The Resource WIP Thread 3

@Robert-Character Creator You're relying too much on the edges of each rock for your shading. To get light along the top edge like that the light would have to be coming from inside the crack, but somehow blocked from lighting up the shadowed area. Bring down the highlight inside the rock a little. I also think you've made it too rounded, but that's probably personal preference. I don't think stone walls should look too weathered unless they're ruins, I think it would look better if it had shaper planes. But if rounded out is what you're going for, you've got it.

@Xenphir I think you can get the cute look really well without going pixel. Maybe check out some of the newer, after pixel before 3D Mana games, see if they have the look you're going for.

It happened again. I stopped getting alerts for this thread but now I know why. Another thread was merged with this.

@Robert-Character Creator Those are cool looking bricks and it looks like they match when connected.

Parallax? Drawing 50+ maps separately sounds like a lot of work.

@FleshToDust I'm drawing all of my maps entirely from scratch (that means no copy/pasting the details ;P ) and I can confirm it's a lot of work. However, I love world-building, so it's a lot of fun doing it. I spent several hours choosing a stone type and a real-world influence to base my walls on on; I ended up basing the walls on Incan architecture, with granite blocks.

@Sharm The placement of the lights was bothering me as well. Remember how my game is very dark, as it takes place at night? The light source is being held by the girl in the image, so the lighting should be very different, should it not?

Edit: I should also add that even though the castle is lived in, it's many centuries old and in an area with constant, severe, weather. The amount of rounding is intentional. :)

Well sort of. This is a case of needing to know the rules before you break them. Just being any type of different doesn't make it work. No matter where the girl would be standing, the blocks wouldn't be lit like that. Since your light source moves and you've got permanent lighting drawn into your tiles, you have to light everything as neutrally as possible. Just try it out my way and you'll see, the stones will look rounder and work better with the lighting.

Hmm, I tried adjusting the lighting like you said, but it doesn't look very good. This is on my part, clearly. Any idea how to clean it up a little?

So I used MV's default A2 set and just replaced the grass texture with my own. This time around I used smaller blades of grass that are also less detailed, and blended it into the background a bit better than before. I also spread more around so the oddly textured background doesn't show through as much. I've made the texture seamless myself, and it looks like it worked. All I did was do the top and right sides using 48x48 grid in GIMP and then any grass poking over the line of the grid I copied and pasted on the bottom/left side of the tile so it was seamless. ^.^ I'd love an opinion on it so I can improve it further.

@Robert-Character Creator You're focusing on the details and smoothing again before getting the basics where you want it. If the highlight didn't look right that far down without the additional shades, it won't look right with them.

Okay, made some examples. I took your last image and drew on top of it, putting the shadows and highlights where I wanted. To give it the more rounded look I drew the light away from all the edges and brought the highlight down from the top a little. 2 colors used.



This is the point where you stop, look it over, and fix anything that looks off, even by one pixel. This is the place to experiment, see if something else works better or show it to us if you can't figure out what's wrong, before you invest a lot of time and effort into smoothing.



The best part of being more careful in the earlier parts is that it makes the smoothing part easier and faster. Here's the finished smoothed out version.

If you want the entire rock face flatter, like it looked before, that's fine. Just don't put the absolute brightest shade right in the corners of the crack next to the blackest. That makes it look sharp and points out the squareness of the pixels. Bring it in from those corners a bit and have the brightest bits along the longer runs of pixels, away from the corners. Here's some examples using white to make the jagginess more obvious.

No:

Yes:


@Xenphir Something went wrong somewhere. Either MV isn't displaying your map properly (possible, I seem to remember that being a bug in an earlier version), or you've done resizing on your textures at some point. It's hard to give you good feedback with the problem, but I did notice a couple of things. Be more careful of implied lines, the ones that look like they're there from far away but are actually broken up when looking closely. You've got a bottom left to top right swoosh that looks like an errant brush stroke in the light shades and a possibly overwhelming sine wave pattern in the darker stuff (could be fine, depends on how it looks without the light shades emphasising it). The amount of detail is just right, enough to be interesting but not distracting. Over all very pleasant.

@Sharm I am not quite sure what bug you mean as it looks the same in MV as it does in GIMp. Pretty sure anyway o.o also that swoosh I think you are talking about it just badly placed grass where I believe all the light edges lines up in the same direction. I will have to probably just darken the middile bit I think.

Yep, that's what an implied line is. Things line up just wrong. Our brains are really good at finding patterns and completing incomplete things, so much so that we'll see things that aren't actually there.

So are you saying that the screenshot looks exactly the same as what you're seeing in MV or that zooming in to the original texture looks the same as the zoomed in screenshot? I hope it's not in the original texture, I don't know how you could fix it without starting over.

What exactly is wrong with it though? I don't see what you are seeing? xD

I fixed it up a bit but I hope I didn't do it for nothing o.o if so I can easily redo the whole thing. The first try it only took me about an hour I think and now I could probably do it faster. Also I might not have to edit it as much now that I know to look out for weird pattern spots haha. This screenshot is viewing at 1:1 in MV. So I'm assuming this is the distance players see with their characters?

The weird artifacts are gone in this new screenshot, so nothing's wrong with the tiles themselves, thankfully. It looks good. Was the last screen not showing 1:1? That would explain why it looked resized.

Yes the first screenshot was the mv maker fully zoomed in, beyond 1:1. So if this is now fine tomorrow I can start on snow and stone and sand methinks.

Hello folks. pixel art newb here, and i was looking for some feedback on some icons. Just standard 32x32 icons, and i've only been doing this for a whole 4 days. I could use some critique and feedback, and whether or not anyone would consider these usable for a standard RTP game.

Also, if i am posting these things incorrectly, please let me know. Im kind of a dinosaur when it comes to technology and computer science these days.

I'm starting with standard icons for ammunition that will be required for use with some of my in-game skills.

Handgun:

Rifle:

Machine Gun Link:

And the last one i am completely unsatisfied with, Shotgun Shells in a fabric shell carrier:


That's all for now, but i plan to add arrows, bolts, energy ammo, and a few different types of modern grenades. gotta Sci-Fi this sh**, yo!

advice and critique welcomed!

Edit: My attempts at shading, and i have very little idea what i'm doing with it. However, i think that the Shotgun shells look much better in this edit.

Then again, i'm not sure if all that i've accomplished is to make them look "blurry"... thoughts?

Also, Bokuto. I'm not to sure about this one either. too dark?



(also, i don't know if it's implied or not in this thread, but i'm not ready to share these as of yet. Once i am satisfied with my understanding and that i'm doing the lighting and shading correctly, i'll post in the resource thread for open use. Thank you.)

@MakerZeroOne I'm fairly certain any resources shown here are off-limits unless you explicitly say otherwise. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

@Sharm I haven't had much time lately due to college finals and such, but I've been working on the walls. As with when you helped with my character's hair, your shading is unparalleled by my attempts, and all I had to do is darken the highlights a little.

That's correct, no one is allowed to use anything on this thread without direct permission from the artist.

@MakerZeroOne Welcome! Nice job in general and great job for a first timer. The unblurred icons look better than the blurry ones. Don't fight the pixel look, at that size it's helping you define your image, adding in extra shades and fuzzing out the transitions is going to lose that definition. Your problem may actually be a lack of contrast between shades, especially since most of what you're trying to represent is made of metal. You should probably also get rid of the dithering. With how small these are it's doing the same thing adding those extra colors was doing, making you lose your shape. Don't be afraid to go really bold with the highlights, it'll help the brass look nice and shiny. Try adjusting the metal to be less pure colored, the yellow is pretty cartoony, especially against the red (which should probably stay bright red). The bokuto is suffering from a lack of light source and might be too curved, particularly by the handle. Adding in a tsuba (the hand guard) might be a good idea, make it look a little more sword like. It's not unheard of for a bokuto to have one.

@Robert-Character Creator The point of showing you is just to give you an idea of what you could do, I'm glad you're making it your own. Walls are looking good.

@Sharm Thanks for the help. I think I'd like to work on some flooring soon. :)

@Sharm - Thank you for the welcome and the instructions. I was worried about the colors being too cartoonish. I'll take everything else into account and try again. Also, "Dithering?". I looked it up, but other than it's archaic use, I am unsure what you mean. Is that the way that i tried to blend the pixels with an airbrush?

Gotta look up "pixel dithering" to get it defined I guess. It's where you use a pattern of pixels between two colors to blend them together. It can be a useful tool, but too often it's overused. I think you only used it on the red bullets, on the black portion (probably for texturing purposes?) and a little at the top in the brass section.

@Sharm AH! yes. Thank you. I used it to try and create the image of woven fabric, and to try and show the stretching of the fabric with the shell. I'll try to rework it. Also, at the top, my intent is to try and show a depth difference between the lip of the shell (the part that hold a shell in place and seals the breach), and the rest of the brass. I suppose my greatest difficulty is the lighting. I just retried it twice.... didn't look so hot. :p

The two biggest helps with getting lighting right is using references and understanding the underlying shapes of what you're drawing. If you understand that a bullet is pretty much a cylinder with a cone on top it becomes easier to find or make the references needed to see how the light interacts with the object in the position and lighting you want. Your current icons have rim lighting (the light source is coming from behind the object and lighting the edges), which is interesting but can make a piece look flat. It might help to pick a more traditional light source position and be consistent with it. It'll probably help with the lip problem.