Hello Metaru,

Well, I thought the general build of the previous one matched
more the right/left walk.

The old front walk was indeed much more dynamic, in case
you were aiming for that one?!?!

Here is what I came up with (a little shift here and there
because I didn't know much about reference lines at first :) )



Do you want me to really work this one or go back to the previous
one to edit what you thought was bad?


Any other comments?

Best regards from

M.E.

as you said, is exelent. its even more smooth that previuos version. congrats for such achievement.

now i'll list some points that need revision in this edit:

• the arm movement isn't dynamic at all. it rathers looks a bit random. however, in the previous edit the movement was really achieved. you could try to implement it in this version.
  
• those legs looks as he was wearing one of those pants that M.C. Hammer used in the early 90's. the division between the legs should be a bit higher (two or three pixels above its current position)
• his left shoulder is two pixels higher than the rigth one.
• remove the black outlines in the torso. that's why he looked a bit female in the old version(it looks like he has a waist, when he sould be 'almost' a rectangle.)
  
• in the up-down movement, his shoulders doesn't follow the rest of the body. also, while the torso makes a 2px movement, the head only moves 1px. i suggest kept them in 1px. otherwise it would be a bit exagerated.
  
• when the left foot is in the back, its a triangle. try to make it more rounded.
• those arms... avoid trying to make the muscles using the outlines. leave that job for the shading. try to make them more regular during the animation or else they will look like tentacles :s

that's all for now. this's the best version, it just needs some tweakings.

on a side note, i'm glad to see that you've shared some comments with the rest of the users in the Wip forum. See? wasn't that hard.

lol

his left foot (our right) seems to show that he's kicking something suddendly, that last frame need another one just before.. coz it seems to jump out or maybe fix that.. it bothers me :S try to make it more natural =D

It looks even more smooth now. congrats again M.E. for the achievement of a walk animation using 5 frames (something i thougth was almost imposible, not smooth at least). you could try to do the same thing with the arms maybe? they look fine, but maybe their movement needs another small revision.

i think both animations (front and back) are donde. instead of using a black dot for the eyes, you use shading. those black pixels just pop out from his face and and really look more like a pair of 3D glasses. also, i would add another line of 1px to the torso's lower side, and also reducing the black line between the legs 1px too.

Hello All,

So while I wait on the verdict on the colors I am
working on the action that he does when
he is faced with a rock.



He pushes it
The point where he is pushing is fixed so I can't move his hand.
I can move his arms if you think that is needed.
And everything else that you think needs to be fixed.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Best regards from

M.E.

Thanks Metaru!

I will work on the other elements of the game to
use the parts that have the grass on it.
So less saturated it is.
Thanks DragonRC for your comment on youtube as well!

OK. I work on the far leg and of course will take
a look at the colors again!


Edit: Mockup with changed elements (water is now
also better I think) Used brown outline instead of
black on the character. But not sure about the
other colors on the hero yet....




Best regards from

M.E.


Edited by M.E. - 28 July 2007 at 12:51pm

This is making much progress!

Hi All,

Just dropping in to say that I absolutely have seen the
comments. Boy what good comments they are!

I was implementing them but I got frustrated with
the editors. GIMP is not really a pixel program.
Graphics Gale Free Edition doesn't handle
GIF and I dislike the controls.

When I thought of this, I rather would like the
keyboard to put the pixels in. Maybe in
combination with the mouse, but definitely
using the keyboard to have more control over
the placement of pixels.
Also the color selection in Gimp is bugging me.
I would like to have a keystroke that immediately
puts the color down.

So .. I decided to write my own editor with
keyboard control and characters a-z,1-0 for
color selection. So that you hit the 'A' key and
it puts color A on it and so on.
It will be nice to change the colors on all the
frames with just one color change on the
character 'A'.......

If anybody knows of a FREE program that can do
keyboard pixel control + animation I would
like to hear it!!

It will be sometime before I will have some updates.

Best regards from

M.E.

Hi Metaru,

Thanks for the tip. But I have allready checked that one out.
The controls are not really how I would like them.
Of course you should get used to a program before you can
judge it. But I always like programs that are really simple
and have just a few functions.

The main issue I'm having is that I like to work with the
keyboard instead of the mouse.
As a bonus it would mean that by typing in characters
I can select a color without having to move. I think
I will use the mouse to jump to larger areas but
most of the time I am just pushing pixels in a relatively
small area and experiment with colors.

Thanks for your thoughts anyway!

Best regards from

M.E.

Hello All,

Finally I have some update.

Removed most of the color shading and
limited myself to < 10 colors.
Is this the kind of shading that I should
limit myself to?
Or can there be more colors?
Is there some golden rule on maximum
colors on a sprite of this size?

Any comments?




OT: Wrote the program which is not doing
exactly what I need. The only real thing
that works really nice is the color selection.
The keyboard movement of the cursor is
working well but only on relatively small
areas.
Graphics Gale is the program that matches
what I need most of the times. If it would
do the hotkey for a color and support the
keyboard arrows to move it would be THE
program to use...
The lack of GIF support is really annoying
so I decided to buy the real thing anyway.
But I don't like to pay using a credit card
and asked them of another payment method.


Best regards from

M.E.

i think its a good idea to not overdo this sprite by adding more colors. you could remove the brightest one in each ramp, because he looks too shinny to me, specially in the pants. i don't think that the ligth source in your game is that strong. kept the rest of the colors. its don M.E., its done.

Hello M.E =)

Walking towards the viewer is great and almost funny in a good way. 'Leisure suit Harry' looking? Walking away from viewer the gap in between the legs looks to big, especially at the crotch/inseam.

Really looking at it it now seeems that its not the space between
the legs thats wrong. Its the lack of a butt. The inseam goes to
the belly giving that 'space' I saw before. I'd fix the shirt so that
there are buttocks. Not a crack or nothing just volume.

You're welcome in advance!

Best regards from

ME




Edit: added returns for your reading pleasure


Edited by jalonso - 23 September 2007 at 8:28am

even if his butt is covered by the shirt, you should add some black lines to give him the appearance of his legs connected to the body by hips..

Edited by Metaru - 17 October 2007 at 6:57pm

since its a shirt, and not a "skirt", we should be able to see part of his "ass", so we could see some kinf of connection between the legs. may i suggest you to try two things. one, with the edit i show you below, is to exagerate the dark between the lines

and how about this instead?

best regards from
M.E.taru

I find it dark too. I promise this wll be the last time i'll bother you with this, but could you add, again, that dark line between its legs? just one or two pixels, just to give his ass a bit more definition.

damn, that last line doesn't sound really masculine.

ROFL
"Ass-shading tutorial by M.E."

I think it definitely shows improvement. But this will forever be the posterior view of the ass reference topic. :P

Tried to remove diaper-look:



Enlarged the shirt a little bit more because
I am going more for the belt-holding-shirt
look than the shirt-in-trousers look.

When looking at the reference it looks like
the shade is below the ass instead of
between it. So I have attempted to
put the shade down.

How does this look?


Best regards from

M.E.

The Hurcules butt thread is back. 

Anyway, the only thing I see wrong is the pushing animation when he is pushed down. 1. His feet are too small. 2. They appear only in front of him, that shouldn't be.

Good luck with the rest of it.

Hello All,

Thanks a bunch for the comments metaru and greenraven.

I will focus on the pushing front (south) animation first as
both of you have commented on that one.

First of all Metaru brings up a very good point about the
visibility of the object. Didn't think of it while I was
spriting. So the position of the feet are not as important
as I thought it was. BUT .. it of course depends on the
size of the object.

For the perspective I have used a free 3d program (anim8or)
to reproduce the right pushing object and turn the
camera around.
This is a screenshot of it:












So I rounded the back of the sprite and made the
arms large at the front and thin at the back.
Maybe the hands that I have been using aren't
matching the perspective, but at least you would
see the hands more clearly.



And for greenraven an enlarged feet version:







That brings me to the topic of visibility of the
sprite.

This is what happens when I put the sprite into
the pushing action:

This is a small rock where the feet and hands will be
visible. Ok it is isn't perfect when you don't seem to push
the right hand side of the rock, but hey it is a game.

This is what happens with a slightly larger object:



Feet, hands are no longer visible.

And .. when using the sprite on the largest object the hero
vanishes all together, but hey ... the gamer knows that
he is pushing .. or at least I hope that the gamer realizes
this. I will be avoiding the largest objects in the first levels
so that the user will be familiar with the pushing.

Any comments?


Best regards from

M.E.