Badniks & Bosses Art

There's a newer version of Grabber we'll be showing off here shortly, and issues with the shine have been dramatically toned down. I'll leave it up to Vincent and Philosoraptor to decide when they want to present the updated version.

 

I haven't been here in forever, but I've recently caught up with the art style argument and I must say I agree with Tweaker and the others. Don't get me wrong, I think Vincent's art is fantastic but whenever I see this:

The thing that stands out most to me is the Grabber. Why? Because the visible shading style gives it a very warm, inviting look. It makes me really want to play this game because of how beautiful it could look. It makes the world look more colorful, almost like a giant story book. Okay, I don't think my analogies are very good today, but I hope you catch my drift. Honestly, I think visible shading fits better with the original sprite style anyway. While I still think the uber style looks good, this is one of the most promising arts I've seen here:

How can you say that's not perfect as it is?


Ah, I've finally figured out exactly what this shading has that the uber style seems to lack!

Depth.

 

I think the main issue I have with the Balkyrie is that it doesn't really look much like a robot, made of metal. Actually the only thing that does is the non-gradiented grabber. Looks like metal with a simple coating of some glossy paint on it.

 

Look at the original artwork. The wings need to have grey at the back.

 

it's body looks a little too green to me, I'd have colored/shaded it more like this

 

Well, for those of you that care, this is kinda what I think would work for the Balkyrie in terms of smoothing it out a bit, and I don't think much on it needs to be altered. I probably forgot to mess with a few things, or was too lazy to do so, but oh well. I'm just throwing it out there as a thought. The top is the original and the bottom has more steps in it.



As it is, if there isn't a solution found that's simple enough to do, he might have to redraw the stupid thing since his Photoshop file rasterized everything for some unknown reason making it difficult to edit. Anyways, this thing isn't even a priority right now. Yeah it'd be nice to get it finished, but if we can't decide on anything for certain on it we have to put it on the back burner to make room for other stuff that needs to get done first.

PS I didn't add as many steps as I would like to, but I'm being lazy right now because I'm tired. I'm going to bed.

 

You might want to replace the Mecha Sonic raster file with this new one I made. It's more neatly set out so that it's easier to edit.

 

Perhaps we could add some small screws then? I'd like to see some small added features on all of the badniks that give them a more metallic feel, as the original concept art that spawned this project showed us with the giant battle suit.

 

As for the glossy looking grabber versus the gradient shaded one, I would have to go for the gradient one. I agree the glossy one looks more "cheerful". I think it could go either way, but consistency is of great importance. The gradient shaded version fits in nicer with the other accepted sprites. I also think that some more emphasis on making the enemies look more mechanical could help.

I haven't yet got into vector art myself, but here's a quick paint mockup of how I think the grabber could be improved. I think this makes the grabber have a much more mechanical look, by highlighting the edge of the split, to make it look more like a lip of two pieces of metal joining along the body.



EDIT:
The vertical portion of your legs looks too thick relative to the the part above it. In the original, the part above the vertical segment looks more triangular and wider at the top rather than a constant width. The top joint on the front left leg (appearing beneath the neck) looks kinda wrong. It might look better if that top joint was more horizontal. Also, your assembled picture is very different from the genesis version. In the original, the legs don't overlap as much and they extend backwards beyond the end of the body so that a total of 7 legs are fully visible. They also have what appears to be a metal disk that the legs come out from, it kind of looks like a magnetic lift with legs attached. With the original the grabbing legs sticking out lower and further back, I think they appear more threatening ... the original grabber with its thin legs used to remind me of a 555 microchip.

 

One final thing, I like what you've done with the wheel but it looks a bit large relative to the grabber itself.

and.. Since I've just picked at everything in quite a lot of detail I should mention..
I actually think the core of your grabber looks great! please don't take my comments as unconstructive negativity :P`

I'm including my idea (editted using paint.. >_< *begins downloading Illustrator*) ..This has the lip, the smaller wheel, thinner (and longer) vertical portions of legs, the top part of the first leg made horizontal, and different positioning of legs to show the base. Also, the base is a little dark so I lightened up the right edge a little. The only change I didn't do was making the segment above the vertical one wider at the top (like a rounded triangular prism is what I'm picturing) - but I don't want to waste too much time on an mspaint mockup :P`

.. Also, looking at it now, the bottom of the foreground legs should probably be lighter to stand out more from the background legs.

 

Actually, don't worry about the edits, I could use some nice effects if we need to change that sprite, you know Im a "layer expert" If you remember my other works about...well, you know. Even if its a raster.

This indeed, look nice, Nice detail, maybe we should add a few screws there too.


By the way...

 

O teh MG round the back!

Sorry, there have just been about 10 posts complaining about the sharp angled geometry behind the seat and no one has really argued that it looks like the original to have an angled back. For reference, back on pages 24 and 25 there are a bunch of posts to that matter - I personally think it looks out of place with the sharp angles behind the back.

Other than that, it looks fantastic El!

 

Well, new update guys...as you can see, this is a perfected version with higher highlights, but...I need to quote someone first...

He is right, metal shades are just rough transitions of white and black with some gray...so, that's what I did... and rounded the back for lotharstar, first, I didnt liked the egg shape back, but now I think is cool to me, also, Added few screws, and some other fixes, also I added a cut in the center of the ship, It looked cool to me, with some screws there.

So, this is a resized version, the one Im working on is like... A4 size at 300dpi.



Also, just for showing how it looks with eggman (found some old art, no comments about the eggman please, also, as the eggman art was that size, I had to resize manually the eggpod, so, its not the correct size I think)



It seems really nice to me... so... comments guys?

 

I started work on my first piece of vector art (thanks Vincent for the tutes). This is my work in progress of ShellCracker. I still want to fix up the legs (I think they look too fat and too organic looking) and the area under his mouth needs some work but I'm not entirely sure what it should be.. I was thinking of making it layerered kind of like a prawn's tail, but I dunno yet.. I'll see what looks good.

Comments / criticism please ?
(EDIT : sorry, I should've probably put this in the other thread)

 

Awsome start!

Critiques:

The red parts fade to black in yours, they fade to a darker red in the original.

The metal, specially the mouth, need to be lightened,

Keep up the good work!

 

Yeah, what he said, and also, it looks really matte right now. It definitely needs some brighter highlights, though that would probably be fixed by lightening some of the metal spots on the legs and such.

PS I really hate those things.

 

Thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely take it on board. It's far from complete at the moment - looking at the original sprite there's a lot of changes I still want to make. I'm going to change the head piece to make it narrower and have 2 "shoulder" pieces visible. I also want to add some more mechanically realistic joints for the legs and make the rear legs different to the ones in front (I'm going to change it so the front ones come forwards a bit, with the others going out to the side). Thanks again, will post an update when it's closer to complete.

 

Yeah... Even if that's not gonna be seen anyway, perhaps it would be better to leave that part more plain. It doesn't look too good with the perspective issues Hivebrain mentioned.