How does one sprite a waterfall?

[Ninspriterx]

Milestone 1:


I have NO idea how to approach spriting a waterfall.
I've done the references and tried again again and nothing comes out right. Here we start out with the simple water template, but we're pretty much starting off from scratch.

Help please?

[Wes]

Did you look at photographs of waterfalls or example of other people's sprites? Many games have them as background objects. One that comes to my mind is Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver

http://www.spriters-resource.com/ds/poke...heet/28243

towards the bottom right of this sheet you can see some examples of what they did. The water sort of makes sheets and falls over top of each other, although they're not even all the way across.

[Gors]

see SMB2 for ideas.

[Cobalt Blue]

Metal Slug to the Rescue
http://spriters-resource.com/arcade/ms/sheet/36639

[Ninspriterx]

I tried going with as simple as possible that's not TOO simple (thanks anyway Gors.)
I took some ideas from both other refs, thanks guys:


I'm getting there. Of course still needs refinement, but what else?
and the next step after that is animation.

[arün]

i'm kidding

This is kinda cool, but I'd use a lower color count

[Wes]

I think it gets too dark near the bottom. Like on the grass where the top waterfall hits the land and then flows into the other one. The dark blue at the bottom of the top waterfall seems too dark compared to the light blue at the top of the bottom waterfall

(wow that sentence has too many tops and bottoms and waterfalls, sorry)

[tsr moderation staff]

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

[Gors]

I think by combining a rather simple design and using some programming to get some effects (palette cycling, distortion), you might get an eye-catching result. That is, if you're making a game with those tiles.

Now, all I can suggest aside from SMB2 is to make a zig-zag-y pattern and cycle through colors, kinda like that flash animation does.

[Cobalt Blue]

i'd say as a tip, put emphasis on the cloud's animation. make it as fluent as posible and you'll have one wonderful waterfall that will be simple yet completely shows itself natural.

[arün]

That looks like a waterfall having a seizure. Seems a bit too jittery, mainly because the shading is a bit erratic.

[Cobalt Blue]

mainly because it was a 3 second effort to make something that didn't work as i expected because the waterfall needs something way more elaborated than that

[arün]

I still think a Mario Bros 2-esque waterfall (with some adjustments) would work nicely with the style.

[Gors]

Talking about SMB2, see the japanese counterpart's animation (it's way smoother, albeit a bit grating to the eyes). If you can achieve this smoothness without being so sharp, you can have a great animation paired with simplicity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE18NgEERtU#t=1m21s

[Elk]

Things I made some years ago...



wip