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Took me a bit to get here and say it (this is the second time I'm writing this post, crash ate the first round), but holy crap. That is So. Much. Better. Seriously, leaps and bounds. You've generally eradicated the pillow shading, the lightsource helps it look tight and uniform (for the most part - more on that in a second), and on the whole it's just a far sharper image.
That said, it isn't perfect. None of the things I have to say today are on anywhere near the scale of the issues in the previous post - if I saw that image in an indie game, I would be all right with seeing it. Still, some things could use some fixing, so if you don't mind me rambling on a little longer, I'd like to address them. Unfortunately, this barely tipped over the character limit, so it's in two posts.
First: color count. You, once again, have some one-off colors that shouldn't be there. I mapped 'em out for you again. http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex15_colorgoofs_zpsf961de5a.png
Red circles are just loose colors, the same sort as I was talking about before. Not sure where they're coming from - I still suspect a transparency bug, but it's likely unintentional. Check your settings. If you're using Photoshop, one of the relatively recent versions sometimes has an issue with holding 100% opacity. Just keep an eye out for these, they're so close to the colors you're using that you won't catch them with the naked eye. Now, I've also got the green arrows pointing at a couple spots, two places where there are long contiguous stretches of off color (unlikely to be accidental). They just need to be merged in - perhaps you deemed them necessary, perhaps you slightly shifted the color dial and forgot, or something. I just wanted to point them out - no big deal.
My next point is about lightsource! http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex16_lightsource_zps7d95b285.png
The green arrow is my approximation of the light source's direction. It's a good one. The red arrows don't represent additional lightsources, as they did in the previous posts, but instead just point at troublesome spots where the shading is incongruous. I've got the roof and the crosses - let's start with the roof.
The roof's trouble, from a lightsource perspective, is that its side, the one facing forward, should be catching a lot of light, more than the top of it probably. It's easier to explain the shaping of this one with an image. http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex17_roof_zpsf3ea201f.png
The crosses have several problems, and what it really stems from is that it's not that concrete what they're specific form is. By that I mean, by the way you've shaped the pixels right now, it is unclear if the crosses are flat, stained glass windows of the abbey, or if they're shaped, actual crosses set into alcoves. Personally, I find the latter more interesting. If it's like that, the recession into the wall would interact differently with the light source. http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex18_crosses_zps4974d19a.png (A is flat, B is an alcove, C is a cross in an alcove)
Other troubles with the crosses include their frames being slightly distorted for the angle, the black outlines and crossbars swallow the details of them a little bit, the three are all copy/paste jobs rather than following the lightsource, and it seems odd that they would have a brown background behind them.
(cont. from prev. post - wow, I didn't expect to need to hit a third one)
But I said this one was about uniformity as well. See, that's a trouble with banding - it's too repetitive and "the same," you need some differentiation and variation to keep things interesting and visually pleasing. At the same time, shape demands some degree of uniformity. Here's some spots where you break uniformity in a bad way, with labeled points:
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex13_uniformity_zps5e2320a3.png
Let's hit each point. A: The trouble at A is that the block isn't square. This block, for whatever reason, jsut keeps on stretching on so it can hit the door frame, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
B: The size of the blocks doesn't line up. Did the builders just haphazardly decide that some blocks would be short and others long? They should be the same, or at least have soem reason to why the size shifts.
C: Two things. First, the angle of the block seams don't make sense for the plane they're on. On the front, while most blocks have a "/" direction, the blocks next to the corner have seam slopes like this: "\". There's no reason for that. Second, technically, these two that I'm indicating are the same block. Right? They're cornerstones. Their seams should meet, and the slopes should flip at the corner. Which brings me to my next point:
D: There IS no corner. This building has a corner line most of the way down, is shaded like a corner, has at least two other ground-touching sharp corners, but this corner at point D is at a different angle. It doesn't really make any sense at all. Think about how it would function, maybe look at some other isometric houses to understand what it would look like. Heck, the house, ultimately, is a block with a triangular prism on top and a couple window/door holes carved out of it - just look at my blocks above and see how they show their corners.
E: Uniformity in shading. The shading should be rational and sensible, following the lightsource, but this one seems to jsut be gibberish - you put a banding shadow around the seams and tossed in a center highlight. Most of them are like this, I'm just only calling you on one.
Uniformity can be hard, but having a unified-looking image where everything plays by the same lightsource(s), shapes make logical sense, and objects act as they should, go a long way to making a strong piece. Remember that too much uniformity can be boring though, that making things uniform through banding is actually problematic, and that being uniform in shape still demands adherance to your lightsource.
Almost done. I got one more thing to talk about: colors. First off, I have no idea where you're getting 24 colors from - technically, you have 59 colors in there. A lot of those are clones though, goof colors that are usually an indication that you've either a) been messing with transparency, b) been using automatic tools like blur or an anti-aliased brush, or c) you saved it in a bad format at some point (it's not that one, unless you did some extreme clean-up work). I'm guessing it's the first one - you've done transparency stuff before (your Golem Foundry piece has 143 colors from it). Here's your color goofs:
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex11_colorgoofs_zps436578f0.png
44, most of which are only present for single pixels.
The real tragedy though is that you don't even need those 15 colors. I think this could be pulled off without too much trouble using, I dunno, 8? Maybe 9? Here's it in a hyper-simple form with 6 colors where I just consolidated similar colors.
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex14_6colors_zps5d160c44.png
There. I'm done for now. I hope you take some good out of this - you have the ability to pull this stuff off, you just>*** Message truncated (4000 chars max) ***
(cont. from prev. post)
Instead, think about the shape. A good way to make it work can be to round off the sharp corners a bit - make it seem like things don't fit together seamlessly. Another is the push out the center a bit. This is done by giving the block visible edges, in that some bits along light-touched sides will get highlights while the opposite ones will be in shadow. This is hard to explain, so here's an image: http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex8_bump_side_blocks_zps01f48be6.png
In this picture, you can see how the placement of shadows and highlights gives the entire center of the block a raised appearance, or, more accurately, it gives the other parts a sunken look. In general though, it still gets to look squareish and shaped right, but it's definitely not quite as boring as before. As you move along a side ou can play around a bit and make things more shadowed or highlit, and it's important to always remember where your lightsource is - in this case, that means that for some of the blocks you'll add even more shadow that is caused by the overhang of the roof casting shade. For example, these blocks wouldn't get touched by nearly as much light as some of the others: http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex9_shadedblocks_zpsb7c20da4.png
There are other things you can do to add texture and interest. Divots and chunks taken out of a couple of blocks, cracks at the edges of some maybe, perhaps even a rough dither texture at the fading edges to imply roughness, you have options. The trick is to use them sparingly - above all else, it's important that the idea of "block" be communicated.
The roof is pillow shaded as well, up to a point. First off, it's not precesly clear what it's supposed to look like. From my looking at it, it appears like corrugated metal - not that bad, consideing people actually make roofs out of that, although I don't think monk abbeys get that sort of roof. There's no real shaping to anything. To be brutally honest, it looks like a bunch of tubes with the light source positioned directly in front of each of them. It also hurts that they don't have any 3d sculpting to them - there's no clear differentiation between the side and the top, which there would be on the closest one, and we should see some kind of bottom side as well. While the light source is stronger the further to the bottom right you get, each of them has the exact same amounts of shadow all the time in the same places. I'm pretty sure you copy/pasted them and then added the highlights on top of that.
Uniformity, Banding: The next lesson here is about uniformity and banding. Banding is a sneaky problem that emerges when you have lines or clusters of pixels "hug" each other to try and create shading. Really though, it gives this blurry, unsettling appearance - the technical terminology is that it lowers the resolution since you can use it to easily identify the size of a single pixel, but that's a whole complicated subject. Basically, the idea is "don't do it." The most common occurance is when you shade by tracing around the inside edge of soemthing. Your piece is FULL of it. Let's point out some of the examples, though I'm going to ignore the BIG one for a moment.
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex10_banding_zpsb5823d78.png
In each of those loops you will find examples of shades hugging other lines exactly. That's not all of it though - your piece is positively covered in banding. However, like I said, I'm ignoring the big one.
The Roof: http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex12_roof_zps009ddc18.png
This is a solid block of banding. Single, identical lines of slightly different color, one after the other, "recreating" a blurry gradient effect without modeling anything real. Repeating and mirroring just made it wo>*** Message truncated (4000 chars max) ***
This has some good idea behind it, but it's struck by a pair of major pixel art maladies: Pillow shading, and banding. Based on your previous uploads, this is a chronic problem for you, so I'll go into a bit of detail describing what these are and why you shouldn't do them. I'll try to keep this well-explained and break up the wall of text with pictures in links, but this could be kinda long. I'm not picking on you - you've now had several pieces rejected from the gallery for various reasons, so you didn't seem to quite understand some specific ideas, so I'm trying to explain them. Believe me, it looks like a ton, but it's more from me being thorough rather than really mean. Gonna split this into two posts to dodge the character limit.
Pillow Shading: Pillow shading is the practice of shading an object as if the light scource is directly in front of an object. It's most heinous when used in the manner here - when you shade every individual object as if the light source was right in front of it, rather than placed in a single location that affects the piece as a whole. Here's a picture illustrating what I mean: http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex1_lightsources_zpsbea38064.png
What that image shows is two things. First, with my point about lightsources, you may argue "But I have a lightsource - see, the front is lighter than the side, it's comign from the front!" and you'd be right-ish. As I point out in that picture, the green arrow shows your overall light direction. This is a good idea! The general concept is okay. However, the red arrows are your true light sources. If you look at the front, each stone actually has its own individual light source coming from dead in front of it, rather than all coming from a single point. And from the side, yes, it's darker, but the highlight is still right in the middle, rather than the shading itself following the light. Link: http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex2_lighting_sides_zps3940dbba.png
In this image, you can see how a lightsource would hit an individual block. Here: http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex3_lighting_long_sides_zps1c3dfc2e.png
This image is more representative of how it changes as you get further along (though this is unshaped and quickly made). By the way, the tops of the blocks are black because they are irrelevant to this example, not because of any effect of the lightsource.
The other aspect of the problem of pillow shading here, is the shape of a block. Let me pose to you a really obvious rhetorical question: what shape is a brick? It's a rectangular prism, right? Flat sides? Yeah, of course. The problem with that is that that's not what you drew. See, you have each block having this round-ish highlight in the middle and a shadow in a ring around the edge. This is the hallmark of a round shape, of a sphere. Here's an image: http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex5_blocks_arent_round_zpsaf5f5888.png
It should be pretty obvious that the bottom block is more representative of a block. Let's see how the light hits the house front real quick: http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex4_lightsource_front_zps41f3f023.png
Okay, let's now see how it would look if you used blocks. http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/maxdxam/ex6_flatblocks_zps749715de.png
There. Now, that really displays what the lightsource is on the blocks.
Now, that's a really obvious concept. I can't imagine you didn't understand that blocks are flat and that light comes from one place. So why did you shade like you did? My guess: that last image? Borrring! It's flat and without texture and interest. I entirely agree with that. However, in adding that shading, you changed the shape of things, and that's not good. See, texture should conform to the object, not change it. That can >*** Message truncated (4000 chars max) ***
(cont. from previous post)
Still got two more things I want to confront. One is banding. The staircase banding of before is mostly gone, but there's still a lot of minor banding. I recommend those tutorials at the end of my previous post - they're much better at explaining banding than I am.
The other thing is texturing. This is a complicated issue. On the dark side of the abbey, I've no doubt: you have a little too much texture, it makes it look busy without adding much. Going a little easier on the texture is probably alright. On the front side it looks much more natural, maybe a bit too much texture, but not a distracting amount like on the dark side. The problem comes more from a design perspective. As you said, this is for a game. The amount of texture is kinda dependent on how you plan to use it: as a one-off asset, or if this is a recurring object that will appear multiple times in the game. If it's one-off, cool, you want it to be distinctive. However, if you plan to use it mutliple times, you ought to actually minimize the amount of unique texture. See, if you see two stone abbeys made of stone blocks, that's a regular sight, nothing suspicious. However, if you see two stone abbeys that both have distinctive and identical cracks in them, it's an unsettling deja vu, it becomes obvious that it's a copy/paste job. In an ideal world, you have a unique variation of the church for each instance you want to use it, but that's not really possible, so you need to strike a balance between making this a unique piece or a widespread representative of all monk abbeys. I leave that up to you, but thought you ought to be aware.
But seriously, it's a vastly better piece than it used to be. Now it's less about "damage control" from innate problems and more about refinement. This is definitely an admirable taking of critisism to heart and fixing things. Keep being open to advice and retain the stuff you learn and you'll just keep improving. Happy pixelling!
(hope you don't mind, I think I'm gonna blog a bit about this stuff, put the lessons out there. I'll properly credit you, no worries)