Help Wanted: Apples Within

[Benny The Miraj]

I'm working on sprites for this person's Pokemon-esque game on another forum. These three are starter monsters. Instead of going with a Grass VS Fire VS Water theme, I decided on Nature VS Technology VS Magic theme for them. The first one is a porcupine, the second is a raccoon, and the third is an opossum.

I'm showing them here for tips. I looked up a tutorial on shading and looked at several Pokemon sprites and tried to make sprites in a style different to that of Pokemon.  Do they look alright?

Also, an alternate pallet for the opossum. Which looks better?

[Benny The Miraj]

Aww, no one's taking interest? But anyway, here is another sprite. Feel free to give me a few tips on shading if you feel I need them.

[Quirby64]

-The right are on the sprite to the far left looks misaligned to the other arm (or maybe it's perspective?)
-On the opossum, its toes on it's hind legs seem either in an odd position or a weird shape.
-The Opossum and dog(?) both have pillowshading on them.
IMO the one in the center that you posted in the first image looks the best. Good job

[Shade]

These could be better. The excessive dithering looks ugly and adds little to no depth. Additionally, there's little contrast between the shades, making the characters look even more flat (the green on the porcupine is the most notable offender). Frankly, the colors in general could use some work. When making a palette with green for example, you wouldn't just darken or brighten the green to achieve a proper looking shade or highlight, you would hue shift it a bit, maybe go for a more bluish green as the darker color. This makes the colors more appealing and natural.

The spriting dictionary covers hueshifting way better than I could: http://www.vg-resource.com/thread-25474.html

HUESHIFT- Hue shift, as the name implies, is shifting the hue.

look at this wheel. rather than increasing or decreasing a color's saturation, or its Contrast, you switch to the color to the right or the left on this wheel. Notice also that colors on the exact opposite of the wheel also work as a darker/lighter version of your color. A more dynamic and natural palette of colors is the result of a proper hueshift.
Note: HUESHIFTING can be combined(an to an extent, has to) with CONTRAST and SATURATION in order to produce a wider vaiery of results.
(for an indepth reading on how colors work, read this wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory )

I'd recommend giving the entire dictionary a read. It's an extremely helpful resource for beginners and those more experienced alike.

[Benny The Miraj]

-The right are on the sprite to the far left looks misaligned to the other arm (or maybe it's perspective?)
-On the opossum, its toes on it's hind legs seem either in an odd position or a weird shape.
-The Opossum and dog(?) both have pillowshading on them.
IMO the one in the center that you posted in the first image looks the best. Good job

-...you do have a point.
- I see that now.
-Aww, I was trying to avoid pillow shading. I was trying to give them light-source at an angle.

These could be better. The excessive dithering looks ugly and adds little to no depth. Additionally, there's little contrast between the shades, making the characters look even more flat (the green on the porcupine is the most notable offender). Frankly, the colors in general could use some work. When making a palette with green for example, you wouldn't just darken or brighten the green to achieve a proper looking shade or highlight, you would hue shift it a bit, maybe go for a more bluish green as the darker color. This makes the colors more appealing and natural.

The spriting dictionary covers hueshifting way better than I could: http://www.vg-resource.com/thread-25474.html

HUESHIFT- Hue shift, as the name implies, is shifting the hue.

look at this wheel. rather than increasing or decreasing a color's saturation, or its Contrast, you switch to the color to the right or the left on this wheel. Notice also that colors on the exact opposite of the wheel also work as a darker/lighter version of your color. A more dynamic and natural palette of colors is the result of a proper hueshift.
Note: HUESHIFTING can be combined(an to an extent, has to) with CONTRAST and SATURATION in order to produce a wider vaiery of results.
(for an indepth reading on how colors work, read this wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory )

I'd recommend giving the entire dictionary a read. It's an extremely helpful resource for beginners and those more experienced alike.

That... actually makes sense.

The dithering is based on a tutorial I read on spriting. I agree it's not great, but I'm learning. I really need some advice on the wood shading for the green one, though.


BTW, off topic, but what is your opinion on self-tracing? Like, I know it's wrong to trace other people's images, but what about your own image? I drew these images up on paper, scanned them, converted them to B&W Bitmap, then went from there as far as spriting goes. Is that considered cheating?

[The 100 Mega Shock!]

No, you can see examples of this idea in Miyamoto's art for Mario 1 and Donkey Kong, though in those days they would also draw a mosiac-like representation of what the sprite would look like in-game and if it would fit into tile limits before inputting it as graphics data.

Later games with large sprites like Street Fighter Alpha were produced as lineart before being scanned in and traced over to create the final graphics.

[Chris2Balls [:B]]

These links may interest you, then:
http://2dwillneverdie.com/tutorial/a-bas...-tutorial/
http://danfessler.com/blog/pixel-purism-...vs-results

Also I think hue shifting doesn't make your sprite better, I believe it's a stylistic choice.

[gnbman]

This might be helpful.

[Shade]

Also I think hue shifting doesn't make your sprite better, I believe it's a stylistic choice.

Which I would mostly agree with. Simply a recommendation to make the palette more interesting, because currently it's somewhat dull.

[Benny The Miraj]

How is this? I tried to make the green more vibrant, I relocated the arm and I cut down on the dithering, though I still need help with the wooden/brown bits. Still not sure I got it right, though. I tried to keep a little dithering while not over-saturating the sprite with it.

[Benny The Miraj]

I tried shifting the shading over to the left to make it look less pillowy. I also tried to cut down on the dithering and added a fifth shade to the wolf's grey coat.

[Silversea]

If you want a sort of Pokemon style my advice would be going with these guidelines:

- 1 light shade
- 1 dark shade that is highly contrasting
- no dithering (or VERY minimal dithering, see that nice pokemon image linked above, there is a tiny bit of dithering on small areas. In my opinion you have too much dithering and it is not helping the sprite)

You have 2 light shades, which you probably don't need. If you want pokemon style contrast, the darker areas should be completely dark. For instance the (our) right front arm of the wolf sprite should be using the dark grey only, not a light grey with a dark border. I like flareon as an example because it has good contrast, the sprite is very clean, and it uses the "two shade" method very well:


But arguably colour choice is the most important first step. On your second grey and red wolf sprite, the contrast between the dark grey and light grey is good. On the green guy above however there is no significant difference between the lighter greens and the darker greens, which makes it look flat.

Hope this isn't too much information and/or overly negative. Please keep at it

[Benny The Miraj]

Actually, I kind of want to avoid copying Pokemon's style, to be honest.

Now that I think of it, the Porcupine still looks kind of flat. Back to the drawing board.

[Benny The Miraj]

Sprite number five. Since it's a smooth creature, I felt dithering was not the right way to go with this one. Not sure of the pallet, but I did try hue contrast.

[Benny The Miraj]

I tried shading the porcupine again.