not find anything that justified such drastic changes in the pose.

updated version:

[tocky]

That's cool, the right angleness was all I really wanted to point out