The VG Resource

Hello! I never got much of a chance to try out my spriting skills for various reasons that would take a long time to explain. One of the primary reasons is that although I was a fine spriter (or at least in my opinion) awhile back, the reality was that my sprites where "meh" compared to everything else on this site.

After polishing up my art skills at Full Sail and picking up a few things from you guys (including hue shifting), the thought of applying those skills with sprites popped into my head. Since I didn't have much to lose, I decided to whip these sprites up for this occasion. I know it's only a Mushroom from the Mario games, but we gotta start somewhere, right?



While I could just create a simple Mushroom sprite with the style I developed and leave it at there, I wanted to explore all my options, which is why I created nine variations of the shading. Tell me what you think and decide which one I am better off sticking to. (Note: The Mushroom is in a 2-D side-scrolling view that is common for Mario games.)


These are all my thoughts on the sprites. They actually turned out better than I imagined, but you guys know better than I do about these things.

Before I conduct any new experiments involving sprites, I have a question about frame-rates. Is the typical frame-rate for sprites 24 frames per second, or is it something like 12 or 10 frames per second?

By the way, I have other ideas in mind relating to sprite research. I will place them here in case any of them sound good to you. Which of these projects do you want me to tackle? I would like to do all of them to be honest, but I know that not everyone would care for them and/or some of them have been done already.


- Emulating the Paper Mario style to create the faries that will appear in Super Mario 3D World (loosely suggested by Devicho).

- An annalisis of the sprite style featured in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team and ideas on how to rip/emulate it.

EDIT: Not everyone wants to read a wall of text, so I took the liberty of placing all my thoughts and notes into spoiler tags to reduce clutter.

You go to Full Sail? On campus or are you online?
EDIT: Also, way to many shades per color, dial it back a bit.

Looks good to me. I got a minor problem with the shading on the middle white dot but your okay with me.

(10-06-2013, 11:20 AM)Gwen Wrote: [ -> ]You go to Full Sail? On campus or are you online?

I am an online student. It's a tough job and sometimes I consider quitting, but since I'm more than halfway done, I still trek through anyway. Without exposing too much about my grades, I am actually doing alright. I just don't care about spending long hours to complete each assignment.

(10-06-2013, 11:20 AM)Gwen Wrote: [ -> ]EDIT: Also, way to many shades per color, dial it back a bit.

Forgive me for this statement, but I honestly don't see why a lot of people have a problem with me using too many values. I can understand why it seems like a problem for my usual art style (some people say that it looks beveled due to the feather shading), but how is it a problem when I only use a sliver of the amount of colors I usually use? The second and third variations of the Mushroom have far more limited palettes than the later variations, yet I find it odd you didn't say anything about those. Besides, even though my opinion has no say in a situation like this one, variations six through eight look more polished to me (I will agree that the extra shade on nine is a bit overkill). Is there something I am not getting?

Because, for a sprite that size, it just muddies up the contrast and it gets difficult to even pick out different shades.

Hmmm... I think I see where you're getting at this. For my palettes, the values of the cap and "head" are five for each one, while black and white use four values each. For the second and third variations, the total is reduced to three for each color, but they don't dramatically appeal to me and I have doubts that they would be accepted onto the main site.

For the look I'm going for, I was actually inspired by this style of sprites, whihc has more than three values for each color (or at least at certain angles).



In that case, what would you say would be a fair amount? Four values per each color?

Idk if the number of shades needs to be decreased but they definitely need a bunch bunch more contrast between shades.

Since I didn't get a reply in awhile and this topic is starting to become a bit buried by the others, I thought replying to my previous post would be called for in this situation. Please don't get too frustrated with me over this.

Anyway, I looked into my shading and decided to to whip these balls up for research. I didn't number these, so I will talk about them from left to right.




So, what do you think of my thoughts on this one?


EDIT: Oh! I didn't even need to double post! Thank you, StarSock64! Anyway, to respond to your critique, I'm assuming that you would like the values to be darker, right? (i.e. darker shading, brighter highlights) Like I said in my art topic, I choose to avoid making my values look too intense because I think they would not look so good, but if you want me to experiment with them, I don't see why that can't be arranged.

EDIT2: I placed all my thoughts into spoilers. Sure, they are shorter than the thoughts of my first post, but you can't be too careful!

If the values seem to get too intense, it's not really a sign that high contrast is a bad idea, but other problems can be going on (-too- much contrast {you should fear not having enough contrast MUCH more than you fear too much; people who don't sprite a lot almost always don't have enough}, poor distribution of saturation, badly blending hues)

Don't let that gibberish confuse you though. First things first, try adding more contrast, and then we'll see how to fix it from there. And yeah, darker dark shades, but -not necessarily- brighter bright shades. That -is- a way to increase contrast, but trying to brighten up reds can turn them pink, so it might be a good idea to only work on the darker shades. You should basically play with it and see what you can get out of it for now.

edit: Oh, that very brightest red shade for the highlight, that probably needs to be a bit brighter. I meant the base red doesn't need to be changed much

i got extremely bored after reading the first paragraph of your post

you talk too much for something as small as this. While you're trying to "mimic" M&L 4's shading style, you really don't need all those shades because you aren't going to animate it smoothly. The official sprites has many shades because that way you can add a lot of antialiasing and thus helping in the smoothening of the sprite.

your mushroom is weird because the 'face' is placed forward instead of being in the middle, like a mushroom would be. Therefore it looks more like a Toad than a shroom. Also because of that, the face looks like another sprite than a single entity because the cap should cast a shadow on it, but it isn't.



here's my take on it, light coming from top right. The direction of your shading doesn't matter as long as all other sprites follow it. There is no 'correct' direction the light comes, therefore you shouldn't be hellbent on shading the sprite from all possible sides like you are doing. Adding in-between colors also don't matter if you are going to pick way too similar colors. If that's the case, increase the contrast and work well with what you have.

I was taking a peek at your color values and noticed that all your shades seem to be at the highest saturation setting. I'm pretty sure that in general, shades in the shadows should have less saturation than shades in the light (aka lower saturation on dark shades, keep some higher saturation on bright shades)

I think I heard somewhere that highlights should have less saturation than the base color, but I don't know if that's true. I'm not really well-versed in how shading works...

Anyway, I think some of the best advice I can give you is to take a bunch of random official game sprites you like (probably more modern games; some SNES games and such contain bad habits)

then pick the eyedrop tool for lots of different shades within the sprite,
and look at all the hue, sat, lum, rgb values in detail. The visual representation on ms paint is probably easier to comprehend than looking at the numbers, but you should probably kinda keep an eye on both to see what affects the numbers.
Basically look at this thing:


then try to get a feel for how the professionals pick their colors and what kind of trends there are in their decisions

Heh... Sorry about talking too much, Gors. I just wanted to explain as much as possible to ensure I can convey my thoughts properly, but I guess I horribly confused you. Since you mentioned something about my Mushroom looking like a Toad head, perhaps I could repurpose the "failed" attempts as Toad sprites once I get around to that? *chuckles*

Anyway, both you and StarSock64 have very good advice! I already made a new set based on some advice StarSock64 game me. SInce you got confused by my wall of text, Gors, I took the liberty of placing all my notes and thoughts on each group into spoilers. That way, that should hopefully make my posts appear less daunting. (Note: Each set consists of two spheres that are above and below each other. The order is from left to right.)




What do you think of my thoughts? Anyway, I was wondering how many values should each color have. It looks like three is a good standard, while four should only be used for shiny objects..... Or is five a good maximum for shiny objects, while four should be used for everything else? Also, the thought never occurred to me to tweak the saturation in my highlights and shading. Maybe that should be something to look into for my next experiment?

Well, there's not really a hard-and-fast rule when it comes to number of shades. It depends on a lot of factors, from size (bigger sprite means more shades might be necessary, and bigger areas within a single sprite may need more rendering than smaller areas), to practicality (less shades=easier=faster production and cleaner-looking work), to plain old personal preference.

I don't even think about my shading in terms of how many shades I have. I never count my shades if I don't have a reason to. Instead, I typically think of things like:

1) Are my shades currently providing maximum clarity/readability?
2) Are my shades currently demonstrating a proper amount of depth?
3) Can I combine existing shades without losing anything important?
4) Will adding a shade contribute to readability and depth? Will it make it look more muddy and cluttered?

These are things that you learn over time through observation and practice. Don't feel like there's a golden rule you should stick to. Just go with what feels right and ask for advice like you are and keep doing your best!

the answer is

you are making a storm in a cup of water. You are worrying and overdetailing a lot for something so small as this, and not only it's annoying, it's unecessary. Look at the other threads, they aren't as gigantic as this and they work fine (maybe in a better steadiness than your topic).

it's not about confusion, it's about -being utterly unecessary-.

Also you are still way too hellbent on finding an optimal style or technique when there is not. I am actaully tired of saying this but it doesn't matter if you want to use 5 shades, 4 or 3. There is no rule saying what's the optimal number of shades. I mean, it even feels like you have no self-awareness at all. Do you really need to post all the steps for the two spheres you just shaded? Really? Maybe it's your way of learning but I just feel it's tacky and not direct to the point.

The balls you shaded are all correct depending on situation. There is a type of shading for each situation (I told you this too) and what matters more is if your current style works for your work. Sometimes you will need more shadows, sometimes you will need to hueshift more. There are no fixed rules for this, there are just guidelines. For example, Starsock's advice is valid, but sometimes you won't use it. And what defines it is the environment and the use of the spheres. (And I think the darkest shade could be a tad more dark and unsaturated).

The rule of thumb for picking colors is if the color you are adding onto the palette WILL CHANGE CONSIDERABLY the art you are doing. If two colors are too similar to each other and don't add anything positive at all, you may cut one of them off.

You're right, Gors. I'm way too paranoid about whether or not my style is "perfect" and I should chill out.

Despite all that, though, I love the advice you and StarSock64 gave me and I'm happy to keep on learning.

Anyway, I decided to create some more sprites and this time, I shaded them base on how they look from a distance. I did my best on all of these, but don't be shy to point out anything I could do better.