House in a tree

[Groogokk]

Hello everyone,

I started working on the graphics for an AGS game with an RPG-Maker perspective a couple of months ago. What I'm working on at the moment is a little village with a number of houses inside birch trees. I had drawn some slender birches before (see picture on the left), so I started pixelling away. At some point, I decided that a wide tree trunk required dithering to give the tree some depth... (and I had never dithered before).



On the left side of the wide tree trunk you can see my first try: I drew parallel shades of gray and tried to blur them with dithering. On the right side, those shades are not parallel - and they are not quite finished, because I started wondering which was the better way. What do you think? (Some darker, slightly curved horizontal stripes will be added to the trunk once the shades are finished).

Apart from that, I'd be grateful for any kind of constructive criticism.

[Matti]

The non-parallel shading on the right side of the tree looks much better. I'd go with that.

[Khris]

What you have on the left is called banding and should be avoided at all costs, especially with objects from nature.

[MashPotato]

I agree that the right side looks better.  If you're planning on using black outlines, try using them on the slender birch as well to keep them in the same style :)

[Jakerpot]

yeah, i agree too, but i think the tree is kind of linear, but it's cool anyway.

[Evil]

The original tree looks great, but something about the outlines or the dithering make it look like it has JPG artifacts or something. The outlines don't really work with the character. I did a little edit to show you how to keep some depth to the tree, but without making it look bulbousy. I didn't change any dithering, but it's the shape of the tree that will really change how the dithering looks.

[Groogokk]

Thanks everyone for your feedback! 

I plan to use the dark gray outlines on the slender birch, too, as soon as I finish the later work (for which I expanded the palette).

The tree on the right was drawn from scratch (that's probably why it looks rather linear, Jakerpot), but I've got one or two more natural-looking trees (ones that I used a scanned hand-drawn sketch for) in the works.

@ Evil: Thanks for your edit, Evil. I didn't like that funny bend there either. The additional root in the back looks very nice, I think I'll use this as an inspiration.