Here have some stuff.
WELP SEE YA ROUND I GUESS.

The fellows on the last image seem hard to read, most likely is how the pallete's scattered in many areas. Most notably the giant and the guildmaster(?). For some reason the eyes are too dark to read and can't make out of it because of their facial details/hair obscuring them and the fact that some colors seem to blend in with one-another, and the seemingly heavy use of brown.

For your RPG protags they have somewhat of a contrast issue here too. Some details blend in with others (the knight's shinguards) while others tend to melt in certain areas (the modern take on the bard class). The nekomimi's proportions seem off, but hard to tell in that angle, and the gunner seems to have twisted his foot to get a clear shot at a zombie.

I can say nothing for the Mega Man X enemy though, but what I can tell it's for that Mega Man X: Corrupted fangame I've been hearing about that is in dev.

Ah, thanks. Most of my friends aren't artists, so I've been looking for some good criticism.

In the last image, I was kinda going for a color theme. The giant was probably the crappiest one, I'll probably redo his sprite. The palette was pretty lazily done, I think I have an issue with color contrast since I spend most of my time spriting really zoomed in.

RPG protags are based off of some sprites I made a long time ago and reshaded a bit more recently, which is probably why the anatomy is sketchy in parts. I'll try and fix that up.

the usual protip reads as "avoid using saturated colors as a background color for your canvas as they usually affect your perception of color". same happens with pure black or white. use more neutral colors, such as grays, as they dont interfer with your palette.


as far as i can tell, your shading suffers greatly for this lack of contrast and proper choice of colors. the Rsmaller characters however give me a weird feeling... as if they were composed of several edits glued together - if not eyeballed-. tehir body's desing shifts quite constantly on each sprite and they do not follow any kind of coherent aesthetic - not to mention the last purple character being completely awful compared to the rest).

I think I'm going to try and fix it based on your critiques one character at a time. I did a few edits and changed the palette of the first character. Still not sure if the slight adjustments did enough; I know jack shit about making palettes since I'm more used to making sprites in a pre-made style.



Also yeah, a lot of the others are kinda crap; I was really sleep deprived when I made them, plus I spent less time.

I can see the obvious Megaman Zero / ZX Influence.

It looks like she's got some pretty long legs, and the knees are seem too high up.

had the exact same vibe, but these doesnt really match any of the game's sprites as far as i could tell.

though i'd hardly say OP was influenced by the game's spritework, otherwise all of the sprites he posted would follow that formula.

i don't think it needs as many black shades as it does

Shortened the shins, removed a shade of black.

Hey, I don't mean this in a "wah, you guys are mean, be nicer!" kinda way, but can you tell me what I'm doing right on these (if anything)? I mostly just want to avoid making mistakes as I'm trying to fix them.

Also, I grew up playing da Meggermangs, so that's probably why it has that kinda vibe to it.

that doesnt explain the drop in quality on the last sprite, though.

(08-08-2012, 12:44 AM)Meta Wrote: that doesnt explain the drop in quality on the last sprite, though.

"Okay, this guy wears baggy pants, has dyed hair, and is supposed to look like an attention whoring douche. I've never sprited any of that before, so let's experiment a bit."
[pause]
"OH GOD, WHAT WAS I THINKING. ...FUCK I'LL FIX IT LATER."
Then I tried to fix it, but the 3 days without sleep started catching up to me and everything got all melty.

Anyway, you think the first sprite is good to go now? Or is there some blatant issue I'm missing?

for a start, you nailed quite nicely the shadding on that sprite(the first one) and managed to get a proper balance between readbility and contrast by a proper use of hihglights and shadows. the details such as the face are quite stylized. the gradient-based palette does work, but it could be easily optimized with minimal effort.

however

the rest of the set is awful. there are elements on each one of them that makes me wonder what is the actual timespan between them that made the quality drop so much -instead of improve. it seems like, for example, you asumed that adding some random traces of lines here and there contributed to making the sprites more detailed, but instead -and coupled with the poor color choices and low contrast- made them look as if their were basically made out of random noise. the face of the character on the stand is a joke. the proportions on the 6th character are quite off, while the 5th one seems to lack any bones on his arms. and again in the last one you didn't even tried.

i'd like to see a new sprite, or at least you trying to be more constant on what is apparently a huge lack of attention to those details.

Yeah, going back on them I'm not really sure what the fuck happened. I think the first sprite is relatively better because I've been redesigning that character so much; if you count from the first version on it's probably been months. After I finally nailed the style on that one, I probably got overconfident and rushed through the rest. I'm going to redo all of them shading wise, probably change the sprite entirely on some of the later ones.

Also, I have no idea how to optimize the palette. I'm used to working within other people's styles, and having a premade palette to use. Would that just be upping the contrast or what?

Anyway, thanks for the response.


Reshaded the second one. I might need to adjust the table, or completely redo it, in addition to whatever other criticisms you guys have. I think the reason this one's face looked so derpy is because I was trying to show he had stubble. Still not sure how it turned out. His mouth keeps flashing between looking really weird and normal every time I scroll up, so I'll probably have to fix that too.

keiang, i think you should consider remaking the sprite entirely, maybe with different proportions and try incorporate some of the advice in here, instead of editing what you already have.

Bluh.