The Resource WIP Thread 3

I couldn't find any wood log tile that suit my need, so I created my own tiles: a common one and a mossy version of it.

@hiddenone Those are actually really nice, I'm a fan :). The only downside that I can see is that they seem a bit tall and realistic to work well with the RTP, although that may just be me noticing how cartoonishly large the tiles on B - D can be. Seriously, those dolls are larger than most small children o_o.

Hey guys, I believe this is the proper forum to post this in.

I've created my first sprite for a RWBY themed game I'm developing. I'm hoping to get some feedback on how I did and any tips for improvement. The attached file has my attempt to turn the picture I've linked below as my base model into a sprite. I took it a step further to add the three other basic color schemes seen in the show thus far. Please let me know what you think!

Base Model: Atlas Soldier - (The color scheme on that sleek armor is simply incredible in my opinion).

@Acturis I've merged your post into this one, the best place to get feedback on resources you are working on.

@mlogan Thanks for the assist!

Soooo, this happened. I'm not even sure what I'll use it for. It's just so big!



@Acturis The structure looks good, but the color choices are off. For some colors like blue and yellow the contrast between shades is great, maybe a little too strong even, but the red and greys are very close together and make it look flat and soft. Lots of contrast makes metal look shiny. The white bits are too harsh and random, they make everything hard to understand. When translating an existing design into a smaller size you have to make a few very hard choices. Sometimes you just have to throw out a lot design elements that seem important because there's just not enough room to make it work. Sometimes, if the tiny thing is important enough to the design, you have to make it way bigger and cartoony to get it to make sense. The bases for the newer RPG Makers are especially difficult to work with for costuming, since the head takes up most of the sprite. There's so little room to work with. For something this small and squashed you have to just simplify everything to a high degree. Most of the design will not work on a sprite. The sword(?) on the back looks out of place, like an image that was cut from something else, color reduced, and rotated to fit. It doesn't look like pixel art and clashes with the rest. You'll have to take out all the extra shades and clean up some of the randomness if you want it to look like it belongs. As far as I can tell the placement of the shading is working alright. Hard to say with the color choices the way they are. Keep in mind that our brains interpret color contextually, so you can do things like use a medium grey and still have it look white or color in a deep dark line with a light grey and still have it look dark if the surrounding are suited for it.

@Sharm ;giant bouncer?

The new style of sprite I'm working with. Trying to transition from doing MV edits to something more original. Mainly concerned about shading. Any other advice would be most welcome...especially about how to sprite hair!

I can't put my finger on it, but it looks like it might be a bit stiff in moving. Otherwise, I think it's a great start.

@Bradok I've merged your thread with our Resource WIP thread.

Been playing with tile set making. Tried to make a theater, @Sharm recommended to bring the stairs out more - and to post it here.

Any opinions on how to improve this would be helpful.

Awwwww Puppies... and awwww Kitties!!! Huh? Birdies?

Welcome! That's not what I meant when I said bring the stairs out, I was talking about the mapping, but I really love the prettier staircase.

It looks like you're struggling a lot with understanding the RPG perspective that you're working with here. Not surprising, it's a really difficult one, which causes a problem for a lot of artists. I personally took a very long time and lots of explaining and made lots of tiles before it finally clicked. Here's some resources that might help. This style guide is for the Liberated Pixel Cup, but it explains a few things in simple terms and I found the 3D model images extremely helpful in having a few things finally make sense. Here's a really nice and short thread on TIGSource that has a few methods of short cutting your way into something that looks mostly right (neither is right, but it's closer). These two by Cyangmou are a little technical, but the visuals are great for understanding how 3D works in 2D. I find this method extremely useful in figuring why something isn't working and fixing it. My method of doing proportions is slightly different than any of the examples, but seeing it this way made me finally understand why it's called 3/4th's perspective and allowed me to figure out my own path.

I hope you don't mind me doing an edit. It's not really so much of an attempt to improve, it's really more just me trying to sort out what's going on with the perspective. There's a little lighting too, because that helps me sort out where things are and what they might represent and your version doesn't seem to have a consistent light source. I moved a few things around a little bit to show how you have to use changes in positioning to indicate the correct depth of something. The pillars in particular are problematic, since they show the tops but don't take up any floor space. They're a lot like the stairs on that point. I couldn't quite make sense of the top wall, just too many things competing to exist in the same space, but I tried to fix it up a little.



So, things to note. Things that go on the floor need to take up space on the floor. That means that things like stairs, columns, archways, and other such things might be attached to the wall, but they also need to stick out the appropriate distance. If they don't you lose the illusion of depth, which is already difficult to show in this perspective. To be honest, you don't have to be very accurate with stairs. It's annoying to go up and down long stairs in game, so players will give you a lot more leeway there. Just as long as it sticks out a little bit you can usually get away with it being short. If a wall or column or cliff face is three tiles high, that means the things that are supposed to be the same height will also be three tiles high. This is why I moved the wall up, and why the stage curtain is so much shorter (probably still not short enough). To match the height of the columns the wall face and curtain plus transom length needed to be only 3 tiles. If you wanted to map it differently, have the stage not stick out at all, then you'd need to take the top parts off the column and adjust a few other things. Personally, I think the stage looks better sticking out a bit. What else. Oh, right. I changed a bunch of the shading around, making a light top and a really bright corner edge to indicate the traditional top and a bit front facing light source. This means pretty much all of the shadows are incorrect. Sorry. Some of the choices I made were stylistic, so don't feel the need to copy exactly, but hopefully it gives you a better understanding of how color can indicate form. Word of warning, I was really rough about the "fixes" for the light source and I didn't do all of them. You might end up doing something else and I didn't want to spend too much time on something that didn't matter. (At that point. I have a bad habit of spending time on things that will be deleted.) Um, changed the spindles to be round instead of flat. Changed the lighting on the stair rail. A really small but important change was to lengthen the top highlight from the middle floor tile just slightly. The original has an implied line going on, really making it seem like that's exactly where the tile line is.

I hope you find it helpful and that I didn't overstep. This is a great start, I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

@Sharm That looks really nice. Though I will have to do a bit of work on the stairs, since I'm trying to keep as much tiles as I can on the "floor" sheets.
So the railings are like this:

So I don't know if it would be better to have all the stair stuff on the B,C,D,etc. layers - since I doubt I'm going to have any tiles resting on stairs.

Personally I split it up, putting the rails on B-E and keeping the steps on the A tiles. I think you're going to run into a lot of trouble with keeping everything on the A sheets as much as possible. A5 doesn't have a lot of room, and the other A tiles have very specific uses that they're best for. Yeah, do what you can if it works on A1-4, but don't be afraid to use the B-E sheets and save the A5 tiles for things that you want to layer over. The B-E sheets are big and there are lots of them, it takes a lot of stuff to fill them up. You're also not just restricted to using one A-E set at a time, you can swap sheets or the whole thing if you're using a different map. With a little planning you won't run out of room, so just make it however looks the best.

If you're using Ace you can also do a few tricks to get things to layer even on the B-E sheets. The easiest is to just make an event with the graphic you want on top of the other. It gets resource intensive if you have a lot of events on one map, but it works. Put the tiles that you want to do this with on the E sheet, that way it will automatically show up as an option when you're making an event. The other thing you can do is to add a pre-layered graphic to the B-E tiles. An example of this is the tree canopy tiles in the default graphics.

Having events as tiles is a good thing to note, since stuff like signs - and books would be events anyway.
But I gave it some thought and that I do think trying to put the ground floor stuff in A is good, because the smaller size helps restrict me from making too much stuff. And just trying to be smart with my resources.

Mainly a pallet update.

Patched the theater up a bit. I feel like its a lot better now.

Though now I need to find the best way to lay out a tile sheet.

The wood tiling is pretty bad... it's perfectly straight! Go to an actual theater and you'll notice the tiling is not like that at all...

Wanted to show how much the criticism helped :)

That does look better. Where is your light source?

Edit: Oops, ninja'd by Rukiri! The improvement is great. You always had skills. I think the reduction of color count made a huge difference.