[ICEknight]

Here's the original artwork you might want to base the beak and feet's shapes on.

This post has been edited by ICEknight: 09 April 2010 - 10:36 AM

[Covarr]

Extreme-Giga, you've completely completely ignored what Vincent suggested for you:

-Ditch the gradient shading, only manual shading is allowed on Character Art.
-Post your art at the original 4X in-game resolution. (If you use Illustrator scale down to 100% zoom, matching the size of original frame)

You're still using gradients. You're still posting at the wrong size. Please fix these before posting more WIP images.

Look closer. The latest image does NOT have gradients, merely a ton of shades bunched together near the shine on his head. HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I'm AN IDIOT

This post has been edited by Covarr: 09 April 2010 - 08:39 PM

[Canned Karma]

The shading on the head was not was I was referring to. While I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, I still see gradients in the white to blue transition in the eyes and again in the beak. Even when the image is blown up I can't see even small color steps in those areas.

[Vincent]

We've set up the Contribution Guidelines and the Flicky example to let artists create usable art assets for S2HD, so it is very important that before contributing you have an in-depth read of those!
Reading those before contributing will save lots of time otherwise spent by redrawing!

The Hawk is using gradients on beak, eyes and pupils, and therefore needs to be replaced by manual shading.
In game resolution, the rough shades will blend in and be perfectly manageable for animation purpose or new shape additions.

So, again, just remove the gradients and resize your source!!

[Extreme-Giga]

Sorry about earlier, so I've now completely ditched all gradients, I have scaled the image to 4X of the original, the reason why I posted the images so big was so that all of you could analyse it better, and see detail more clearly. (oh and the beak on the last image was a placeholder.)

[ICEknight]

Flicky's feet don't fit the eagle much, you can see in the artwork they're supposed to be different.

[Vincent]

Suggested (& dirty)mockup:

This post has been edited by Vincent: 11 April 2010 - 09:12 AM

[The Growler]

*sigh*, why do people always forget to do a comparison between the original sprite and the updated one?

d'oh, it's a transparent png, so you can't see much of the outline anyway.



Extreme-Giga's


Vincent's

This post has been edited by The Growler: 11 April 2010 - 11:08 AM

[steveswede]

I lovin the look of this mockup.

[Hamneggs]

I lovin the look of this mockup.

Yeah other than the fact that he is a tad, um, shiny. I think that the shape and form of vincent's is indeed better than extreme-giga's but E.G.'s shading actually is more inline with Ricky and Flicky. A combination of the two could make quick work of finalizing this asset.

[zemulii]

Since there hasn't been much action around here lately...

Well I've been trying to get to grips with Illustrator. So I thought it would be good practice to start by trying to vectorize my chicken.

This is what I've got so far...



Concept:

I'd rather not post it at game size just yet as it's reeeeally small and at that size the pixels look terrible (seems to work better when I scale it down in Photoshop... Illustrator makes it too sharp or something and it actually loses detail...) so I guess there's a lot of optimisation to be done there. It's been a lot more difficult than I thought it would be but that's probably just due to my inexperience. Anyway it's obviously unfinished.

One thing that irritates me is that when I use clipping masks to shade (don't know if that's the usual way, but it seems to work) the edges look terrible. That is until I use "save for web" and it seems the output is a lot higher quality. But when I'm working on the file, I can see the colour underneath on the edge (know what I mean?) and it's pretty off-putting. Is there any way I can have a higher quality "preview" while I'm working? Little things like that really make my blood boil :P.

This post has been edited by zemulii: 15 April 2010 - 08:00 AM

[Vincent]

To preview the actual pixel aspect, Illustrator has a very handy option called pixel preview mode. (view-->pixel preview)

My AI setup method:

-Add a light green color BG layer and lock it.
-Add a new layer to place both concepts and original frame, then lock it.
-Add a new layer and put there all your vector work.
-Be sure your vector work at 100% zoom is the exact same size as the original frame.
-Add new shapes on top of the others instead of nasty clipping masks.
-Enable pixel preview to adjust them to look pixel perfect (zoom back to 100% to give it a final check)

That's it.

[zemulii]

To preview the actual pixel aspect, Illustrator has a very handy option called pixel preview mode. (view-->pixel preview)

My AI setup method:

-Add a light green color BG layer and lock it.
-Add a new layer to place both concepts and original frame, then lock it.
-Add a new layer and put there all your vector work.
-Be sure your vector work at 100% zoom is the exact same size as the original frame.
-Add new shapes on top of the others instead of nasty clipping masks.
-Enable pixel preview to adjust them to look pixel perfect (zoom back to 100% to give it a final check)

That's it.

Up to the bit about clipping masks, that's exactly what I've been doing actually (apart from using a blueish-turqouise background). Yeah the clipping masks... I have been wondering about them. The only thing is... I obssess with getting all the edges to line up perfectly and when I add shades, it was the only way I could find to keep them within the bounds of the original shape without too much hassle. They do look tacky when you view "outlines" but I can look past that at least. Is there another way to get everything to line up perfectly? I know I'm probably being a bit pedantic about it all... especially considering minor things like that won't be seen at it's actual size.

I intend to do all my pixel perfect adjustments when/if it gets to the stage that I can consider it up to scratch. So far it's just practice/experimentation, as I haven't really decided on how I'm going to get the shading done just yet. I've read all the tutorials, but I'm still not totally comfortable with working in vector. So I'll just see how I go .

This post has been edited by zemulii: 15 April 2010 - 09:39 AM

[Volpino]

I hope this isn't entirely off-topic but I thought it would best be placed here...



Even though up close it looks like a hastily-drawn example up close, I wanted to know, is there anyone working on Tails? Is this going to be made into his final sprite if not?

This post has been edited by Volpino: 20 April 2010 - 03:31 PM

[Gambit]

At the moment nobody is working on Tails (or Knuckles) because Sonic is still being polished up and everyone else is working on their own thing. As for whether or not that sprite is going to be the final or not I can't tell you for certain since I'm not in charge of the character art, but I have a feeling it'll change some. I'm sure Vincent will be along soon to tell you more.