[WIP] help with sprite - space marine terminator

[happymonster]

Only other suggestion is to covert to the Ultramarine brotherhood..

[ndchristie]

Only other suggestion is to covert to the Ultramarine brotherhood..

Booooo no smurfs!  They only make up 200% of the fairweather fanbase...(with blood ravens taking up another 150% despite having the most tepid backstory offered in the game universe since 1990)

Revamp is an accomplishment.  Now moar frames! .

Also you might want to look at a little of AA to clear a few of the larger edges, and the cross could come back for balance as long as the form is subservient to the pauldron:

[Monochrome]

Booooo no smurfs!  They only make up 200% of the fairweather fanbase...(with blood ravens taking up another 150% despite having the most tepid backstory offered in the game universe since 1990)

Indeed. I do like the Ultramarines but they're overrated by most fans. I'll try making a Deathwing recolour instead

Revamp is an accomplishment.  Now moar frames! .

I think I'll give it a rest. It will be mighty hard to come up with new stances and I've been working on this simple frame for almost two weeks.

Also you might want to look at a little of AA to clear a few of the larger edges, and the cross could come back for balance as long as the form is subservient to the pauldron:

Hum, I'm affraid I don't get what you mean. are you talking about all the edges or simply the edge on the left pauldron?

[ndchristie]

names the top of the back.

also look to your palette a smidge (on a similar note of eliminating jaggies):

your red ramp by value goes like this:


see the hopskip between the reds?

also, because the model is mostly made up of the first 4 values and because the human eye can discern on-screen differences between medium-dark tones better than elsewhere, it's more important to try and balance these out or add another tone to smooth.

Also you have some redundant values (2 to be exact) which i think are the result of splicing and shifting colors over time and not ealizing they've ermerged (see the shadow tone on the hand is different, and the dark bright red up top is not the dark bright red of below...)

[Monochrome]

names the top of the back.

also look to your palette a smidge (on a similar note of eliminating jaggies):

your red ramp by value goes like this:


see the hopskip between the reds?

also, because the model is mostly made up of the first 4 values and because the human eye can discern on-screen differences between medium-dark tones better than elsewhere, it's more important to try and balance these out or add another tone to smooth.

Also you have some redundant values (2 to be exact) which i think are the result of splicing and shifting colors over time and not ealizing they've ermerged (see the shadow tone on the hand is different, and the dark bright red up top is not the dark bright red of below...)

I'll try introducing an extra dark red value inbetween the 1st then. As for the redundant values I could only find the one in hand shader. Where is the other one? It's a bit hard for me to keep track of all these things since I'm using mspaint. Can you point me to any specific software (preferably free) that allows me to keep track of all this stuff? Keep in mind a lot of the things you mentioned are new to me and any new bit of information is precious. As for creating animated gifs what kind of software should i use, given that i'll be working with animated frames later?

[Monochrome]

Added an extra dark red tone along with a few extra shades. While the bridge between the darker tones is still noticeable I feel  adding yet another tone would be useless at this stage. Looks a bit softer now. Any opinions? I decided I won't venture further into the next frame until this one isn't perfect, so please, give me all your feedback.

[Etchebeur]

hi  
i dont have color table...im are using colors of BOF3
but...see...


edit!
20 colors and simple move...

[Indigo]

there are some threads here at pixelation that EVERYONE feels the need to make edits.  This is one of them  To me though, I'd be much more interested in animating this bad boy at this stage.  The version of the terminator you have now is really solid.  I think you should listen closely to ndchristie's advise.  Everything I'm about to say was already said be him, now that I look back over the comments...

I made an edit too

(animated, yours and mine)

and the palette:  (yours on top, mine on bottom)

note: this isn't your full palette, just your main red ramp.

Like ndchristie was saying, Your ramp has some pretty ugly jumps right now.  You have a red thats so near-black, that it may as well be black to the eye.  I raised the value of that, and made other value changes in the palette to make a smoother, more evenly spaced, ramp.  I also noticed that your second-lightest color, the gray one, was poking a hole in your ramp.  This is because a gray (even though it technically is the right hue, just really desaturated) will tend to look cool in context of warm ones, and warm in teh context of cool ones.  I raised the saturation towards a more yellow color.  I also ramped the dark values towards purple, just for some extra interest.  This alone, helped your sprite a bunch.

There were colors in your ramp that you didn't even use in areas of your sprite - making areas look more rough than they needed to be (such as the right, his left, shoulder pad).  I added in those colors where needed - smoothing the sprite a bit.  The last thing I think you should consider is lightening up the lit edges of a sprite.  In the darker areas, it makes sense to have a dark outline, but in areas like the shoulder pads and back which are pretty bright, its quite a big jump to go straight to the darkest values for the outline.  I tend to change the outline color dynamically with the color it surrounds - keeping it maybe 1 or 2 shades darker.

hope this helps.  In all honesty, I'm much more interested in seeing this thing be animated than I am interesting in nit-picking it any further.  You've made a wonderful progression this far.

-Dan

[Monochrome]

there are some threads here at pixelation that EVERYONE feels the need to make edits.  This is one of them   To me though, I'd be much more interested in animating this bad boy at this stage.  The version of the terminator you have now is really solid.  I think you should listen closely to ndchristie's advise.  Everything I'm about to say was already said be him, now that I look back over the comments...

I made an edit too

(animated, yours and mine)

and the palette:  (yours on top, mine on bottom)

note: this isn't your full palette, just your main red ramp.

Like ndchristie was saying, Your ramp has some pretty ugly jumps right now.  You have a red thats so near-black, that it may as well be black to the eye.  I raised the value of that, and made other value changes in the palette to make a smoother, more evenly spaced, ramp.  I also noticed that your second-lightest color, the gray one, was poking a hole in your ramp.  This is because a gray (even though it technically is the right hue, just really desaturated) will tend to look cool in context of warm ones, and warm in teh context of cool ones.  I raised the saturation towards a more yellow color.  I also ramped the dark values towards purple, just for some extra interest.  This alone, helped your sprite a bunch.

There were colors in your ramp that you didn't even use in areas of your sprite - making areas look more rough than they needed to be (such as the right, his left, shoulder pad).  I added in those colors where needed - smoothing the sprite a bit.  The last thing I think you should consider is lightening up the lit edges of a sprite.  In the darker areas, it makes sense to have a dark outline, but in areas like the shoulder pads and back which are pretty bright, its quite a big jump to go straight to the darkest values for the outline.  I tend to change the outline color dynamically with the color it surrounds - keeping it maybe 1 or 2 shades darker.

hope this helps.  In all honesty, I'm much more interested in seeing this thing be animated than I am interesting in nit-picking it any further.  You've made a wonderful progression this far.

-Dan

You sorta made my day. Your edit is really good and thanks to it, I think I'm finally done with this frame. So far my two latest problems where finding  a way to keep light reflections neutral on dark environments and general smoothing. Since my main source of inspiration for my game project are the bitmap bros, I've been testing the sprite with some industrial environments from chaos engine, one of my favourite titles from the bros.



These are the previous looks of my sprite. While it's decently smoothed it's still quite inferior from the general LOD of the original CE sprites. Like I mentioned, the other problem was related with lighting. Contrary to CE, our project will feature some poorly illuminated environments on which white reflections would stand out a bit too much, I believe. I was actually thinking of a solution until your edit came.



And the difference is notorious. Not only it blends a lot better with the background, but also the yellow reflections contrast a lot better with the darker shades. I'm definitively keeping your pallete and I'm about to go straight to animation now. It will be though for someone who never done something like this before, (I've already wasted +2 weeks on this frame alone) so wish me luck. I'll be counting with your help later aswell

[big brother]

I think the red needs to be more muted to fit into that scene. As it is now, it burns a hole through the plane.