The Resource WIP Thread 3

I'm back again, with the first iteration of my Final Fantasy styled mountain tiles. I'm not sure how I feel about the shaping and the center seems a bit off but they do at least look more or less like mountains.
Seems like I'm saying this all the time, but feedback is appreciated :)

Personally I think peaks like that look strange without a bit of snow on top, but I might be biased. They do need some way of making the tip stand out just a touch more from the rest. The map tiles are really starting to come together.

@Sharm My god you were so right about making the tips stand out. I didn't go for snow for the lower peaks since I want to eventually add larger peaks to overlay on top which will have snow, but just getting a bit of an outline in to the peaks did lot.
Side note I've found that I need to use a brown ground tile underneath the mountain body since otherwise the grass bleeds through on like two pixels and it's super annoying visually.

Hey guys! ^_^ I haven't been on in a while, but im still practicing my pixel art! Today i made some trees with all four season, and I think i did a great job, but i wanted to know what you guys thought too!( I also included the palette im using. I wont post a link to where i got it, in case its not ok, but its called Endesga if you wanna google it) I would love any critique or feed back, I want to keep improving!Also, Special Thanks to @taarna23 !

@KaBlooZio You, my friend seem to have mastered drawing trees, which is something I find incredibly difficult so props there. :)
I really like the style you're using, feels like it would fit right in with something like the Time Fantasy tiles which is pretty sweet all things considered.

@KaBlooZio your winter tree... sorry if I have to notice but.... usually most of the time in winter only the branches are covered with a layer of snow as usually the leaves are gone and the sun melts a wee bit that snow in time.

@shadefoundry - :LZSproud: Thank you! Well, I dont know about "mastered", but its the first batch of nice looking trees that ive done that im actually satisfied with, at least! I think once I can paint trees, like what Celianna can do, I'd say ive mastered them. lol But for now, Im happy with my progress! You keep it up too, Ive been practicing for quite some time now. :)

@Marquise* - No your right, I had thought about that earlier too, Im gunna make a scraggly leafless snowed over tree too at some point. Thanks for pointing that out :).

Well, first off, you're right about these being good. Enjoy your triumph but be open to improvement. There's always room for it.

In this case your clumping of same pixels is strange, you've got a lot of stray pixels, and you're over anti-aliasing. I think these all stem from the same problem, where you're worried too much about the highlights and the darks being right next to each other. This is one reason why it's good to place the big important highlights and shades first and clean up later, so you're not accidentally pillow shading anything. It's fine to not mathematically anti-alias the lines until they have exactly two spots of transition or whatever. Sometimes things are close, sometimes big open spaces are okay, you've got to look at how each part works as a whole.

Dithering can be used to blur things a bit, almost like adding more colors when there are none, but remember that it always adds texture. You need to look out for things like how well you can tell what something is and if the texture is appropriate for what you're making, if you're accidentally adding in a pattern or making implied lines. In very small things it needs to be abandoned entirely. Dithering often makes it hard to tell what's what, especially for small things. Something else to keep in mind, dithering is often considered a beginner's tool, kind of like the dodge and burn in photoshop. It's really quite hated by some. It can be done right if used sparingly, but among pros it's considered so lazy that it's often on people's error list, as if dithering was as bad a pillow shading. Whether or not you are determined to use it, you should at least tone it down for this one.

@KaBlooZio :3 I had seen some that way thought when snow fell above knees. It doesn't stay long but if you have a map of impassable snow bank and bits about to be impassable because those trees dumps their content to a road in a timed map or something... It can be used! LOL I think in Canada we all had one day of a branch dropping us up a big bucket of snow when we played outside after even the cars disappeared under snow!

I have returned with more overworld tiles! This time I'm trying to tackle making the landmass feel less square.
Let me know how I did so far, and as always all feedback is appreciated :)

@Sharm - Thank you very much Sharm! I always appreciate your critique and advice :) . To be honest, i think anti-aliasing is something im still struggling with doing right, im either doing too much like here or not enough :/ , and these being so small, 16x16, I find it difficult to avoid dithering, but I agree with what you said. And thanks again, I intend to post an improved version sometime soon using using your feedback! :)

@shadefoundry You've got the shape of it right, I think, so that part is looking very good. The double outline is not a good way to go. Right now because of a quirk of the colors you used it's got this strange double image thing that it's doing, like the second outline is actually a strange problem with the monitor it's being displayed on or something. It's creating a blur, but not in a good way, in a way that's uncomfortable to look at. That's hiding the problems of doing a second outline all 1:1 like that and it would show up more once you change colors. Think about what you're representing with that outline and what characteristics that thing is going to have. Is it the beach? Beaches aren't uniform, in some places they're thick and some they almost don't exist. Is it grass right up next to the edge? What would the edge of grass look like then? What colors would best show what you're trying to represent? I realize that some of these problems are from the way you're doing the corners since the more dynamic you make the edge itself, the harder it is to hide how square the corners are, but I think there's a better compromise to be found if you work at it.

@KaBlooZio I think you'll be able to get the hang of it with practice. Hmm, maybe this would help. When I was first learning pixel art, specifically how anti-aliasing worked, I would draw something in a program with the anti-aliasing turned on, like a line or a circle or squiggle, and just study it to see how it made things look smooth without making it also look thicker. I noticed that parts of this are because of the shade variation in both the inside and outside of the line, which you can't always do in pixel art due to transparency, so that part is not necessarily useful right now. For this particular problem I think you need to ignore the inside of the line's shading (at least at first). If it helps, draw the line anti-aliased and then again exactly the same but without anti-aliasing, so you get a good look at just the exterior anti-aliasing, where and how much shading each segment gets. You could even reduce the colors so you can see it more clearly.
Wow, I really don't get this! There's so much less room to put any dithering in!

Something that I've noticed is that dithering is really useful in hiding problems. Because of this people get the incorrect idea that putting in dithering is solving a problem that they can't define. If the edge between colors is too hard you've either put the shadow (or highlight or whatever) in the wrong place or you've chosen the wrong colors.

Like I said, sometimes it's the right choice, but I think you'll improve faster as a pixel artist if you learn how to make a piece work without it first and then strategically add it back in.

Hello! I was bored tonight, so I took another stab at my castle's stairs. Not only did I fix them- they were off mathematically- but I also added a tiny bit of shading to make them pop! The room visible through the hole is actually placed accurately- it's what the next floor would really look like- and the stairs are such that they would actually connect to the stairs on the floor below, to the pixel! None of that, however, is very important. I want to know how they look!

The front facing ones are fine, but the left/right set is too small for the character. The tops of the stairs should have the same number of pixels of depth or more than the tops of the stairs going the other way. You're still seeing the tops. Any foreshortening that might be happening due to the viewing angle would only be obvious on the front facing stair.

It may not look like it, but the stairs on both the left/right and up/down staircases are exactly the same size in both width and depth- in fact the left/right one was made by turning the other one 90 degrees. The ones going left/right only seem smaller, because you can't see the kickplate. Plus, I don't actually use any foreshortening in my project right now- everything is it's actual size, so I don't see what you mean there, exactly.

I tinkered with it, and found that by increasing the width of the light beige line on the left/right stairs to two pixels, it helps fix the optical illusion that they're narrower.

Huh? This isn't a flattened out origami project, you will be hiding something somewhere due to perspective. I don't think you understand what foreshortening means. It's an element of perspective not size. You have lots of foreshortening in your project.

The trouble with the stairs is not an optical illusion, the front stair's top is 4 pixels, the side one is 3. But, because of the angle of the standard RPG 3/4ths orthogonal projection the depth of the stairs in the front perspective should physically be slightly less pixels deep than the stairs going left to right. 3/4ths isn't a lot of change so the difference won't be huge, only .25 of a pixel less for every one pixel, so most of the time you can get away with it being exactly the same and no one would notice, but making it actually shallower makes the incorrect perspective stand out like a sore thumb. To put it another way, one direction has 2 stairs for every tile, the other direction has 4. That's not right, the surface areas don't match up.

Even if that wasn't the case, if you just look at your character in comparison to the stairs going left right you can see that there's not enough room for his feet on the treds. It's too small.

Sorry to change the subject, but please don't double post. It hadn't been long since your first post and no one had replied yet, you could have edited your last one without any troubles. I know you worry that I'd miss out on something you added before my reply but that's on me to be aware of, not you. I'll merge your post for you.

Ah, sorry for the double post. I'm usually pretty good at not doing that, but I was in a hurry this morning and didn't really think about it. Plus, I've been communicating mostly in PMs lately, and there's no editing there. I've been trained by them to make a second post when I need to add something, unfortunately.

...Isn't foreshortening the idea of making something farther smaller, and closer, larger? That's what I meant. In my project, everything is currently the same size regardless of its distance to the viewer.

The dark line on the right/left staircase is actually part of the stair, not merely its edge, or some border between the two. Here, I colored in half of the stairs so you can see the divide easier. And because they're actually 4 pixels wide, that means they're the same width as the man's feet, which is pretty common from what I've seen. Besides, the man is just a placeholder template for my sprite anatomy, and is subject to change.



...That being said though, if I have to argue how wide the design is, it's probably not an effective design. How can I make it more clear that the stairs are actually 4 pixels deep?

You're getting caught up in technicalities that don't matter and ignoring the ones that do. Let it go and just make the stairs wider! People don't care if it's technically one way or another if it looks wrong, it still will be wrong to them, but they'll forgive a lot of inaccuracies if it looks right. But if you're stuck on this, consider it this way. If the outline of the stairs counts towards the stair depth in the left/right staircase then it counts that way on the front stairs. That makes the front stairs 5 pixels, not 4. You can pick the rules you're going by with regards to your style, but you need to be consistent with them through the whole game.

No, that's not what foreshortening means. That's just one element of creating the illusion perspective, the exact one that you're ignoring when working in an orthogonal projection. Foreshortening is when you "reduce or distort (parts of a represented object that are not parallel to the picture plane) in order to convey the illusion of three-dimensional space as perceived by the human eye: often done according to the rules of perspective." For example, when an arm is down by someone's side, you see a long vaguely rectangular shape, but when they point their hand at you, your perspective of that arm shifts, and 2-dimensionally the arm changes shape from a rectangle to a circle, and most of its surface area is obscured from view. When you turn the stairs from the front view to the side view, foreshortening is why you can't see the rise of the steps anymore. It's a fundamental element of working in 2D that can't be gotten away from, no matter what perspective you're working in.

Ah, you do this to me every time. I point out an art principle that you're missing, you argue for ages, you finally try what I suggest and you like my suggestion better. I had hoped that I'd proved my expertise and earned your trust by now, but it always turns into a battle to get you to open your eyes to outside possibilities. I'm done. Try it or don't, I'm not going to argue my point anymore.

Sorry for frustrating you, really. I'm an arguer; I argue my point, and listen to yours, until I feel both sides understand each other.. doesn't always work, or even help, but it's the way I am. I knew the sideways stairs looked narrower from the first moment you said it, I just thought perhaps.. doesn't matter. I do trust you, and value your expertise greatly. I completely, sincerely apologize.

@Sharm You were right about the double outline being problematic once I changed the color, so I stole drew heavy influence from the overworld tiles in Final Fantasy 5 . The result is a darker outline on the bottom half of the landmass, with only a single outline along the top half. It's a small change but I think it looks a lot better, although I'm not sure if I should make that darker outline thicker or at least a bit more varied/less consistent.
On a related note, I've got plans to eventually have a bit of variance in the edges, maybe something like 3 or 4 different tiles that all look a bit different to break up the uniformity that they have at the moment.

Let me know what you think, and thanks for all the advice you've provided me with so far :)

Edit: Image shows up now.