AuthorTopic: Catch As Cat Can Mockup.16  (Read 46488 times)

Offline Ai

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Re: Catch As Cat Can Mockup.15

Reply #70 on: March 31, 2009, 08:18:14 am
"You could greatly benefit from studying basic design principles, do not  underestimate their importance."

-Unfortunately, no one seems to know where these are written down sadly. Or, they are, and no one's telling anybody. Or they're here somewhere and I'm just completely blind and missing them entirely. (And unless I'm seeing things. Your brown tree edit uses nearly the exact same colors that my new brownish background tree does. What's that palette btw?)
That palette is the new palette for the OHRRPGCE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OHRRPGCE). I made it specifically for that purpose, and it performs well as a palette to color-reduce to, for 95% of pictures tested. I concluded this meant it is both a realistic and flexible palette.

Googling 'basics of graphic design' gets me a number of interesting and useful links.

Quote
"I think you might benefit from drawing a mesh showing the 3d shape of objects before you shade them -- it prevents you from doing impossible shading, more or less."

-Thank you for the edit. Your shading's a tad subtle but I think I get what you mean. And by 3d shape does she(?) mean an actual 3d model, or blobbing necessary colors around and adding texture later? (I'm guessing it's the latter.)
I mean literally drawing a 3d mesh. Imagine that you are a 3d rendering program, and draw the wireframe mesh that makes up that 3d object (roughly. It just needs to capture all major features in 3d space.) Don't pay attention to color, texture, or anything -- you are just drawing lines to define the 3d shape of something. On a separate layer, you can block out the actual object. Once you have that mesh, it's easy to see how a particular part should be lit -- it depends only on the angle between the position of the light and that surface, and the distance between the light and the surface. Some styles even ignore the distance entirely, and still look quite good.

This is really what I mean by a mesh:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire-frame_model

A bit short of time currently, I'll make an edit later showing what I mean if you're still confused.

Currently, your trunk is excellent (it certainly kicks the ass of my edit)! the branches need work (more definition in 3d space)

Re: the characters: If you're not sure about the design of your character, I suggest you work on it with paper and pencil. This method is far superior to pixel art for just playing around with character design.  And then when you've chosen a design, draw the new sprite based on your final design.
« Last Edit: March 31, 2009, 09:59:41 pm by Ai »
If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.