new character, let me know what u think (compared to the old one). He is not going to be as big as this, this is 150% scale.

Edited by RebeaLeion - 06 October 2014 at 12:58pm

Thank you !! It tells me a lot, I d like to improve with pixelart, but I do not know any drawing techniques. Lighting/Dithering and rules that applies to this.

I did not study tutorials much (I learned to draw pixels on my own, kinda). I d like to learn more about lighting and details, dithering. (any tip for good tutorial for me).

Is dithering hair bad ?


Edited by RebeaLeion - 07 October 2014 at 5:05am

great, thanks for tips ! I ll look try to not dither those parts. The newest pixelart.



Edited by RebeaLeion - 10 October 2014 at 3:28pm

The new work looks great--if there's one thing you're doing really well right now, it's using colours. Good choices, good clarity with your ground standing out well from the other elements. You might have too many layers of different things, and that makes choosing colours for each a little harder, and the scene in general too busy. I'd remove the back layer of dirt and make the stone the standard underground texture.

The big thing you need to work on is cleanness, and consistency. The sky is super blurry and soft (perhaps a tad too much aa, you should let solid shapes of single colours emerge), the grass is scribbled and rough, and so is the rock background. The characters are also inconsistently outlined with black, object colour, or nothing. Choose one! It looks so much better when a game uses the same rules to draw every sprite and asset, so figure our your rules.

Going back to that grass, and the trees for that matter, don't try to light every leaf and blade, just let the shapes soften into larger ones, bringing select elements into detail afterwards. Actually, apply that to everything--be specific and make clear forms and masses, then give them their texture and small details.

Finally (whew), I wasn't bringing it up because it wasn't really relevant earlier, but it's best to work without blurs or effects. You should add those later using a game engine, if you even add them at all (pixeljoint doesn't accept stuff with effects, really). This way your assets will be good enough to stand by themselves before you start exaggerating them with bloom and whatnot.

Good work, keep it up!

Alright, a little tough love coming your way.

I think you're hurting yourself in a few ways. First, which is most apparent by your animations, this *ahem* isn't really pixel art.

*** Hear me out ***

looking at your sword swinging animation up close, you can notice that you have large pixels, and small pixels. This CAN be done to great effect, if that's what you're going for, but being early in your pixeling career, that's not where you should be focusing.

I suspect you may have just upscaled your first pixel, and edited from there. what happens when you go that route is half pixel animations which clash. You're also passing up the most important aspect of pixeling: per pixel attention.

The second issue you have is in your mindset. You said: "Its flawed but the best i can produce atm.". I disagree. I have seen WAY too many new pixelers come in and do amazing work because they asked for feedback, and went outside their comfort zone.

I know you can improve, and I look forward to seeing it.

my recommendation for your animations is this:

1. Choose a size, and stick to it. Don't try to scale and edit later.

2. Draw a stick figure, use a different color for each limb, and animate the stick to do the motion that you want completed.

3. after refining the motion of the stick figure to proper anatomy, draw your character on top of each frame (roughly)

4. Refine each frame and get them to flow together.

There are other ways of doing this, IMO this is the most simple way.

Looks like you've got some great animation potential! Well done. You've really made a positive change in terms of keeping your pixels the same size. Per-pixel attention is a staple of pixel art, in that for everything you draw, you pay close attention and invest great care into every pixel of your work. It means, no messy scribble shading, every pixel can be considered and there will be a better solution than the rough draft. So, making a sprite bigger and drawing onto that to animate is not really following this philosophy. You weren't trying to make it pixel-perfect with what you had, which you've now done to great effect.

A note on speed: first you get good, then you get fast, then you get better. This is true for everything, ever! 6 hours is a great time for now, work for years and it'll take half an hour. There's a lot of trial-and-error doing something for the first time, which bumps up the time taken a large amount.

Things to consider now...

1. Watch out for banding. don't copy the shape of an outline with another colour just inside the outline. This makes really jagged shapes that just kill the piece. Look out for other examples in shading, even small clusters that line up can be awkward to look at if they aren't intentional.

2. Same note about dithering, this time for the legs during the run. Less is always better for small sprites! The dithering for the hair on the right side of the face is excellent though.

3. It can help to keep things simple to help pixeling. Don't over-design your character by having the bracelets, hilts, armour, etc all different. For instance, having the hair tie that holds the ponytail be the same material as the wrist/sleeve thing would help both feel more connected.

Apart from that, the animation itself is looking remarkably good. Keep it up.

Thank you all for your tips ! Adarias's sample may help me a lot in the future.

I think this is final - I moved a leg a bit so its not static + I changed thing by ponytail.



When I look at those new sprites compared to the first, I would not be here without your help. Since I got some feedback I will try to create those new sprites based on it. I will post in the future, when I have more done.

Edited by RebeaLeion - 14 October 2014 at 2:24pm

For your first work, this is remarkably usable. I won't say it's great, but it's consistent in style (and errors), and it works decently well as a whole. It's not a game where the aesthetic is a selling point, but it's not a turnoff either like so many pixel games. I know it sounds like a backhanded compliment, but that in itself is a reasonably big deal, especially for a first.

That said, it's definitely got some issues. Most prominently it feels messy and more like temporary/sketched art than the finished work. Which, this being a WIP thread, might just be the case... but anyway.

Messiness.

Let's start with a very specific detail, your shoulder armor. It's very blobby in nature, and combined with the color choices it feels more like a dirt or rock block from Terraria than anything else. Regardless of it being metal or leather, it should be a more legible shape, and have a bit more specularity.

Taking that bit of info and looking at the rest of your mockup, the same kind of blobbiness appears everywhere from the trees to the grass to the underground dirt. Everything seems to be roughly the same 'material'; pixel clumps with some sprayed/scribbled pixel noise. But in a way that's a good thing because A you've got a specific focal point of things to learn and B you seem to not have ingrained a lot of different things to unlearn (as any artist knows, unlearning is -much- harder than learning). Your biggest issues are having simple enough shapes that read well and have just enough detail, and a lack of understanding how different materials react with light.

That's it. Form and material. Of course your animation could be better, you could have better ramps, save more colors, and so on, but just focusing on form and material will make a -huge- overall difference.

Here's an edit of your main character using the same base colors and style (proportions, selout), but with completely redone shading/materials. I tried to keep it mostly the same character but obviously I've changed design details. And a bit of tweaking of the pose and anatomy because I couldn't figure out some of it. Oh and that blue hair tie =P


The first stages (0-2) are a combination of two processes, first of all reducing your sprite to flat colors, and secondly a sketching technique I like to call 'blobbing' which is a way to quickly get some basic lighting down.
In stages 3-5 you see me adding and tweaking detail. (note that these stages aren't done at regular time intervals, so the 4-5 difference is rather small)
6 and 7 are adding detail and finishing touches.

I hope these things come across good enough:
•medi-eval/native-american leather pants. Sorta like -5146-p.jpg">these.
•smoothish hair with bangs and some strands, relatively clean.
•leather wrapped sheath
•used metal breastplate
•furry tufty pauldrons

One issue with your sprite is overuse of outlines. One might argue mine uses a bit too little, but I'd remedy that with higher contrast colors instead. Because everywhere you add an outline, you're using a pixel, adding noise and generally making something feel flatter. So try to keep outlines only on the outside of the sprite where possible. When you do feel you need a bigger separation somewhere, make the 'outline' work multiple jobs.
If you look at my outline between pants and breastplate, you'll notice it's brown: this makes it look like a dropshadow from the armor. A similar method is used on the forehead, though with a wider shadow. Along the same lines I used a drop shadow on the arm in combination with self-shadow on the fur to create a separation between skin/fur, to create a round shape for the shoulder, and to create a jagged outline for the tufts. (the shoulders took me a fair bit of times and several complete reworks because of this complexity)

With less outlines, we have more pixels to use for the form of things. Take a look at the legs and arms; those are pretty much cylinders. (again, the outlines add shading instead of being merely outlines) The breastplate is spherical, just like the main shape of the hair and face. The shoulder is made up of three waterdrop shapes, partially hidden behind the hair. The sheath is very slightly curved, but could be essentially considered flat. The reason why part of the sheath is darker is simply because the body is casting a shadow on it.

I hope this all makes sense, since the sprite is so small that all of these things kind of blend together and it can be hard to discern shape versus shadow versus detail versus line. =P

But in the end, that is what makes it work. If you compare the sheath wrappings, you'll see that the ones in v5 are much sharper, which would make them read better, right? Well, no, because the sprite is tiny and thus the line is very obviously broken and jagged. But by using some anti-aliasing, by blending in the colors with the sheath and the shadow, we can fudge things a bit and make it look somewhat like one smooth line.

As for what per-pixel attention is... it's simply paying attention to the effect of every pixel. Like I mentioned before, one pixel can have several roles at once; line shading and detail. Or just having that extra bit of detail and having it work nicely. Try removing those single dark pixels in the shoes. Suddenly the shoes are bland boxes. The smaller each sprite is, the more each individual pixel matters.

As for animation, I agree with previous posters. Here is a mini tutorial I made way back:



P.S. You may completely disagree with the face on V7. I like to cram as much 'realistic' detail in as possible, but I imagine plenty of people find it not fitting with the proportions, or simply find it less legible than a simple 2x2 eye.

I tried Ice, its more difficult than I thought it would be ... I didnt know how to place lights (?) so I tried over and over till I got this: (3hrs work).



Edited by RebeaLeion - 19 October 2014 at 2:44pm

Wow, that helped me greatly. But now I feel it's not my sprite. It's yours from 80% - that guide did the trick. The original sprite you created is on 5th frame now (I included it in the motion - and I hope you don't mind, so I ask if I can use it for a freeware game). I draw 1-4 frames of gif excatly by your guide. Here it is, took me like 2 hrs.



This is going to be an ice spell

Edited by RebeaLeion - 21 October 2014 at 2:23pm

There is no resizing in this animation (maybe? I am not sure) I drew frame by frame when I did this second attempt, based on orig. shapes (I will try to avoid drag n drop in the future tho! If I did it before, I won't) - I will try to make some ice blocks now for practice.

SuperTurnip

Edited by RebeaLeion - 25 October 2014 at 7:44am

VID removed, but old progress screen archived :

EDIT : BIG TREE Was orignally turned to right, so it was lit from right. now its lit from left here.

I didn't think about light before. I will try to keep it up to one side+up light. Thanks for tip! I changed direction of assests. What do you mean by lit from right - no fill light (sry for my Eng)? Fill light is something special ?

I am changing assets every month. It's 5 th edit of my game/assests... I d like to move forward already. I am changing same things over and over and replacing things that were already done before, it is really holding me back from coding (on the other one, game at its early phase was far away from being fair). Now I got to phase, where it looks fine for decent freeware game. I will try to improve over time as I am working on the project.


Edited by RebeaLeion - 26 October 2014 at 3:07am

You're making great progress, this statue looks pretty good.
Just a few tips:
1) Edge of a pedestal doesn't look flat because you have lights above it and shadows below.
In doing flat things start with solid color, then add some cracks and flecks so it won't look boring.
2) You have too many colors which makes picture kinda messy. Some of them are mostly identical. I cleaned it up a bit.

Also you might add some flick on right wing so it contrast with body and be more visible.
P.S. Is that hair?


Edited by Finlal - 27 October 2014 at 7:22am

I tried some portrait, but it... took me over 4 hours and I got nowhere near to state where it looks good or at least fair. I am starting to think that I have no that right feeling to be an pixelartist (I can't draw irl with pen or pencil). In 4-5 hours I wasnt able to make a portrait that looks somehow decent and it is not looking even close to pixelart :( what I am doing wrong. Might it be have no creative/graphic talent. I spent so many hours on these...

Edit : its not that I want to give up on pixel art, not even a close ! but something is not feeling right.


Edited by RebeaLeion - 27 October 2014 at 1:09pm

Her hair looks more like liquid in these potrayals.

I Think using more hue shift in the skin colors would be nice and getting proportions right you'll have ace portrait right there.

You might wanna use some reference files. Just search google images for tents.
Also, could you post this image in 1x scale?

References don't have to be pixel art :)

Try out search terms like "norse tent", "teepee", "old tent" etc. The images you find will be helpful because the things that are most important right now are universal things like form that you can learn from studying any image! There are a lot of pixel-only things that are a bit off in your work, notably banding and messiness, but those are only really important after the tent has been roughed out again in a more solid, comprehensible shape and construction.

That being said, the spikes and skull are drawn with a lot of confidence, and they look very solid and well-done. They work in part because they're simple. Remember that you don't need to draw every fold in the fabric or leaf on the tree!

Thanks for banding tip. it took 4 hours + :/


Edited by RebeaLeion - 01 November 2014 at 3:17pm

Thanks, still I am having problems to setup right colours ! Now I ll look like noob but because I am when it comes to colors. I didnt want to have messy colours on the tent so I moved bar manually to get similiar colours for banding (I didnt premade pallete, etc.). Thats why it has many different colors.

I am using graphics gale and when I draw tent alone I slided only on one bar :

EDIT: HUE bar is obvious, but the others for shadow and lights confuse me. When I try to make colors it takes me a lot of time before I make those colors which match (light /shadow). I d like to understand those bars/slide bars so I can mix lights and shadows faster. Difference between HSL / HSV (?). Also that upper bar for 0 > 255 (light > black), does not affect colour at all, it isn't working -_-



Edited by RebeaLeion - 01 November 2014 at 4:35pm

Thanks guys! I will try to revamp a tent + I will try to use warm / cooler colors more - instead of light /dark bar only with same hue.
This is my first sprite where I used warmer colors for lights, colder for shadows. (less than min sprite, so it's not for show, but I see its possible to make shadows and lights this way as Finlal said - I was chasing colors randomly over whole pallete. This may help me a lot in faster color picking !


note*really quickedit warmer/cooler colors

Like mentioned before, use reference. But also, think about use cases. Then think about logical ways how to facilitate those.

In this case one of the first things to ask yourself is this: should the house move? And if so, how often. You say you used a tent as reference, but in the first image you've got a a sign on what looks to be a pretty permanent structure. Here's some more rambling in both cases:

If the goblins are a warlike moving people, I'd expect the text sign to be on one maybe two poles, driven into the ground. Or even simpler, just totems or skullpoles.
Then, the tent is modern yet clunky. The reason a modern tent works like this is because of the strong bending and tensile strength of the poles. I doubt goblins have figured out fiberglass, and you're showing thick poles sticking out, so I reckon using a dome-tent isn't right. There do exist round designs, and goblins could use smaller more flexible twigs than humans could, but it doesn't feel quite right.

Lets look at a few alternatives with pros and cons:


You could go for a teepee, though that might feel cliched and feel too civilized. It's easy to construct though, and very portable. So it would work for an roving fight group. Many campers consider it to be the best kind of movable home; it's simple to make, can be done with all kinds of materials, and can be easily adapted for situations.


Single pole tent. Looks like a teepee, but isn't. One big pole with a cloth over it. Downsides? Pole needs to be much larger/heavier, which needs to be dug in for stability, or needs to use lots of guylines. Easier to think up, but slightly less practical.


Bedouin tent. Same basic concept as the single-pole tent, just with a few more poles to make it more wide and less high. Sometimes this is used as just a roof, and then they optionally wrap a big band around it like this. Biggest downside of this, just like the single-pole tent, is that you need a good way to make the poles stable, which generally means digging them into the soil. Digging in to soft desert sand is easy. Digging in to forest mud, less so. I do think that the visual of this works well for goblins though.


You could also go for a more survivalist style tent such as the lean-to. Stick two poles in the ground with a crossbar on top, and then add a roof of leaves or fabric or whatever. Also very simple, but not quite as portable I think. But it could work quite well, visually, to have one of the supporting poles be a tree branch, to show a bit of a nature connection from the creatures.


Contubernium tent. Roman tent for a squad of 8 warriors. Somewhat modern style with poles and guylines. Good ratio of surface used to usable space for people. (i.e. not a lot of small corners where you can't put anything) Good portability. Looks very neat and organized, which IMO doesn't fit with goblins.

That's about it for portable oldschool tents. Now about some slightly more fixed housing.


Yurts, used by middle-asian nomads. Not meant to move every day/week; you let your animals graze until there's no food left and then you move on. Based on a lattice/trellis structure which is quite ingenous because it's very sturdy, light, and doesn't require large/thick poles. Doesn't require you to dig into the ground at all, very handy for cold climates! The roof is sort of like a flat teepee. Using a different kind of material for the walls and the roof, in combination with the ropes holding down the roof, makes for a nice somewhat messy look.


Wigwams, another native american design. Less portable than the teepee, and somewhat similar to the yurt in appearance. Instead of a re-usable trellis and roof construction, you make a complete frame from saplings. Decently suited for somewhat cold and rainy places because of the sturdier walls. Although I suppose you could use just cloth covering.


Mobile homes. While technically movable, most of these stay in one place for the entire usage duration. The unruly, tribal and territorial nature of their inhabitants can be seen as analogous to goblins. However the materials and construction used are too modern for a fantasy game.

Or would they be completely settled? Then have a look at these.


Mud huts. You make a latticework of twigs, throw on mud and let it dry. Then you add a thatched roof. Simple, sturdy, but you need a place that has good mud. You can also make something a bit more elegant, with mud bricks, like this or this. I particularly like the visual of the second, though I'm not sure having the wooden beams protrude is a great idea because of pole rot. Then again, the millennium-old taos pueblo has them, so I suppose it's okay for a dry climate.

In regards to fantasy, I think you can play around a bit with thematic elements. For example in Warcraft 2, the Orc sawmill</a> was made from a hollowed out tree trunk. IMO it didn't work well in that game because the proportions were out of whack with the game's trees, but you have pretty big thick trees and goblins are fairly small creatures.
Tusks and/or bones could be used as somewhat decorative structural elements, but they'd be heavier than a wooden piece to carry the same load. So I'd limit them to 'premium' buildings like the chieftain house.

And like I mentioned with the sign, I'd expect them to use simple-to-move decorations. Stuff like skullpoles (I'd make them less thick than you have), or strings of skulls/bones, or war banners. Perhaps spikes in the earth like the romans did. They had 3 main methods, to inflict different amounts of damage and slow-down.

Also, think of storage. If you keep your food in your tent, you might find a bear or wolf there. So often times, people hung bags or chests of food in a tree. They'd sometimes even build something like a treehouse platform.

Random image reference stuff time!




Edited by PixelSnader - 01 November 2014 at 7:12pm

tHANKS fIN, you managed to reply to post which was up for two mins, I decided that I will mention it when I have more. So here it is:

Outlines were really necessary, because game is high-hue/contrast. I m not sure about hair, but I tried to keep it pixel-clean PixelSnader's guide.


QUICK EDIT ON THE HAIR







EDIT : I added ruff near neck + changed upper body + shoulder a bit, thanks Finl! But no tail, its sword sheet. Hm, idle anim... I will try to change legs but when I move pixels on legs a bit, it got messy... so I kept them idle for now. I might also change ponytail hair as in image below


Edited by RebeaLeion - 02 November 2014 at 4:52pm

As I said you made great progress but there are still mistakes and things to be corrected.


Ok. I made many things here, not sure I can explain everything.
First of all, outline. When you use dark outline it's doesn't really matters if they are same or different colors. And it would be much easier to animate if outline is one solid color.
And you can use it inside the sprite.
Second - hair. I made a little picture showing how hair grows now and how they might grow.
Also added that little pointing flock which, I think, makes character more recognizable.
Anatomy (or something like that). Shoulder is very big (half of the torso) and legs are short as I mentioned before.
Also I used up to 3 colors per objec (3 on hair, 2 on belt etc). You had too many colors on face and shirt and it looked a bit messy.
About that tail thing - i didn't understand what it is so i just made it like dog tail or something.
Another funny thing - face construction.
By changing a few pixels on the face you changing character's face structure. Add dark pixel on the left - face looks thinner, add dark pixels between eyes - they looks deeper etc. Try to experiment with this.

UPD. I think I turned your sprite into a woman. I should get some sleep.

UPD 2. DO NOT do such idle animation. It's lazy.

Edited by Finlal - 02 November 2014 at 4:01pm

Nice design Try a tablet on the headstone.