AuthorTopic: (Nudity) Back with my female RPG base, better and improved... I hope!  (Read 9691 times)

Offline skittles.loli

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I think it looks great. I would suggest using the less saturated color pallet of the girl on the left though, this new one seems a little bright.
I like her curves, she looks more realistic but not fat or "chibi" or anything, more womanly. Its great!

EDIT:
Actually, I love the splicing ndchristie did there, I'd say that's the best so far.
« Last Edit: June 20, 2009, 03:31:41 am by skittles.loli »

Offline st0ven

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So jut to clearify this a bit, i wanted to point out that you can still keep the legs "skinny" and have more of that sexy anime gap near the crotch and still maintain outlines. As ndchristie would suggest it can be tricky but certainly not unworkable. I hadnt considered the outline on my first go at it and thats my mistake, but ive edited it slightly again to include the outline and the skinnier legs and hopefully you can agree that its not impossible for that to work if in fact thats what youd like to achieve.



notice that not all ofyour outline segments have to be the same darkness, so long as it maintains a contrast between your sprite and environment, this can vary where needed.

Offline Beoran

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st0ven, Ok, I misunderstood the point you're trying to make. With your new edit I think I can better see your intentions. You seem to suggest making the sprite more slender in general, right? I can see now your approach is workable, but I have to admit I may not like the resulting look too much. You're right it's possible to open up the legs, but I think women don't generally seem to stand at rest with their legs open. But I do agree that it's better to use more than one outline color. I like how you use a light outline on the non-shadow sides of the sprite.

ndchristie, I'm trying to balance anatomical realism with characterization. That's why I've done the two versions on the right by tracing over an appropriately scaled down reference, except for the hands, feets and face. Check out this link for my references: http://www.fineart.sk/index.php?s=0&cat=2. Hence, these two on the right have body shapes that are mostly anatomically correct. It does look more slender and feminine, but I think the slightly wide character(as it was) seems to fit better with the face. The right version is based upon my original sprite, but has arms that are more "flipper like". What do you people think about it?

« Last Edit: June 20, 2009, 09:04:34 pm by Beoran »
Kind Regards, Beoran.

Offline ndchristie

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i think she's still got cankles which i see as a problem if you want this to be a generic base.  you may also want to thin her by 1 pixel at least because while you might think the edited versions are too thin, the girl you're presenting is decidedly heavy-set.  Roy Krenkel would be proud, but I think most people are better served by basing their characters on an athletic type rather than curvier.

the love of my life is slightly curvy :P.
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Offline Beoran

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Finally, I decided against shaving of one or two pixels in the width, because, no matter how I tried, it just looked to scrawny and weak to my eyes, not to mention it didn't fit with the head. I was from the beginning dead set against presenting my women like barbie dolls, so I feel like i'd rather have my character look too portly than too skinny. Remember, it's not fat, but muscles! ^_^ I also decided against the flipper arms, as they aren't the style I'm looking for. Also, the face looks exactly how I want it to be, so I'm afraid I'll have to reject the heavier brows, which look more manly to me.

However, I lengthened the torso to give a more vertical, slightly thinner feel. I think this works better than shaving off pixels. I also straightened out the shoulders. I updated the outline to use two colors more effectively. I also borrowed st0vens hand  and texturing/shading technique, so I feel it looks a lot better, now. I also tried to make the ankles look more narrow, but I refuse to make either the arms or legs 3 pixels wide because it just look too thin to me.

Anyway, I'd like to thank ndchistie and st0vens for your contributions, although I didn't heed most of them. I'm thinking I have a more clear idea now about the style I'm going for. 

And Roy Krenkel? Now there's a woman:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zD76GyK9Tjo/Sfu6ydyVLvI/AAAAAAAAAtE/BKtNFCOv11g/s1600-h/tv-rgk1.jpg
^_^
« Last Edit: June 21, 2009, 06:22:29 pm by Beoran »
Kind Regards, Beoran.

Offline ndchristie

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Well, the slight increase in height does help.  I would strongly urge you to reconsider the manly shoulders - they at least can be bought in without ruining the size/weight.  The alternative is to give your male base huge manly shoulders I suppose, as long as there's some contrast.

last but not least, there's a couple of pixel no-nos left here:



top circle - false incision.  Where a band intersects two otherwise identical shapes of color, they become the same form, as you get with those 4 steps above and below the band that dakens each by 1.  change the top or the bottom slightly so that the shapes become their own.

middle circle - textbook case of banding.  where two shapes of two shades (here, that 2nd-to-dark brown shade gets you nothing), you get this jaggy, distracting form.  I suggest pulling the middle shade orange down 2 pixels.

lower circle - another textbook case of overly-independent shapes.  also jaggy.  I recommend having those two columns of the lightest shade gain one bit of length each so that the one on the right goes down 1 pixel further and the left goes up one pixel further, joining the highlight shape rather than creating jagginess.
A mistake is a mistake.
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Offline Beoran

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OK, I think I understood what you meant about the banding. I'm not quite sure I understood what you meant by "false incision", but I hope I solved it. Is my pixeling better now? If you could point me to more examples of false incision I'd be grateful.

As for the shoulders, I think this is characterization versus anatomy. In all the references I saw, female shoulders are just as straight as the male ones. But most people seem to /think/ that women have small, round shoulders and men have big straight ones, so I decided to give the smaller, rounded shoulders you see above a try. I'm not sure if it is an improvement or not.
Kind Regards, Beoran.

Offline ndchristie

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I think it is.  An it's not a common misconception that woman have gentler shoulders, as you say - it's accepted by every anatomy text i've ever read and extensively documented at the wax/cadaver museum in Florence, Italy, where I spent a semester.  Those crazy Italians had it measured and averaged mean, median, mode for over 600 skeletons and casts of both sexes with about half of them non-Italian and at least a few of them non-white. Oddly enough, another big one was that women averaged much smaller fibula/tibia sets, which i would not have guessed.
A mistake is a mistake.
The same mistake twice is a bad habit.
The same mistake three or more times is a motif.

Offline Beoran

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OK, thanks for affirming that. Maybe I'll try to shorten the lower legs one pixel and see if that helps too, or not. However, this thread has already taken me a bit too far,  I feel. So perhaps, if no one else has any edits to contribute I'll leave it as is for now. I've got a whole lot of other fish to fry to make my game, I can't "yak shave" every detail, I'm afraid. ^_^
Kind Regards, Beoran.

Offline Scribblette

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I was struggling with that too - the references have the arms going straight down and shoulders just as wide as the males, yet all depictions show them as lithe little anorexic things miraculously not falling forward and bouncing along on their breasts.

Good luck, Beo, and cheers for garnering all the useful information in your threads from the pros! You'll probably discover all sorts of edits you'll end up doing as you start to clothe them, I suspect. :)
Now reading: Animator's Survival Kit, Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, Fun With A Pencil. No time to pixel!
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