Messages

Hey there Raider,

hello allthatglitters,

looking good so far. 

* I think her feat look a little bit too short in the side view
* her mouth looks too big, this can be reduced by using pixels on the edge which are halfway towards the color of her skin...this could especially be done in the side views where it looks like she has a pacifier attached to her face
* it looks as though her breasts on the frontal view are connected into one large flat breast.  correct this by adding a little shading inbetween (just a hint), but mainly by bringing the highlighting from the top more over the two mounds than in the center
* her hands look sort of like short little crab claws, not sure what to do about that
* in the side view, her arm looks very stiff.  try letting her arm rest in a more natural (slightly bent) position and perhaps letting her rest her hands in her pockets

ok, how about this?

You can still use the concept of a fixed point perspective on a scrolling background.  What you could do is just pick some length S, and then set a perspective point on the horizon every S units.

2ma2,

No, it is not the player character.Ã,  And his name is not Mologwar, that is the name of the race of demons -- and there is more than one Mologwar demon.Ã,  They do not have sexual organs because the demons are not born and do not die, there is no evolution among demons.Ã,  I will have an updated version of the demon in 3D shortly.

p.s. your English is horrible my friend!

I am not a big hitchiker fan...it was read to me as a child, and I respected it, but I don't think I was awake for half of it and I doubt I grasped much of it.  But watching this movie, everything came back as I watched it....everything seemed to be the way I had imagined it.  So, I'm not sure, a diehard fan might see some differences but it at least felt that the feeling of it was very much the same.  If you are able to slip into the fantasy, it's a really unique movie.  So I loved it.

Hmph.  I had wanted to make the demon a little less classical.  I wanted him to be almost in the shape of a human, aside from the 2 horns.  I didn't want wings because...I can't come up with a logical explanation for them.  The wings would have to be ridiculously big for them to actually work.  But if I can't make him extremely scary without giving him claws and wings, well then, he will have to have claws and wings.  Is this more to your liking?

Ok, torso is coming along pretty well.  I'm having trouble thinking of how to make the legs and feet better.  I'll show you what I've got.  Don't be afraid to do paintovers or anything like you do for regular sprites, it can still be helpful!

Well, if he used a footage as a base (great idea)

not a new idea by the way, rotoscoping has been around for ages since the early disney movies, and is still used today in movies like ROTK

what can I say, I wish I had your talent and I wish you were drawing concept art for the characters in my game instead of me  :

Hey,

Stefano has hit the nail on the head.  The players will not identify with the demon, but I must understand the motives of the demon in order to come up with a good plot.  There are a lot of elements of the story which the player will not necessarily know about, but which are there to help me make the story as full as possible.

So, Peter,
I DO want the demon to look as evil and badass as possible.  I'm going to do my best to make the player fear him.  But to destroy him, you must also understand what his motivations are.  You cant trap an animal you dont understand.

The concept of the skull looked cool, but I veered away from the skull and wings for some logical reasons.  First, it does not make sense for a skull to be a head, as cool as it may look.  The wings are being removed because the demons can turn into black smoke sort of like the character in x-men 2, and they don't live in this world, and they don't need wings where they live.

Yes, to anyone who has seen ZBrush, it should be pretty obvious that it was used here   I did not model it in ZBrush though.  In fact, all the Zbrushing will have to be thrown away now that I have connected the head to the body, I had to change the mesh a bit.

Haddas,
The eyes are always the most difficult thing!  Haha.  Well, I don't know about pits...but I could try to make some scary looking regular eyeballs.  Something to keep in mind, but I won't be getting into that until I'm done with the main mesh.

I'm not sure I agree that it has a pig nose...I suppose slightly it does, but it looks more like a the bones behind the nose to me.  Anyway, the nose was the trickiest part to design I thought, but I'm fairly happy with it.

This is good

a while ago I posted a demon sketch
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=20509.0

I've given it a bit of a redesign that I think fits the character better.

concept:




when drawing the concept, I couldn't decide on the specifics of the body.

Anyway, take a look at the preliminary model, tell me what you think of the new look.Ã,  I will probably be re-making it for the actual game, this is more of a preliminary test.

NOte: this is not textured yet, but you can see the shape.Ã, 









The demon is not inherently evil, because I do not believe in such a concept.Ã,  His actions may seem evil to men, but that is only because we do not understand his perspective.Ã,  He comes from the world of the dead, and he is immortal, so he's pretty accustomed to seeing death and he has never felt human loss so he can't possibl understand it.Ã,  All the demons can understand is that it can be very funny to watch how the humans react when you poke holes in their babies.Ã,  But, being immortal, they are very knowleable.Ã,  I want my demon to convey a sense of fear, ominance, ancience.

after modelling the head, I have gone through my magic cards looking for inspiration, and decided to model the torso after Lord of the Pit



alright and here's one more still untextured but gives a bit of a feel of the way I want him to look

There's just not enough detail in this picture to even make comments yet.  I can't tell if the red square is supposed to be a vertical wall or a floor.  Oh...I think it is a wall connected to the brown wall above it?  This must be a bridge of some kind crossing a moat to a castle?

I'm not going to do an edit because I like the shading the way it is.  You could finish the hand though.

Oh, I don't know.. Guns are tricky things. We're lead to believe by Hollywood that handguns are portable Big Berthas that will knock a guy out of his socks when firing them, and send badguys flying out through windows.. Again, I'm no expert in hookers, but her profession aside I think I'll let her be a strong little woman who can handle the recoil nicely.

Hehe, ok, that's understandable.  However, I am somewhat of an expert in firearms, caliber, and recoil.  I have worked to derive mathematical equations for accurately calculating recoil, tissue displacement in wounds, and many other ballistic situations.  Firearm statistics is a big hobby of mine on the side of AGS.  I can tell you that anyone who holds a gun like that, be it a little girl or a full grown man, will have the gun kick back a lot.  When a gun kicks, it happens instantly.  That is the point.  It is completely unrealistic to have her fire, and then wait a frame or more than 1 frame to have her arm move back.  At that point, what you as an animator are saying is "there is zero kick, she has chosen to lift the gun afterwards of her own volition."

Hollywood would have you believe a load of bull.  They would have you believe that a bullet can knock a man back.  This is obviously false as any physicist can tell you.  The felt effect of a bullet from a medium caliber handgun is about the same as dropping a brick from a height of 1 foot onto your chest.  So, it could perhaps make you take a step back in shock, but it will not throw you back (that goes for even .50 caliber "sniper" rifles)

Redrum,

First of all with the pants, you have 3 shades.  One should be dark, medium, and light...but instead you made medium, medium light, and really light.  This ignores shadow areas, you've got to have a color that's darker than your average color.  So, that's why it looks like you have bubbles all over a flat surface for the pants.

Start by filing with the middle color.  Then add shadows.  Then finally add highlights.  This is the easiest order to do it in I think.

On the shirt, be more careful where you put the shadows.  If you have a line drawing, the shape is important.  But once you add color, the line of the shadows is much more important than the outlines of your figure, because the shadows are how we interpret the dimensionality of the image. 

I'm not sure why the right arm has shadow on the top and light on the bottom, this is not really consistent.  Oh, nevermind...I see that there is a bluish light coming from the side.  This light needs to be more consistent to affect more folds of the shirt and pants. 

Then there's the hood,  the entire inside of the hood is light, yet there are dark triangles at the corners.  Not sure what you were trying to do with that.

At least with the shirt you started out by making a medium color and then adding shadow and light, it needs more highlight areas.  Also, when you are assigning shadow patches, try to be less random.  Think about where th shirt will fold the fabric, and how the light will affect each fold.  Try to make larger patches instead of little triangles all over the place.  For the sleeves it should not look like a flat bar with black triangles cutting in the sides.

Hopefully this helps

looks great!

biggest areas of concern for me are the emptiness on the glass and the front side of the building

I'd like some detail added to the front, as well as some vague (washed out) details inside the cafe window.  Also, you cna increase the realism of the windows by adding some white highlights to the window glass

I didn't even realize the stripes on his shirt were meant to be folds of the shirt until I read your comment.  It looks like some kind of dark urban camouflage. 

The reason it doesnt look like shading is because you have not taken the time to carefully think about how the cloth is folding.  YOu can't just follow some random pattern and expect the eye to make sense of it!  so look at your cloth, visualize the folds, visualize the light source(s), and apply the highlights and shadows.  rememeber that if your light is coming from the top, then your sharpest highlights will be directly over your darkest shadows. 

a REAL quick sloppy edit to illustrate the point

2: You've been a bit shy with shading.  Based upon light sources, half of his left sleeve and half of his left leg should be in shadow.  If you're using layers, try using a shading layer and removing where you want highlights, it might make it less prone to under-shading.

3: For much of it, you've taken light sources into account and even what folds would appear.  However, some folds (pants especially) seem shaded without considering how clothing hangs. If you've got a digi-cam, a reference pic might help.

okay, but there are not simple 1 light sources in real life....any object that you can see with your eyes is by definition a source of light.  using single light source shading is an unrealistic (like single point perspective) technique that is used by lesser artists to compensate for lack of skill in other areas, and can help to make more realistic looking images, or great contrast for certain effects.

I think the shading on the coat is pretty good, the pants not quite as good, overrall it looks fine to me.  you obviously drew this from a photograph and you seem to have got the basic shading elements from that which work alright.