Koh's Sprite Joint

[Kelvin]

Aww, that sucks. It would have been fun to play. *sigh* Oh well.

[Koh]

Just an experiment to handle my spritework in a similar fashion as I do my toons (see my avatar for reference).

Old Way:
Updated Way:

The third shade and such will come into play for things further back, or in a position where the lightsource is blocked.

[Koh]

Experimented with giving double frames of animation for Hi-Res sprites. I quite like the results~

What's missing from this animation:
-Hair/cheek fur bounciness.
-Tail movement.
-Translucent Shadow.

[Gors]

too stiff, body should move and fur should flow with the movement.

[Koh]

Definitely trying that as I go back and edit the frames to add the missing things, but not before I get the base of the other directions done. It'll allow me to have consistent positioning of the tail and such when I go back to add that throughout the directions. Here's a distraction.

[E-Man]

How about trying to remove the nose and possibly the mouth? When creating chibi characters (especially female ones), showing only the eyes makes the character look very adorable.

[GaryASPG]

I like your idea for the Nayru sprite, it's always fun to work with 3 colors. There are a few limitations you should look into, though.



Because of how small the sprite is, on top of the limited amount of colors, it's essential that you cut out some details. Nayru has a pretty simplistic design, but a lot of it needs to be forgotten to convey the overall message that she's a sleek, whimstical, musical Oracle. Making the dress have more flow to it and less bulk accomplishes this pretty easily, though it's admittedly frustrating to accomplish with the right amount of readability. In the original sprite they decided to just give her a giant tarp to convey the simple message of "this is a dress", but with slightly more room to work with you can get in some more details. Unfortunately, at this scale, jewelry just looks clunky and bad (unless you have more colors, of course) so it's something you have to remove entirely.

Since we're working with so little, you have to consider that going from lineart to coloring in doesn't necessarily work out all too well. When everything is completely defined it looks flat and that's what you want to avoid. There's some really good use of 4 color mixing and matching with the Gold and Silver Pokemon sprites. Basically, instead of thinking of it as lines, you want to think of it as shapes that fit on top of eachother to form what you want to make. This applies to most pixels at this resolution, but especially with this limited palette.

Removing the mouth and nose from the front, as E-Man said, makes the character not only look more cute but also keeps things simple and easily readable.

Also made a lil singing version to show how they made it work in the original sprites.

[Koh]

I definitely like the look of that. The only thing that bothers me is the way the outline is done. I'm personally not a fan of that kind of antialiasing; the outline defines the bounds of the sprite, and when it is broken like that, not only can the boundless colors blend in with whatever is nearby, but it also feels super inconsistent. Like, why have part of an outline? I feel it should be either all or nothing; nothing like Dragon Quest's NES sprites, or all like most other 8-bit sprites.

For inlines, I'd refer to this animation again, as my handling:



The inlines are denoted by a darker color, so as to denote an edge, yet not be completely black as the outline. This allows for the bounds (outline) of the entire sprite to be completely visible, while at the same time, letting the inside of the bounds flow with the different inner bounds defined.

[Shawn]

Basically everything GaryASPG said but I don't agree with removing the mouth, since a key feature of Nayru's is her humble/gentle smile, a thing both of your sprites are lacking.

And one thing I'd recommend when working at a small scale is to play with strong shapes and blocks of colour, because it's how you'll get the most readable low scale sprites.



Ignore the really crude edit but about your animation, you're 1. Using WAY TOO MANY FRAMES. This isn't really a problem in itself, but theyre largely identical and add nothing to the animation. What you need is more unique frames, less minor changes.

Secondly, it's really stiff. Only the limbs are moving, theres no hair or ear or whisker bounce and the torso itself, or even the LEGS aren't moving at all either.

Basically just don't focus on smoothness or frame count, focus on the keyframes and what they're doing and how they're different from the others.

[Koh]

I was going to add all that when I get back to updating those, adding the tail motion and such. The only thing that animation was truly to show was that doubling the number of frames for hi-res, since you now have double the pixel space, allows you to have a smoother animation; it won't look jerky if you had the exact same number of frames as lo-res.

One thing that bothers be about GIFS; why can't you have translucent pixels? They have to be either totally opaque or totally transparent.

[Chris2Balls [:B]]

Shawn and kori have made some good points, but I think the body lacks contrast in relation to the rest, so here's my take on your sprite:

Your sprite is "noisy", in the sense that it has a lot of very small pixel clusters, which scramble our ability to read what's happening. Try working with larger cluster shapes that can convey the form you want, rather than working with 1x1 pixels.

[Koh]

I think that looks fine for that kind of hi-ressing, since there's so limited colors. But in general, I use the extra space to apply more detail, and even missing detail. The game that started the hi-res craze for me was the PSP version of FF1.

http://www.spriters-resource.com/psp/fin...eet/38479/

Not only did they double the resolution of the WonderSwan/Origins/Dawn of Souls sprites, but they also added a lot more visible detail to the character graphics, such as the hair and outfits. I sort of use this as my role model when I do hi-res versions of other sprites. Probably not the best for the 8-bit stuff, if retaining the palette, but I feel it still has that general guideline for me.

[Chris2Balls [:B]]

Sure, but at the look of it they have many more colours than the sprite you're working on, so of course they'd be more detailed. If you add more colours to your sprite, not only can you play with value contrast but also colour contrast (or both simultaneously). As for now though, you're limited by the small size of the canvas and of the palette.