Simmone the summoner

[fmunoz]

She is just an edit of the plain mage with another haircut
Not really much to see. But can be used as an example of how to create custom units for heores, a new head is usually all its needed to give them an unique feeling.

[Jetrel]

My new female mages are so much better than my old ones, no?

[fmunoz]

Too murky too many colurs and half transparent pixels at the edges...

[Jetrel]

too many colurs and half transparent pixels at the edges...

Those are good things about them, in my now much sharper knowledge of sprite art. I don't know who started this whole mantra of having a very limited color set, but it has no benefit, outside of a very minor savings in file size/blitting speed.

As for the pixels at the edges, those are antialiasing, a trick used by more advanced sprite-based games like Ragnarok Online. It helps to alleviate the "jaggies" caused by forming a line against the cartesian grid of our pixel system.


Both of those are things that web-taught sprite artists typically decry - but there really is no good reason not to do them, and there are several good reasons to do them.

[fmunoz]

I know, but is harder to made animated frames with all that stuff..
(Limited colour set means that you can redraw and colorize new parts easily and get an uniform feeling)

[Attila]

too many colurs and half transparent pixels at the edges...

Those are good things about them, in my now much sharper knowledge of sprite art. I don't know who started this whole mantra of having a very limited color set, but it has no benefit, outside of a very minor savings in file size/blitting speed.

As for the pixels at the edges, those are antialiasing, a trick used by more advanced sprite-based games like Ragnarok Online. It helps to alleviate the "jaggies" caused by forming a line against the cartesian grid of our pixel system.


Both of those are things that web-taught sprite artists typically decry - but there really is no good reason not to do them, and there are several good reasons to do them.

I like the only having five or six shades of every color. It makes color changes very easy and not particuarly time consuming.

[Jetrel]

I know, but is harder to made animated frames with all that stuff..
(Limited colour set means that you can redraw and colorize new parts easily and get an uniform feeling)

That is true.

Here's part of a secret to make it easier - use the brush tool for coloring large areas, instead of the pencil. Masking with selections is also great to prevent brush runoff.

[Jetrel]

I like the only having five or six shades of every color. It makes color changes very easy and not particuarly time consuming.

I use selections and the "Hue/Saturation" modifier to change colors. It's even faster than using a paint bucket tool.

It is true, beyond any doubt, that my style is heavily dependent on the features of advanced image editors like photoshop or the Gimp, and would be damned near impossible to do in something like Microsoft Paint, or Appleworks, or GraphicConverter. GraphicConverter is a very useful tool for me, but not for the actual task of editing the image.

[Simons Mith]

Forgive my presumption in teaching you artists how to draw, but if you draw your 'master' animations at 4x, 9x or even 16x size and then scale them down, you can have antialiasing and a limited set of colours without extra work. If you draw at a magnification which is a whole-number multiple of the final planned image size, then scale down, The Gimp and other like tools will do an excellent job of anti-aliasing for you. I have a demo 640x480 image scaled down nicely to 32x24 pixels by this method, and it's still recogniseable. It will work with any scale factor, of course, but whole numbers and simple fractions give better results. And you don't have to worry about adding fine detail to the big images, because you know it will disappear when you shrink it down.


Edit Admittedly, sucky programs like Paint would scale by 50% simply byu deleting every alternate row and column of pixels, but all the better tools use error diffusion - and it's the error diffusion as you scale that gives you 'free' antialiasing.

[Darth Fool]

Forgive my presumption in teaching you artists how to draw, but if you draw your 'master' animations at 4x, 9x or even 16x size and then scale them down, you can have antialiasing and a limited set of colours without extra work. If you draw at a magnification which is a whole-number multiple of the final planned image size, then scale down, The Gimp and other like tools will do an excellent job of anti-aliasing for you. I have a demo 640x480 image scaled down nicely to 32x24 pixels by this method, and it's still recogniseable. It will work with any scale factor, of course, but whole numbers and simple fractions give better results. And you don't have to worry about adding fine detail to the big images, because you know it will disappear when you shrink it down.


Edit Admittedly, sucky programs like Paint would scale by 50% simply byu deleting every alternate row and column of pixels, but all the better tools use error diffusion - and it's the error diffusion as you scale that gives you 'free' antialiasing.

While what you say is indeed a quick way to make a well anti-aliased image, the final product often still benefits from single pixel manipulation in the desired scale. This is especially true on smaller graphics such as the 72x72 used in the unit graphics.

[allefant]

I use selections and the "Hue/Saturation" modifier to change colors. It's even faster than using a paint bucket tool.

You should write a tutorial about your style/technique, it seems to be different (and better) than other pixelling tutorials I've seen (which say to use no alpha and few shades).

[Dave]

Forgive my presumption in teaching you artists how to draw, but if you draw your 'master' animations at 4x, 9x or even 16x size and then scale them down, you can have antialiasing and a limited set of colours without extra work.

Ermm...wouldn't drawing larger images be extra work in itself?

[allefant]

I guess, drawing 16 times bigger images implies they are vector art.

Simons Mith: Do you have an example of such a sprite downscaled to Wesnoth size? I'm interested in how it would look..

Something else I have been wondering, would it be possible to render 3D units into pixel-art sizes, and have them look good?

[Attila]

Something else I have been wondering, would it be possible to render 3D units into pixel-art sizes, and have them look good?

I'm pretty sure that's what they tried to do with starcraft, the result a ok, not great.

[Disto]

Trying to do it at 16* with animations would mean that a huge amount of editing would be needed as it would be all jagged and different as the resizing it would make it look bad, 2* maybe, 4* possible, but nothing bigger, and it would take a huge amount of time.