The Resource WIP Thread 3

[Bastrophian]

The FF1 monsters are limited to 3 colors. I also tweaked a few minor things because I wanted to, nothing major.

Oh my gosh! X3 I cant believe I didint notice that! It looks a lot better and closer to the FF1 sprite! thanks for pointing that out!

 

[Elissiaro]

@Sharm Thanks for the tips!
I'll look into making her hips sway a bit. Not really sure how to make the arms look more like arms.... But I'll experiment a bit. They do look a bit weird since I made the legs look like actual legs.

 

[Bastrophian]

Actor1_3 Battler in Retro NES style!

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The origrnal, for comparison.

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[/SPIOLER]

 

[Sharm]

Oh, fun! I especially love the mace, you've done an excellent job of defining it without it all being visible, you clearly understand the object in a 3d space and how light would work on it. For just the mace, the only improvement I can come up with is defining the points of the spikes a little better. The outside ones having one more pixel to square up the corner, and all of them having the highlight at the tip or along the center line instead of around the base.

I think if you want to improve on this one in general, you need to look a bit closer at being picky about the details. The line on the arm makes sense if you've got the original to look at, you can tell it's the tatoo. But if you hadn't seen the original, that line is just something that makes the arm hard to understand. It looks like strange large dent, maybe not even on an arm, maybe it's a scarf. Without that line, the fact that it's an arm becomes clear again. That detail is getting in the way of the picture. There are lots of other places like this and I think it's the reason behind why you keep getting orphan pixels, you keep trying to include details that are getting in the way. On the other hand there are other places where the details are more important, and this is where exaggeration can come in and help out. The belt buckle is a good place for this, you could have a nice bright c shape surrounded by the black and even though that makes the buckle much, much larger than the original it won't look out of place. This is why it's important to switch back and forth from zoomed in and zoomed out when working on pixels you need to see if it works or not at a small size. If it doesn't, cleaning it up will make even the smaller size work better. Well, most of the time, anyway. If it helps, some art programs let you have multiple views of the same piece, so you can have one at 100% and one at 600% or whatever you like to work at.

Overall a fun and dynamic piece that has some of your own personal flair added in. I can tell that you're working hard to implement everything you've learned into this one, and I think it's stronger for it.

 

[Bastrophian]

@Sharm, thank you so much for your complement! To be honest, at first that line on his arm was intended to define musculature, but it didint work very well, but then I did notice he had a tattoo on his arm that looked similar, so decided to keep it, but I get what your saying. I got rid of it and tried using the lighter orange, I think it did a better job of doing what I intended.

Im pretty proud of the mace ball, but I wasint sure about useing the black background as a color to help imply shade. I was afraid the lighter color would be considered an out line.... I dunno, I just wasint sure about it, but thank you Im glad you liked it !

I edited the spikes a bit, as well as the belt. I also made the liter gird thing around his hips smaller, it was kind of bothering me anyway. is this what you meant? Thanks you so much again!

 

[AmieLK]

Hi, hi, hi! I have a walking sprite set I would love critique on! Anything at all would be loved.

 

[Sharm]

She's so adorable! I think you should swap the motion from the skirts from the side views to the front/back views and vice versa. The kind of reactive motion you currently have would happen more if people swayed forwards and back when they walk, but they don't. People are pretty evenly balanced that way. But we do have a side to side motion when we walk, and girls have a bit of extra motion at the waist, which causes a bigger secondary motion at the bottom of a skirt. And, since it's a secondary motion it'll happen just a bit out of sync with the steps. The same sort of motion would happen with the hair for the same reasons. Plus a little bounce, because curls are springs.

 

[AmieLK]

You are spot on. I was trying to figure out why it looked like she was climbing stairs.

 

[AmieLK]

@Sharm

How's this? Didn't change the side views much, but I think the fabric swish for front and back is more accurate now.

 

[Sharm]

It's hard to say without seeing it in motion, but it looks right to me, and it's prettier.

 

[Elissiaro]

I've started changing the arms completely and I tried adding some sway to the hips, but I dunno...
Here's the new arms from the front with and without my attempt at hip sway.

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Also no clothes, cause I was too lazy to change that too right now.

 

[Sharm]

I think it's an improvement! No more noodle arms! But I think you should focus less on side to side and more on the tilt of the hips, that's probably what's bothering you about it. Personally, I like the side to side motion, but it needs the tilt to make it work.

 

[Elissiaro]

I think I managed to make the hips sway pretty well, thanks for the tips @Sharm
Here's the finished front and back:

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With 100% size too.

Actually, looking at it now...... Did... I do it wrong in the back? Like, mirror it, incorrectly or something.. With the legs? I think I might have, but my brain is tired of thinking.

 

[Sharm]

Great job! I think the marks at the base of the spine just before the bum starts and the center belly button line should shift a little too, but the motion itself is fantastic. The back legs do look odd. I know why, it's because of the height of the feet. The highest point of the feet in a walk cycle is when it's behind you. So when you just flip the motion, the legs suddenly look like they're goose stepping. You need to reverse the heights a bit too, the forward step only going up the distance that the front view goes down, the swing back showing us the heel and getting the most motion.

 

[Bastrophian]

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Hello! Was expreimenting I bit with what Ive learned and made some tiles with a NES ara style. Im trying to make a sewer like area, and work on my color usage. Most everything here is made using only 3 colors per tile. Any feedback is appreciated! thats in advance!

 

[Sharm]

Hmm, it's tricky to know what to say. Most NES games didn't know what they were doing with tiles, so looking at them for inspiration is going to lead you to some bad pixel art practices. There's also some things that were done because it would be on a CRT monitor, which caused a large amount of blur between pixels. Modern screens don't have that blur, so anything done with that past style is going to look a bit wrong. That's why older pixel art would have a lot of noise while newer pixel art tends to be cleaner.

One way or another, you're certainly going to want to mix things up more with the bricks. Maybe turning the floor tile 90 degrees or having a more dramatic difference in size between the bricks, or adding some sort of edging to break things up or all of the above at once.

 

[Elissiaro]

I've been trying to work out the arms from the side... Does this look weird?

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Spoiler: Also I made some hair and elf ears... Because arms are hard and i needed a break.

 

[Sharm]

The arm bend is backwards, that's why it looks odd. When the arms go back, the arm straightens out, but when they go forward, the arms bend upwards. What's funny is that you got it right on the other views. BTW, you might want to add a bend to the knee when the leg is in the back position for the side view, it'll help the walk look less like scissors.

 

[Elissiaro]

I changed the arms, and I'm not sure I completely got what you meant about the legs, but I tried to make them bend more.

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It's really hard to make the arm bend forward without making it look weird...

 

[Sharm]

The arms look better now. The hand turned outwards like that is odd, but probably only to me. That's not what I meant with the bent knee but what you've done works, it's looking less stiff.