Need Help with Hokage Building from Naruto

[Zettman]

Ok so I'm still working on my game as you or may not know, and I've come to find myself stuck on another piece - this one made me give up for a couple of weeks tbh.

So this is it, the Kage building.

Palette from a Naruto GBA game.

As you can see It's minimally shaded right now, I wanted to try and shade the main body, but because of it's size I couldn't find the right way, everything would look ugly...
There's obviously other mistakes in there, and things that I could add to make it look more like an actual building - in a sense, but this is my main concern atm.

[rikfuzz]

This is hugeeeee.  I find a lot of the geometry a bit confusing too, you need to use perspective guides:



I made this by making a big circle split into 5º slices that was then squashed to (roughly) the ratio of your flat ceiling circles. 

As for colouring, I think you just need to split it into areas of light and shadow and have detail only in the division, and at the very edges. Otherwise it'd be hard to manage (and at least take ages).  I'm wondering how much you're even gonna see at a time if this is for a game?

[Zettman]

Well that helps me on the lower set of tiles.. But I didn't really understand what you said about shading, and yeah I know it's going to take me a long time... Also, the screen is about 1200x800 so you should be able to see a good portion of it ingame.

[big brother]

At that resolution, I don't think pixel art can provide any aesthetic benefits. It will take a long time to draw using this fine level of control, but the results will be too small to appreciate.

[rikfuzz]

Well that helps me on the lower set of tiles.. But I didn't really understand what you said about shading, and yeah I know it's going to take me a long time... Also, the screen is about 1200x800 so you should be able to see a good portion of it ingame.

I couldn't find a decent reference pic, except some (smaller) pixel art. I assume you've seen that since it looks like you've picked colours from it, so I'd probably just do dithered gradients similar to that.  If you have a decent reference, post a link to it - I'm not really sure what texture the building should have.

[Zettman]

Yeah, the texture is what I'm mostly worried about here... And I've tried dithering it dosn't end up looking pretty here. And as for the resolution I can't shrink it down, I'm trying to go for realistic sized buildings in my game lol...

[Jad]

Do you have any ACTUAL color restrictions? If not, use dirty tools and way too many colors. Or spend way too much time on this thing. Heh.

I do agree with big brother, I'm afraid that pixel art doesn't really provide a benefit in this resolution ' 3 ';, You should cheat a bit. (this coming from a pixelation mod, haha)

[rikfuzz]

Done a super quick noise dither:  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1534394/hokage.png

It's not brilliant, but it does the job. I've added a couple of sort of pock marks. Doing more and varied sizes of these will help a lot.  Honestly, at this size maybe a curved gradient would preferable.

[Zettman]

That could work, but there's one problem... I don't know how to apply any of that on any programs I have... (I have PS, GG, etc) Could you show me how that noise dither is done?

[rikfuzz]

I use photoshop: 

1)  Make a gradient on a new layer with all the colour steps you want.
2)  Edit>transform>warp;  change the warp from 'custom' to 'arch' and change the bend to around -70.
3)  copy the layer into a new file
4)  Image>Mode>Indexed Colour in the new file, reduce to however many colours you want to restrict to, change dithering options in this dialogue too.
5)  Copy paste back into your art work, then hide the gradient layers. 
6)  Select the area you want it to cover with magic wand.
7)  Create a mask on the new gradient layer (3rd button on the bottom of the layer window)
  You're done!  But if you unlink your mask (the chain icon) you can move your gradient around in the correct area for adjusting.