E-Man's Sprite R & D

[E-Man]

I don't think you understand, DragonDePlatino. I know you could use anti-aliasing with ease and I'm more than capable of using transparent pixels, but MS Paint users are incapable of using them. That is why I was pretty hesitant about using that kind of anti-aliasing in the first place. Also, I'm not up for using the same kind of anti-aliasing used for the outlines in the first Mario & Luigi game because the non-transparent anti-aliasing would look weird when the sprite moves around different colored backgrounds.

Also, I am still not happy with the eyebrows as they are because they look too thick (I already mentioned this). Would you mind if I just stick with a strategy that involves anti-aliasing in places that would make the sprite look good instead of applying them in in every nook and cranny?

[Kelvin]

That and, IMO, the AA makes the sprite too blurry. I like the original best.

[E-Man]

Well, here comes a huge topic bump because I decided idea to work on my sprites again.

Over the period of time I was away from my sprites, I was thinking about a lot of things. To avoid cluttering this post with too much information, I'll only reveal it in spurts as I go along. For starters, anti-aliasing will not be used because not only do they make smaller sprites with mutilple levels of shading and highlights look too blurry, but also that they would increase my palette count. I might consider using AA in large scale pixel art pictures and backgrounds, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

For now, though, I think I'll focus on getting my Super Mario items submit before I do anything else besides my Goomba.



I didn't do much to this sheet, but I did alter the colors to have less saturation in some areas and make them look more noticeable as a result. Also, I changed up the flag's shading to reduce the palette on that, but did I pull it off correctly? Considering all the previous critique I got on it, I had to go through a lot to make sure it doesn't look like it's made of metal and/or a Kit-Kat Bar.

By the way, you know my submission thread over in the submission board? Well, I picked up on what Dazz said to others and he mentioned that it's obsolete at this point due to the sprite submission system in place now. I bet you could guess what will become of that thread now.

My only major question at this point is how would I make the big icons everyone is talking about these days. Any templates I could use, or are the smaller ones I've been dealing with thus far get the job done?

[DragonDePlatino]

Hey, nice looking flag there! I think that's just about good, but a highlight would be nice.

Oh, the icons he talked about here? http://www.vg-resource.com/showthread.php?tid=24421 I'm pretty sure the icon submission process will be a little different when that comes around. To me, it looks like you just upload an image and the site will do the rest for you, including hard-coding the text and layering the background.

[E-Man]

Okay, sounds fair. I guess I'll cross that bridge with the icons when I get there.

Anyway, as much as I would like to add the highlight in, I actually removed it on purpose. I think I already explained it a bit in my previous post, but I got rid of the highlight due to something Gors suggested a while ago.

also i am still not sure about teh shading on the fabric, it's making it look like a kit kat bar than a curved fabric imo.

If you take a look at this older version of the flag, I think you'll see what he means by that.



In any case, I think this sheet is more or less complete. I'll see about submitting it now and see where that leads to.

[E-Man]

Okay, a few days ago, I sent my item sheet onto tSR and….


It was accepted!

I'm glad it is finally up on the site! Thanks a lot, Ton! It's even more thrilling to know that it's the most viewed sheet of the custom rips, too.

Also, I have to congratulate Neweegee for providing great custom sprite sheets as usual and congratulate DragonDePlatino for making his debut on tSR. Keep up the good work, guys!


Anyway, with that brief celebration out of the way, let's get back to business.

I decided to do some modifications to my Goomba sprite sheet, and one of the tweaks was chugging around the palette again.



Beisdes that, I also did two versions of the sitting pose. The alternate pose came about from a comment by DragonDePlatino where he said that I shouldn't show the soles of the Goomba's feet too often. I think it's fine to show the sole of the left foot (the Goomba's left that is) when needed, but I think he was referring to me showing the sole of the right foot, which I took care of. What do you think?

As for the walking animation, this is what I came up with recently.



Also, I created this to show what the Goomba looks like when he's not walking in place.



Any of this count as foot sliding now?

[TheShyGuy]

Hehe it counts as a limp now. The left foot does nothing to move the goomba. You shouldn't be worrying about foot slip anyways. You're making sprites, not a game.

[E-Man]

Left foot? You mean the foot you see on the left, or do you mean the Goomba's left foot? If you are talking about the foot you see on the left (AKA the Goomba's right foot), then I can see where you are going with that. Compared to the Goomba's left foot, the right foot isn't all that animated.

Any suggestions before I take care of it myself?

[E-Man]

While I was doing tweaks to my Goomba, I was also working on a project that would lead to two sprite sheets I'll be working on at the same time.



This time around, I decided to do something not related to Mario because I don't want to end up being another spriter who only focuses on Mario sprites. Before I move ahead with that, though, my human sprite needs a lot of work first.

Besides seeing how to get the proportions and anatomy right, I want to see how I should tackle the shading correctly and deal with a flaw in my sprite style.

While using no outlines makes my sprites different from the others, they cause parts of my sprite to merge with other parts of itself (the limbs are the most notable example). An idea I recently had is to use a "selective outline" of sorts to only outline parts f the sprite as long as its absolutely necessary, while keeping everything else without an outline. What do you think?

[TheShyGuy]

Yeah, I was talking about the goomba's right foot. You should just focus on making sure the animation is smooth, not the translation stuff. If people makes games with your sprites, the gifs are useless. Baking the translation into the frames would be a headache for others since they've got to undo that.

For the human above, try shading according to the surface normal. I'm no artist, but I messed with 3D graphics programming and one of the first things I did was make a sunlight/directional light shader (no self shading though). The intuition learned from looking at the code is that directional light basically operates on the surface normals, not placement of the surface. So when thinking about what surface you're trying to shade and think about the direction the surface normal is pointing to relative to the sunlight/directional light.

In case this helps with intuition, a part of the code:

Code:

//calculate the amount of light on this pixel
lightIntensity = saturate(dot(pixelNormal,-lightDirection));

dot(): returns a value [-1,1] of how "much" the two vectors (normal, -light direction) are in the same direction.

1 Being same direction, which is why the light direction is negated.
If the pixelNormal and the (positive) light direction face towards eachother, then it's fully lit (but the dot returns -1)

-1 means that the (negative)light direction and the pixel normal point away from eachother, and therefore should not be lit

saturate() just clamps the value to [0,1]

That's all there is to it =p.

[E-Man]

Hm, okay then, ShyGuy.

I manly created those GIFs to test how the walking works. I wasn't expecting the actual GIFs to be used. Many people were complaining that my Goomba was sliding its feet, so that's why I did the transition test, too.

Without going through all the trouble of creating a transition test, you think this version of the walking sprite cuts it, or do you see any sliding?


As for the human, I generally shade from a diagonal direction going downwards (usually to the right). I typically don't draw this point because I always imagine it. Also, my usual rule for shading is that the amount of shadows and darkness increases when it is further away from the light (i.e. in places the light normally can't reach from that angle).

Right now, though, since this is the earliest point of my human, the shading is far from being final. I thank you for the advice you have given me, ShyGuy, but I'm still scratching my head on how to apply your coding to my sprites.

Anyway, the real problem I'm facing is trying to prevent the limbs from merging with each other. This is an attempt at the "selective outlines" I was talking about, but it doesn't look that right to me.



Maybe they would look better if I were to apply a highlight on the limbs instead. What would you suggest?

[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?

[Alaby]

Hey Eman

I stopped by your post to see what youve been up to. Congratulations on having your sheet on tSR!

I like your goomba animation, it looks really good from my perspective.

About your human shading concern. Im not sure where you want to go with it ultimately, but I tried out shading it a little bit, heres what I came up with. Hope its a little bit inspiring.



Other than that, have a great day!

[E-Man]

Hey, guys, I'm still working on my sprites. I didn't update in a long time because… Well… I was at a loss on what to do next for the sprites. Since I ran into a flaw that makes working with a line-less extremely difficult to work with, I didn't know where to go from there. To make matters worse, I already submitted a perfectly good sprite sheet in my sprite style, so posting another sheet with a different style would be awkward at that point.

Instead of trying to mindlessly tinker over the sprites with fruitless results, I decided to take a break by honing my coloring skills in Photoshop (one of my more recent experiments is in the Doodles and Completed Pictures thread in case you're wondering).

During my break of coloring, though, I eventually decided that trying to stick to a style because the first sheet looked like it was pretty stupid, so I decided to look into using another style. This time, I said nuts to not using any outlines and created this.



I took a few suggestions from Shy Guy by not only using a darker shade for the eyes, but also reducing the colors for the sprites. Also, to the right, I made my first few attempts to apply an outline. What's very interesting is that with the reduced shade and the addition of an outline, the Goomba sprites bear a striking resemblance to Mario & Luigi styled sprites (particularly the ones from the first game). As for anti-alisaing, I didn't know how to deal with that at first, but after taking a look at Gors' current avatar, he used some colors found on the inside of the sprite to provide it. I thought that might be the best way to do it, so I gave it a try. Any thoughts on the current sprites?


As for walking, I think I finally figured out what people mean by the "sliding feet." When Neweegee and I had a conversation on Skype, he mentioned something about looking at the Goomba from New Super Mario Bros. as a reference. When I took a look, I realized what the problem is. As you can see below, the Goomba actually picks up his feet to move forward.



What I have been doing all along is making the feet move in a manner similar to a pendulum. I'll be sure to apply this for the next update.

By the way, Alaby, I like how you shaded my human. Even though it is not exactly what I am looking for, it does bring me one step closer on how to shade her the best way possible.

[Iocus]

I haven't been following the thread, but I wanted to point out a couple of things:
- The body segment stands out because the contrast on the head and the feet is a lot more aggressive than that on the body itself.
- That's a REALLY large head. I doubt it would cast such a little shadow onto the body. Try expanding the shadow a little at the upper right.
- It looks kind of inexpressive? I think you should arc the eyebrows downwards a little further. Also, Goombas are often sort of crosseyed, so I think you should move the irises inwards a little.
-Regarding that exterior AA... You should watch out how you employ that; usually, it's used to make the boundaries of the sprites blend into the background it's on better.

Hope that helps.