General Project Thread & Feedback

Ladies and Gentlemen, I may have been wrong when I said I couldn't help much with the art. I have completed what is now the first HD animation for this game! Behold! I am the Lord of the Rings!!!



This is the standard ring animation using the three ring sprites from the game (there are four frames, but the angled sprite is flipped).

And now....



My ring animation here is 64 x 64 pixels since we're going with 4x scaling, so this is the ingame resolution.

The details are below, all at ten times the HD-resolution sprite above.

---- The original ring animation at 640 x 640, highly pixelated.

---- My HD ring animation at 640 x 640, vector graphics = no pixelation.

---- Face-on frame at 640 x 640.

---- Angled-right frame at 640 x 640.

---- Edge-on frame at 640 x 640.

---- Angled-left frame at 640 x 640 (this is just the mirrored image of the angled-right frame).


All of this took over half a day to draw because I'm a perfectionist (it's 6:00 AM actually and I haven't slept and I have class in a few hours :-P).

I would really appreciate feedback, I'm sure plenty could be improved. I know that the ring is one of the simplest sprites, but it has to be done. Here's hoping this inspires people to try their hand at art for this project.

By the way, I used Inkscape to draw these and I have the three SVG files if people would like to make edits.

 

I hope that perfectionism doesn't hurt when I tell you it sucks. Where's the shade? Where's the perspective? What's with the inconsistent lighting?

I'm sorry, you sound like you worked your ass off for this, but I think it wasn't worth the effort.

 

I kinda like it, though it looks more like Sonic 1/3's special stage giant rings than the in-game rings.

 

Sorry to hear that you don't like it. I don't claim to be an artist, but if this even helps keep things going then I think it was worth it, and just because I was up late working on it doesn't mean I didn't learn a bunch of things while doing it (I actually had never worked with vector graphics for art before, but I really like them). Well, we can always make changes. :-P

It spans about the same amount of the color palette as the original sprites, although it uses a lot more than five different colors. And I'm not sure what you find so inconsistent about the lighting, if you look at the original sprites they clearly aren't symmetric with respect to the lighting, being brighter on some sides then the others. If you feel it needs more contrast to it than that is understandable and ideally changeable by modifying the color selection a bit and dragging around some of the contours. Fact of life, perspective is challenging and I probably could've done it better.

Please feel free to post your own ring animation, or if you have specific ideas about what regions need what changes, that is always helpful. :-)

About looking like the giant rings, do you think it should be thinner? The scale of the hole is correct with respect to the original sprites despite how pixelated they are, but it does make the ring look fatter.

 

I do think it should be thinner, but besides that, I was thinking that perhaps CG might work better for objects/backgrounds.

If somebody can please make a CG ring to compare...

 

Can't say that I have any experience with CG :-\, but I do think CG would be easier. It would certainly make shading, perspective, and time commitment more manageable than trying to draw frames one contour at a time.

 

I personally think it looks good not as CG, as CG always looks out of place in 2D games. An example: Sonic Blast.

 

It doesn't look out of place in Sonic games at all. In fact, many stuff in the Sonic levels was purposely made to look CG-like (or was real CG, like the corkscrews in Emerald Hill).

Drawing the backgrounds like the already done sprites would make them look more like Yoshi's Island.

 

Ah good point, I'd forgotten about the corkscrews. The way those were rendered was perfect though, no dark shadows or anything.

 

Heres some reference images of enemy's, from sonic jam.

Hope these help someone when you do enemy's.

 

I think that depends on the style we want and the effort we put into it. There's much more room for subtlety at four times the resolution, but if we're still limited to 256 colors then we can only go so far, CG or not. Maybe we should see how things look for both styles. We certainly don't want to have the background and object design make the character sprites seem out of place.

Hopefully I'll get to making an updated (I.e. thinner) ring later. I've already played with the colors a bit and Neo is absolutely right, it needs more contrast and looks better that way. ;-)

 

Just a quick note - for the rings, wouldn't it be better to use Sonic 1's Special Stage Ring as the basis for the vectorised versions rather than the smaller rings? I ask because, proportionately and in terms of shading, isn't that pretty much a heavily upscaled version of Sonic 1 / 2's regular rings already? =P Might be able to get a more accurate look with the shading etc. by basing it on that at first.

Also, if this idea sucks, I apologise - I've been worked to the bone today and I'm probably not thinking coherently.

 

Sorry but these rings need to be at least eight frames. The 4-frame ring animation always bothered me as being a bit jerky; some chaotix-styled rings wouldn't hurt.

 

Funny that you mention CG rings, I have an old animation on my computer of one. I personally think it looks better for a large ring, though.



NOTE: I don't remember where I found these, they just happened to be somewhere on the internet.

 

That would be cool, if it had the correct shape and didn't spin in such a wierd way....

As McAleeCh said, they should look more or less like the Sonic 1 Special Stage rings. That looks more like a cheerio.

 

I think a CG ring would look weird next to the Sonic sprite in vector graphics...

 

I think that's quite an interesting idea, though I think it would probably wind up with a ROM hack and an Emulator hack =P

Also if we are splitting topics, why don't we make a sub-forum so we don't clog up the Engineering & Reverse Engineering section.

 

We're not making a subforum. I don't even know why this topic was split, because it shouldn't have been.

EDIT: In fact, I just merged them back together. Seriously, what the hell was the split about?

 

If you look at the bottom of your animated ring, you'll see that the light source is inconsistent and keeps bobbing up and down.