E-Man's Sprite R & D

[TheShyGuy]

Sorry about the misunderstanding about the gifs. You're were right that it's a bit hard to tell with this animation. Besides the foot sliding, I feel like the head turning seems too stiff and abrupt. The bounce also doesn't look right, but that might just be me. The darkest shades for each color can be removed too because they're barely noticeable (to be clear, the head, body, shoes, eyes, pupils, eyebrows). Also, the shape of the head could be smoothed a bit, especially the bottom right corner.

With directional lighting, the distance to the light doesn't effect anything. It's about the direction of the light and surface normal, not the distance between. The easiest example I can think of is a directional light the is pointing to the left '<----'. On a sphere, the right half is lit, and the left side isn't.

Example image:

Spoiler

(light direction is left)

The lit surface normals are in the same direction as the negative light direction/opposite the positive light direction. The dark surface normals point in the same direction as the positive light direction/opposite the negative light direction.

Image of surface normals:

Spoiler

About the merging, I'd say go with selective outlining.....But that's obviously biased heh. If you can improve on your shading, then maybe you won't even need to do that. If the human is animated and the shading describes the shape well enough, then maybe the merging might be tolerable?