En Passant Sprites

Started by SpacePirateCaine, Mon 27/02/2006 22:42:21

Previous topic - Next topic

SpacePirateCaine

Ahoy.

I've been working on redoing a bunch of the sprites for a revived game project I am involved in, and figured that if I was going to put the effort into a complete rework of in-game graphics, that I should do it right.


This is the lead character sprite (3/4 view), with and without hawaiian shirt, and I'm attempting to make it look good, while keeping a relatively low pallate and keeping it easily animatable. Wondering if I could get any tips on how to make it look even better, and perhaps optimize the image a little more.

The game itself will be 640x480 resolution, and though we're going to be using a high-color pallate, I still like to work in the range of 15-20 colors per sprite, if I can.

I may, in the future, be posting more sprites from the project, so I'll just keep this thread for that purpose.
Check out MonstroCity! | Level 0 NPCs on YouTube! | Life's far too short to be pessimistic.

Daniel Thomas

#1
_I_ think shortening HIS right leg would make it better, it seems out of proportions in my eyes. making it 2-3 pixels longer then his left leg would be enough to make it look 3/4

EDIT: and maybe bring the right a little closer to the middle, try make them slimmer too see if it looks any good.

just my 5cents
Check out The Journey of Iesir Demo | Freelance artist, check out my Portfolio

Mordalles

yeah, i aggree, something looks a bit wrong with his right leg.

creator of Duty and Beyond

SpacePirateCaine

Thanks for the prompt input! I went ahead and tweaked the length of his right leg, and updated the files, so they should be now visible in the first post, sans long-leg.
Check out MonstroCity! | Level 0 NPCs on YouTube! | Life's far too short to be pessimistic.

DanClarke

I'm not sure if it's intentional, but the top half of the body just seems way too small for the legs.

SpacePirateCaine

#5
Also a very good point. I also just noticed Zyndicate's edit, and gave another whack at the legs. Dragged them a little closer together, and slimmed them down a bit. He's supposed to be athletic, but not an olympic speed skater. Thanks a lot for the input, everyone, I'm really glad I put it up here.
Check out MonstroCity! | Level 0 NPCs on YouTube! | Life's far too short to be pessimistic.

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

His torso is indeed disproportionate to the legs, but I've come to see that as your style rather than an anatomical error that should be fixed.  I'd stick with it, personally, as it makes the sprites easily recognizable as your work.  Also, there are a slew of fighting games like King of Fighters and such featuring characters with impossibly long legs and no one ever complains about those!

Helm

#7


This is now 12 colours. You know about your anatomy thing, right? Extremely small head, long legs? Not my type of thing, but each to his own. Otherwise, you're not using your palette very smartly. A colour can be used in many places, this saves up both colours and time when you animate.
WINTERKILL

Afflict

Good job whats up with the foot "his left"

SpacePirateCaine

I wish I could say I'd be able to recreate that without studying your work extensively, Helm. I'm going to open that up in GraphicsGale, cry for a while, and then see if I can come even close to the same level as that.

As far as the anatomy is concerned, yes, it's hardly photo-accurate, but it's the way I've drawn for quite a while. Somewhat more cartoonish than many, more realistic than some. I do admit that I'm still a rank novice when it comes to working out pallettes, and I've been quietly picking apart your work on PixelJoint to see if I can't figure out exactly how you do it.

Unfortunately, I fear that I'm still nowhere near being able to whip up something that good in the amount of time that I'm sure it takes you. I hope that when I'll also be able to animate it (when I get there) without too much trouble. I'll get on fiddling with that a bit. All things considered, I'd love to just take that and claim it as my own, but I wouldn't learn a thing from that. Any pointers you could offer me (and anyone else reading this) that we may be able to work with, save for going over your work with a fine toothed comb? Anything you could teach me would be greatly appreciated.

Also, regarding the left foot, I try to work with the feet being more flat to the ground, so they work on a broader range of backgrounds, but I have no proof that the feet that Helm reworked wouldn't do just as well or better. I'll try some stuff out, and see what works best.

Thank you so much for your input.
Check out MonstroCity! | Level 0 NPCs on YouTube! | Life's far too short to be pessimistic.

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

#10
Well, what I found that helped me with color usage immensely was playing around with restricted palettes for awhile (in my case the c-64 palette).  This may not be an option for you, but after forcing myself to draw sprites in 3-4 colors and backgrounds with 16 at most I found I could make very convincing sprites despite only having a few colors to work with.  Your original sprite color scheme was fine imo, aside from the contrast on the shades being a bit low.  Helm's version literally changes the presentation from comic to more realistic- and if that's the direction you want to go then by all means do so.  Your original had more of a raw comic book appeal to it, however.  I did a quick edit in 8 colors with some dithering to give you some ideas about contrast and making do with fewer colors.  Obviously, the sprite would benefit from some more color variation.


Helm

#11
I dunno if words really help much, but here's the thing about colour palettes, conservation and mixing. Copy/pasted from a reply about the same topic in Pixelopolis about how


was made

Quote
http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs092/VA10/HTML/GoethesTriangle.html

this thing above is real fun, I suggest you use it.

Now, it's still guesswork for me, but there are basic rules. I lack deep technical knowledge, but generally I avoid too much saturation in natural surfaces, ultra saturation is for plastic colour and human made reflectives, of which I don't draw much anyway. So as long as you keep saturation low, you pick a hue, any hue :P well whatever hue you think will make a good base. Let's say we're making a human face. A desaturated dry flesh tone will do. From there, we consider the lightsource tint. Lightsources have tints. daylight is bright yellow and reflective blues and what have you. Therefore we start making the shades go towards the yellow highlight we need. The darker shades should complement the yellow with the opposite colour in the colourwheel, in this case, purple. So darker shades mean less saturation, and towards purple. Lighter shades, more saturation (naturally, but don't overdo it). That's pretty basic, and I've done the purple-flesh-yellow skin ramp for spritework for the last 3 years or something. However, here I have 16 shades, which is way more than I'd need for modest purple-flesh-yellows. so what do I do with intermediate shades? I decide to represent other parts of the colourwheel, do near neighbour tints. Now, this is a bit guesswork and a bit 'lol let's see how much we can cram into this thing lol!' but not as much as you'd think. For example, I selected mid-range pinks/oranges because I knew I'd need them for where the flesh is pink with sanguine humour so to speak, and greens because I wanted that sort of zombie thing going on. So when you have a few primary tints, and a few secondary tints, you try to bridge from one shade to the next, the fine art of minmaxing lightness/constrast/hue to have a servicable ramp. for example, when I entered the first orange on the cheek in step 3 after pep suggested oranges, I just selected the colour below (a blue shade) and shifted the hue to orange to see how it looks. However, this is not a finalized shade. For this shade to be used for maximal effect, it has to NOT be the same lightness and saturation as the shade below it, it needs to be lighter, or darker, even if it's by a little bit ( you can get shades to work with eachother even if they're 10 or 20 lightness apart if you tweak the saturation. It's really hit and miss here ) so it becomes part of the RAMP, not just an alternate tint to be used only here and there. My focus is on using all the colours everywhere, at this time in my pixel art path, therefore unifying the palette is no1 priority on any piece for me. This creates, however, baroque-ish and monochromatic pieces. everything just melts into itself, a wonderful flurry of colours. This is the effect I want, but others prefer segmented colours and more game-arty things. Look at the three blick coloured pieces by myself, tomi and pep. Look how Tomi made it into a game sprite, with 3 ramps ( blue, red, green ) pep applied his special stylistics with the bright but unified palette, and mine is sorta monochromatic, every colour everywhere...

hope the rambling helps. If you need any clarifications, ask.

another post from Pix about colour theory, this time discussing the TRVE MASTERS OF NEBULAR FROST piece:

QuoteI don't think there's any tinting way early in the process here, is there? Post which history step you mean if you want something specific. When dealing with demoscene artwork, I make my colour ramps estimating what tints I'll be using beforehand and then adjust each shade until it meshes considerably in my mind. Way early this is all the one flesh ramp until I'm satisfied with the volumetrics. The corpsepaint face of course called for a pure grayscale ramp, and the hair and leather for blues and reds. So 64 colours. When I had my ramps, I somewhat intuitively started testing tints on places ( like the collarbones which I REALLY love as they came out ) and some stuff just makes sense ( like the tint on the shoulder from the resonant blue behind the hair ). Other stuff are just there to be there. I like mixing everything with everything. Pure ramps look boring to me.

QuoteCraig Mullins is talking about things I probably wouldn't understand for the life of me I guess, but from my limited ability and experience I can too tell that as long as you properly minmax the saturation and lightness of a shade, you can do pretty freaking big jumps in hue from shade to shade and it will look very well. Look at a recent edit I did for faceless' avatar for hue jumps in a single ramp. There's theory behind the hue shifts most of the time, but since pixel art allows for such minute control at any level in creating the piece, one sometimes just goes crazy and experiments with the HSL sliders on a shade, 1 bit at a time :)

Generally though, the theory is that you tint towards the colour of the lightsource ( blueish yellow in sunlight I guess ) and towards complementary shades in darkness. Skin strangely adds saturation in darkness in places where the skin is thin and light subsurface scatters through, but it goes towards more muted unsaturated purple darks where it is thick and oily. In pixel art, and this is more of the way I learnt to pixel from studying amiga-era artists, I usually forget proper theory when I tint art. I like to unify my palette for the piece, everything everywhere, and I like to keep the main colour of the piece as 'ambient'. It's there, but it's not THERE and THERE but not THERE. It's the general colour. Otherwise I like to use otherworldly lightsources, tints and smearings that while not realistic, suit the pixel art aesthetic I've developed over the years.

The computer is not a tool for simple reproduction of representational art like actual painting can be (amongst other things). It has it's own aesthetic. There is an aesthetic in the method. You can accentuate the aesthetic by making the method more visible in the art. Computer art, video-game art, pixel art. These things have special charges that need to be understood and to an extent exploredfor me to respect the produced art as within a new medium in itself. In that respect then, I pixel in colour schemes and stylistics I've picked up from amiga art, because clear 'reality'-based colour theory doesn't accentuate the pixel art method for me. Also, I sometimes texture using squares, or my structures ( not as in this piece ) accentuate the vertical and horisontal grids, generally giving the feel of squares, doublewide pixels, etc etc. Pixel art isn't just drawing in another way.

about green tint in flesh: I think I was trying to unify that end of the ramp with the pure gray ramp I use to tint that under the nipple for example for later when I would collapse the two ramps so as to save shades at the optimization stage. But the sickly green suits his oily flesh, no? What else would probably work would be as sick burned pink, but it would need a lot of juggling to balance it now if I changed it.


crab2selout: of course dither brushes were used. Also darken/lighten modes, some smearing around the head hmm what else...

no that's about it.
WINTERKILL

SpacePirateCaine

Alright, that's more like it. I copied a good number of ideas from Helm's edit, which hopefully worked out alright. I'm also in process of reading through the links and the advice in your post, Helm, which is greatly appreciated. I'll attempt to apply the things I learned in future sprites. This isn't yet a finished work, of course. I also have to give a swing at the flower shirt. I'll see if I can't apply what I've learned into that to start. Wish me luck!
Check out MonstroCity! | Level 0 NPCs on YouTube! | Life's far too short to be pessimistic.

Afflict

I dunno need to read through that page again its early morning hours 6am and well I blame sleep deprivation anybody else know layman terms?

Helm

Good luck, Caine. Post when you have new stuff and if you want my help.
WINTERKILL

big brother

#15
16 colors is way more than enough to draw a sprite without resorting to dithering. Fighter sprites have been doing this for years, and they have to keep the colors distinct because of palette shifting. Because of a sprite's small size (in comparison to the background, etc) dithering makes it look furry.

For example:
3 skin tones
3 shirt tones
2 short tones (borrow lightest from skin)
1 hair color (darker parts can be borrowed from skin) = 9 colors
(whites of eyes can be borrowed from the shirt, darkest short color can be used for the sandals)

If you want, I can do a paintover to demonstrate...

Animating in high-res is going to be a big production bottleneck if you want to get fancy with the coloring.
Mom's Robot Oil. Made with 10% more love than the next leading brand.
("Mom" and "love" are registered trademarks of Mom-Corp.)

Nacho

And also, if you go over 16 colours (Talking at least about my animation program) the graphic will eventually get ruined with dots, because for animating converts to gif...
Are you guys ready? Let' s roll!

SMF spam blocked by CleanTalk