The VG Resource

I refuse to change the proportions and waste time with undesired results like in animations as walking, running and others which will don't match.

This is not a professional work, it's for a customisable fighting engine.

You guys are asking way too much and from what I tested, neither Rockman is a good basis for the shadding due his black outlines and limited colors.
He is mostly blue in appearance and his boots clashes with Uran who doesn't even wear them.

And I'm not wasting my time trying to fix proportions since I'm not good at drawing characters with their proportions right.

That whole talk about changing the proportions is NOT helpful.

I do have to ask, how do you want us to be helpful?

You clearly want us to just be echoing the praise and criticism you already came up with yourself looking at the pics, and anything outside that box is being denies. However, we're not mind-readers, so we can't know what exactly you want us to repeat to you and please your ears.

Therefore, I advise a mirror. It'll give you the criticism you want.

~~~------->POINT


you

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for the last time, we are not saying to carbon copy the character at all. We're saying to use it as a reference (reference =/= copying, for god's sake). Referencing means "oh, CAPCOM did this for their sprites, I wonder if I use the same animation WITH SOME CHANGES RESPECTING THE CHARACTER I'M TRYING TO CONVEY, I can make something cool". Not "oh man, Megaman has huge boots and poor colors, let me copy all the flaws in my sprite and then complain to everyone how referencing was a terrible idea"

I hope this cleared things up, or else idk what to do

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It being professional or not doesn't mean you can make shit stuff. You're then implying that 90% of tSR is lazy and untalented because they don't make sprites for living. This is just plain laziness, if you really love the thing you do, you won't make a half-assed job. Your problem is laziness, trying to bite off more than you can chew and close mindedness.

I understand that her having a huge head is Tezuka's style. I applaud you for keeping the proportion from his original work. But:




wonky lines IS NOT Tezuka's style. Gray outlines around the hair with pillowed blobs inside IS NOT Tezuka's style. Pants that change color with no reason whatsoever is also NOT Tezuka's style.



notice how even the curves are, Tezuka's stuff was always smooth and nice to look at for me, and the same can't be said of your sprites (because they're traces from resized anime footage).

As yourself showed and said,



people use anime footage to animate characters. That's fine if you want to save up time/make smooth and faithful animations. Not everyone can animate properly and despite we (the Spriters Resource) preferring original animations over traces, it's understandable to do it in order to churn out a huge amount of animations in a shorter timespan. But you're missing the part where they neaten up the lines and modify it to better suit the pixelart nature of the sprites. See for yourself. Every other character aside from yours are neat to look at, the lines look cleaner and despite it having little shading, it works because the original show is exactly like that. Sure, there are some jaggies in those sprites, but nowhere as noticeable than yours. Make a simple 1px outline instead of that 2px thick outline you're using, stop with the careless pencil doodles and actually place pixels.

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What did we learn here today?

1) Referencing a sprite is not copying it. You can reference small sprites to work on big pixelarts, and even modify it to better suit your needs.
2) When making a character, pay attention to how the original creator drew them in order to make it as faithful as possible. This does not mean only clothes or colors, it also means how the artist draws the lines, amount of shading etc.
3) Jaggy lines are ugly no matter what. Avoid it.

*takes a sip from my glass of wine, throws it on the ground, teleport away in a pillar of light*

(02-05-2013, 08:19 AM)Gorsalad Wrote: [ -> ]*takes a sip from my glass of wine, throws it on the ground, teleport away in a pillar of light*

and now we know what happened to megaman, he beat wine man and liked the taste.

anyway to add on, the size of sprite your attempting is a bit ridiculous, I can see it being useful in a slideshow based cut-scene but your desire to animate shows me thats not your intent for these sprites.
the look that comes with pixel art which gives it its charm often works best when its in neater sizes. in giant sizes like this it won't fit into a game environment without resizing which will defeat the entire purpose of using pixel art.
If your making these for the sake of it, fair enough, but if you want them for a specific purpose you might want to rethink what your doing, if you just want to animate drawing would serve you better because it has a faster workflow and the trick to good animation is the efficiency at which you make it (if a minutes sequence takes weeks it may look magnificent but it still wasted too much of your time to matter)
If your making it for a game as already stated pixel art of such size would not fit into a gaming environment very comfortably and you'd do better with vector graphics.
If your making it as a portfolio piece then you have a very long way to go, its all the more because of this that you should hear what we're saying, we're not conspiring against you, we're drawing similar conclusions, and if more than 1 person is drawing the same conclusion then there is clearly something to be fixed.

bombshell youre right about shading being last thing you do but shading is very important for me thats why i have it on high priority.First sketch and outlines of frames and then shading so you dont have to realize at the end that animation looks weird, so its better to check anim when its still in first phase of outlines/sketch.

be very wary, a sketch looks very different when made into pixel art, I suggest you make sure it animates well in the sketch AND in the pixel art before you go into the deeper shading.
it doesn't matter if its important you, if you use it too early the animation process will be a massive pain in the ass and one thing you want more than good shading is a good overall sprite. (a broken wheel on a good car doesn't make the wheel look good, it makes the car look bad)

(02-05-2013, 08:19 AM)Gorsalad Wrote: [ -> ]It being professional or not doesn't mean you can make shit stuff. You're then implying that 90% of tSR is lazy and untalented because they don't make sprites for living. This is just plain laziness, if you really love the thing you do, you won't make a half-assed job. Your problem is laziness, trying to bite off more than you can chew and close mindedness.

This is what I tried to tell him in one of my replies. We aren't here to judge him, we are here to make him a stronger pixel artist.

Gorsalad, even though you made a thorough post that's as polite as it can be. He wont read it, and if he does, he will not care. His issue might not even be laziness it could be a pretentious thing.

Here is what I got so far:



I've realized that just reducing the color depht doesn't help, it was only damaging the lineart.
So, I've just cleaned up everything.

I decided to keep the proportions and use the anime screenshot as a basis for the shadding.

I somewhat like the coloring and shading. The hair does not look shiney though and her legs are still a tad long for her body. Her eyes look like they are not done too.

Had to correct the spelling. This laptop keyboard is giving in.

JAGGIES! lots of them! you've not fixed the anatomy issues, your lighting curves are inconsistent, and an outline should always be darker than the contained colour.
I'd also like to point out in that animation her shin keeps breaking and her shoulder is pulsating, it actually looks very very painful.

Try a little revising of the sprite, I think more noticeable outlines(darker ones) could help you with the jagged-ness of the sprite.
Also maybe use less color at first it makes it easier to read the sprite. Then shade it later
The face feels a bit too wide also.

I'm confused about how to fix?
Can you guys give any more hints?
I don't think that I'll be able to make a head like the other example, but I can take the eyes as reference.

Please explain better how to deal with the "jaggies" and the shoulders.

(02-17-2013, 06:46 PM)Toshio Wrote: [ -> ]I'm confused about how to fix?
Can you guys give any more hints?
I don't feel like making black outlines, it'll be troublesome with the color separation which I wish to apply next.

Its not hard to just go over the darker lines once your ready to add more depth.

your outlines need work. I think once you fix them shading should be easier since it has a more defined shape.
Also the gray outline for the black hair confuses me.

Perhaps try some tutorials on animation/pixel art (there are some links under the spriting dictionary)

The gray area of the hair is added, because I wish to make color separation later and also give a red hair for example.

Can you explain better how to deal with the jaggies?
But I cannot fully reproduct the example of the face showed here.

Any example to make the shoulders move without pulsating?

I do not wish to try change the proportions, because it's quite discouraging, so the legs will be just like the original.

I know you hellbent on making Zoran a playable character, but as I said before, you're more than biting more than you can chew. If you have no fucking idea of what jaggies are, then I can assure you 100% that you will fail in this sprite (because dealing with jaggies should be the very first problem you need to deal with).

Now I might be sounding rude, but we are humans like anyone else in here and there will come a time where we'll lose patience to guide you. Like now. We've been telling you for two whole pages to be more self critic, to be aware of the problems. We can help you in some steps, but we also won't baby step you every single hurdle you face across (funnily, it is also the first hurdle you're facing now)

Jaggies are when a line is not straight or smooth, it depends on the type of line you want to achieve. In pencil drawing terms, it would be the same as having an unsteady hand and drawing a ball with wobbly lines, or trying to draw a strait line without a ruler. In pixel art, making smooth curves are a lot more tricky due to the square nature of the pixels. This made the artists develop techniques in order to minimize them and make them as smooth as possible. One of them is to create curves in an exponential fashion, that is, making a line with 5 pixel width, then 3, 2, 1, then going back to 5. Notice that 4 in this example, is omitted to avoid linearity, and the values go from bigger to smaller, then back to bigger to create the other side of the curve.

I have no other suggestion than to look up for pixel tutorials. We already helped you a lot, but if you need more info on the subject, don't be afraid to google it. The Internet is full of pixel art tutorials, study about them instead of halting and asking "lol what now".