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Meatballsub
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 Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2008 6:33 am Post subject: Outline or no? |
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I generally do black outlines for battle sprites, but i'm wondering if I should be getting away from it in order to get a more realistic feel out of my graphics.
Here is a sample, WIP, hero sprite from my next game. Do you think it would look better or more defined with the black outline?
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TwinHamster
♫ Furious souls, burn eternally! ♫
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| Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2008 7:09 am Post subject: |
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It depends on the background that it's placed on.
Right now, it looks fine because no part of the body blends into the gray.
However, it's generally safer to use an outline of some kind (not necessarily required to be black).
The sprite looks pretty nice though. |
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Newbie_Power
Joined: 04 Sep 2006
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| Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2008 7:20 am Post subject: |
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What matters is that your sprite shows up on the background (black outlines are a tool to help accomplish this, actually, but it can still be done without them).
The main thing to consider about sprites is contrast between colors. More contrast in shades will aid greatly in giving your sprite more shape and volume to it, making it more identifiable as a 3D object to the eyes.
Yours: Mine:  
If the contrast between shades are too low, your sprite will look "flat", and the shading won't do much. If you have more contrast than that, your sprites will start to take more form, and will be easier to discern as well.
When it comes to outlining using color instead of black, refer to a segment on this post on Pixelation:
| Quote: | Outlines: another big thing. There's various schools of thought on outlines. If you insist on outlines-all-around, be a sane person and DON'T BREAK THEM. You'll get fat looking sprites like this, bu some people like that. If you break them, you just arrive to selout. What I am doing here is not an amateur technique: I am doing outlines, but they're mostly dictated by where the light source is. So under the arm, darker, on top of the arm, light suggests the outline. What a lot of people miss in this technique is that I do not confuse the line when I go from one shade to another. I don't change colors in the middle of a 'step', I wait until the angle of the outline changes and then make it darker or lighter according to how much light will hit there. This is imperative for doing this sort of outlines correctly and it took me a lot of time to figure out why. It has to do a lot with avoiding single-pixel noise on outlines (awful, selouty) and also avoiding banding. BANDING is a very big issue, as the years go by it seems to me it's pretty much one of the biggest issues ever in pixel art, and it's not yet well explored by anyone. I will attempt to cover it extensively at some point. You don't need to worry about it much at this stage, and especially in such a small sprite where some banding is pretty much unavoidable. If you want to learn more about this however, you can search the forum database for "Banding". There's a lot of threads where I show how to take care of it discretely at least on a basic level.
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Meatballsub
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Meatballsub
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MADSOFT Games
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Meatballsub
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LeRoy_Leo
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| Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2008 6:40 pm Post subject: |
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... Punch Out?
That game looks like it's shaping up to be an instant, OHR classic.
Mini game or title game?
I also want to point out something obvious and make myself look like a complete ass...
How can he expect to hit that guy when he's way over in the upper right corner and his opponent is in the bottom left? :o
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MADSOFT Games
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| Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2008 6:44 pm Post subject: |
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| LeRoy_Leo wrote: |
How can he expect to hit that guy when he's way over in the upper right corner and his opponent is in the bottom left? :o |
lol, maybe he can move the enemy in the battle formation a little closer to the hero, but he didn't do it yet coz it looks like he's just testing it seeing the hero's name is "Hero1" 
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TwinHamster
♫ Furious souls, burn eternally! ♫
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| Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2008 5:16 am Post subject: |
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| LeRoy_Leo wrote: | I also want to point out something obvious and make myself look like a complete ass...
How can he expect to hit that guy when he's way over in the upper right corner and his opponent is in the bottom left? :o |
Psi-Boxing, of course.
The use of boxing gloves to channel PK-Power from your mind towards your opponent's face.
Last edited by TwinHamster on Sun Jul 27, 2008 9:45 am; edited 2 times in total |
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Newbie_Power
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| Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2008 6:38 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | How can he expect to hit that guy when he's way over in the upper right corner and his opponent is in the bottom left? :o |
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN? |
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LeRoy_Leo
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| Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2008 9:42 am Post subject: |
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Boxers don't hit and run. lol
They stand toe to toe and throttle one another. 
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Meatballsub
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LeRoy_Leo
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| Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2008 9:47 am Post subject: |
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I agree, they are turning out great.
The back of the guy who's back is facing us looks a bit strange. The shoulder blades seem to be caving in toward the lower back. Looks like a "V", but it should be more of a wide "U". 
PS: Newbie, that image is HUGE.
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Planning Project Blood Summons, an MMORPG which will incinerate all of the others with it's sheer brilliance...
---msw188 ---
"Seriously James, you keep rolling out the awesome like gingerbread men on a horror-movie assembly line. " |
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