Messages

Renal: That's what I keep saying! It's not just Disney, about half the cartoons I've seen look like that. But it's the first thing people notice, unfortunately - that the characters aren't as detailed and shaded as the backgrounds.

The neon sign is going to be animated. This is just something I slapped together to show the walkcycle in action.

Kastchey: Thanks, I tried that, doesn't really work. Light outlines look weird when the character walks in front of a dark background. Blending with filler colors (i. e. having a brown coat bordered with dark brown instead of black) could help, but it's also a lot of extra work.

I'm doing different sprites for each room to match the color scheme - that's all I can do at the moment I'm afraid. More details and shadows are on my list of things I'd like to do if there's any time to go back and do some extra polishing. But right now, I'm far behind schedule as it is.

Snarky: You're right about the neck, it's shaky overall... I'll see if I ever get back to correct that or if I scratch it to "hand-drawn charm"

Here's another one:

[imgzoom]http://hvavra.sweb.cz/PoisonGreen/William_walk_side_outlines.gif[/imgzoom]

This one I can actually still correct without wasting too much time, so nitpick away!

StillInThe90s: Thanks! The head bobbing is a cartoony thing. It's not realistic, but I kinda like how it accentuates each step. Does it bother anyone else?

Anian: You're right about the arm - I actually gave it a little more swing because it seemed cool at the moment . In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn't have done that...

dactylopus: yeah, I have a problem with the swing of the arms in the front and back views - I couldn't handle the 3D aspect of it, all attempts to make them swing "towards the camera" came out weird, so I just gave up.

A bit of an update:




I'm not really sure I have the time to correct anything at this point, but I'll be happy for feedback anyway

English teacher, freelance graphic designer.

Eric: It's actually a walking pose (the other leg is going to be rised mid-step), so I made her lean forward a bit.

Just a quick question for everybody: how about the length of the arms? Currently they're longer in the side view than in the front view, so I'm going to fix one of those according to the other. Which length looks better to you? Thanks!

She is supposed to be the "elongated" type of girl - this is the image I used as a reference for the face (although I strayed from it later):



Question is, is the torso too long compared to the rest of the body? I used some reference images and the proportions seem to fit more or less... there are girls who have shorter torsos, but I also found ones that are like my Mia. But if it looks disproportional, I'll correct it - been staring at it for so long that I can't really tell.

[A Poison Green]

Hey guys,

so after lurking here for ages, starting three games and never finishing any of them, it seems I'm finally working on a serious project - check it out here:

A Poison Green

I'll be posting new character art in this thread to get some feedback. Here's the first one I'd like to improve before I start animating it (because after that, there's no going back ):

[imgzoom]http://hvavra.sweb.cz/PoisonGreen/mia5.png[/imgzoom]

It's one of the main characters, Mia: "an unemployed woman aimlessly wandering through life, stuck behind ideals that never translate into acts."

Plus one character that's already animated to an extent, but there's still an option to redo him:

[imgzoom]http://hvavra.sweb.cz/PoisonGreen/Elijah_side_walk.gif[/imgzoom]

Also we've been getting multiple criticisms about the character style not matching the backgrounds (see this for example). I believe it's pretty much the standard for character art to be simpler (less details and especially less shading) than backgrounds, but in our case, it seems to be more obvious than usually. Any ideas on how to correct that without having to do hand-painted shadows on a zillion frames of animation?

Thanks very much for any input you care to give!

Khris: Just tested it, seems you're right. Thanks!

How exactly is animation delay related to game speed?

I thought that game speed is the number of cycles per second and animation delay says how many cycles it takes to change from one frame to another. So if I have delay 2 and game speed 32, that should be 16 fps. With delay 3 and game speed 48, that's also 16 fps.

However when I tried those two settings with the same animation, the second one (delay 3, speed 48) looked noticeably faster. What am I missing here?

Khris: Thanks for taking the time to do this! It seems my instincts weren't as wrong as I thought they were. Did you really draw the 3D version using the lines shown, or did you use some transform tool?

Anyway, Sketchup it is

Awesome little game. Unlike some games that try to shove a forced joke into every sentence, the humour here felt genuine and effortless.

I just can't get over the childishness of the first version... I may try to pass it as a style, but it just looks inept to me compared to the newer version. Then again, the second one took about ten times as much time.

Well, since I'm at it, I might as well post two other early versions of backgrounds, both to be redone completely.

Judging from all the comments saying the perspective is irreparably wrong in my background, gut feeling didn't work out for me . So I need to understand where exactly I went wrong. People are trying to help by demonstrating the theory, for which I'm grateful, but I'm still not able to apply it to the specifics of my image. I see some details that seem a bit wrong, but it doesn't look off to me as a whole.

Just to be sure, this is how I imagine the room in a top view (not that I planned it this way, but it's what I see in the picture as it came out):

pharlap, tamatic: I've just noticed the sentence "The above represents a great de3al of work" in pharlap's post. I missed that before, and I'm sorry for judging it as a quick job.

This often happens to me (as can be seen in this thread ) - instead of trying to learn something from others, I resort to endless trial and error with little progress. It takes far more time than if I actually tried to learn something, but it's much, much easier mentally - I don't have to struggle to wrap my head around how others do what I can't do, I just enjoy the "freedom of creating". If this is your case, my advice would be to use other images as examples and watch tutorials. I've spent countless hours doing things the hard way, only to find some obscure video on youtube showing that they take a few minutes if you take the right approach and use the correct tools.

xrg: Hello and thanks! I'm afraid I still can't grasp the basic concepts of perspective. Let me show you the picture my spatially challenged imagination paints for me . Let's say I draw a simple cube using two-point perspective, like this:



As I imagine it, from a bird's perspective it would look like this:



Now I can move the cube around using auxiliary lines from the vanishing points, but as I see it, the cube is still facing the same, convenient direction. Like this:



.
.
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My question is, what do I do if I want to rotate the cube into a less standard angle?



Applied to your tutorial and my background, I understand how to draw stairs facing the same angle as numbers 1 and 2 in the picture below. But what if my staircase looks like 3? How do I work with auxiliary lines then?




I assume there is something very fundamental I'm not getting, but I can't figure out what.

By the way, this is an earlier version of the castle/cave background:



While the current version isn't great, I think you'll agree there has been some progress .

tamatic: Come on, let's be honest here... that image communicates an almost complete artistic lack . But then, how long did it take to create? 15 minutes? An hour? And how much thought, planning and attention to detail was invested in it?

Why so many people think they can't draw is that they assume it shouldn't require any effort. Especially no mental effort. "I don't know how to draw a tree right away, thus I'm no good at drawing". While all it takes is to type "a tree" into google, study how a tree looks like and slowly learn to copy what you see.

What really makes an artist, in my opinion, is vision. Once you can see in your head what the result should be, there are various ways to achieve it. Talent is just one of them.