Badniks & Bosses Art

Guys... You know, if you don't tell us what stuff you're working on, other people might be spending their time in doing the same thing again instead of something different. =\

 

Yeah yeah, forgot that ok?... But I made it like, 3 months ago I think... I thought everybody in staff's knew about the masher...

 

Ok, then; just so that everybody knows, I'm working on the Crawl. Even though I'm not nearly finished, here's what I've got so far (mostly been working on the shield; the rest is kind of for a basic cruddy outline):



You'll notice that the hd version is not as yellow as the original... I'm not sure if I should keep it closer to the same; the yellow seemed too bright and unnatural.

 

That robot crab should have a very HEAVY textured finish to it's metal, as it is such a HEAVY looking character. It would have to be because it is able to hold its ground as it powerfully deflects Sonic with its shield. The Shield should have small, sharp dents as though it has been a bit warn.

 

I think you've started on the wrong foot there NAC. Just throwing gradients around will not yield good results for the art style we're after. I'd recommend checking out the videos Vincent created for doing remasters in Illustrator and restarting from there. Your basic shapes need a lot of reworking anyway -- the star being the perfect example of this. If you're still looking for ideas, by all means check out some of the approved remasters on the database.

 

If anyone actually read his post, they would have found out he said that he was no where near finished.

 

Constructive criticism and direction are best early on before you waste your time working down the wrong path.

 

Although Meph has a point, I condone open acceptance of constructive criticism. However (despite my novice vector-art making status), it just so happens that I only used one gradient, did watch all three of Vincent's videos twice, read the guidelines/tutorials for the way that the style of the art should be done, looked at pretty much all of the art on Inker, and practiced doing some mock-up Sonic art before I started this current badnik. Also, I couldn't find any brushed metal tutorials for Inkscape on the web (I would have done that if I knew how). I wondering if it's just too much blur (it should not disperse the light particles as much?) or something else :: I have an untrained eye. I can do the dents, though. (either a really hard impact or really weak metal shield...but at least it adds realism)

 

Well if you have more experience with another program, like Photoshop, you can use that as well. We don't only ask for vector stuff, so raster can work just fine. In fact, Photoshop can do vector graphics, but they get rasterized when you export it. But yeah, don't limit yourself if you're better with another program. However, if you're just learning things for the first time, you just need to practice. I don't think any of us here just opened up Photoshop or Illustrator or whatever and made some amazing thing the first time they used it.

PS When you say you looked at the art, did you just look at it, or did you download the source files and actually dig around and look at how the people did what they did? I've learned a ton just from looking at how things are done.

 

Just wondering, but how would GIMP fair with doing stuff like this? Or is that too much focused on photo editing rather than graphics?

Just did a quick Google, and I found these freeware programs - including some CADs you might be interested in:

http://users.telenet.be/desi-iii/ - "The most powerful freeware 2D CAD system"
Project Dogwaffle
NVIDIA Gelato (not sure whether it means it's just for rendering, or for creating too)
<a href="http://www.freewarefiles.com/BricksnTiles—_program_18601.html" target="_blank">Bricks'n'Tiles</a> - Architectural texture generator. Creates seamless bricks textures for your 3d models.
Imagelys Picture Styles (free activation after 30 days) -Create seamless textures

Not sure whether any of them are any good for you, but I thought it might've been worth a try.

 

I really don't know enough about GIMP to say. I'm sure if you know how to use that you could get some good results.

 

In my experience, it's acted as essentially a free-and-legal version of Photoshop. If you can get good results out of that, you can probably get them out of GIMP.

 

I personally use gimp for all my graphic stuff (save for adobe illustrator), but I don't believe I've used it enough to give a proper perspective of it as a whole. It's easiest to just think of it as a free, slightly dumbed down version of photoshop, as Clutch said. There's no question that photoshop is better (as far as functionality/capabilities), but most of what you can do in photoshop is, the majority of the time, possible in gimp.

Down particular downside is the lack of support for CMYK, though.

 

Gimp is okay, I still haven't really got the hang of it. I like Paint.NET for most of my artsy stuff.

 

Inkscape is an excellent vector graphics editor that exports natively in SVG. The only problem with it is the UI, which isn't that easy to grasp until you've figured it out.

 

To try to keep the forums as uncluttered as possible, I will be posting my badniks in here from now on. That goes for any questions relating to my past ones too.

Here's my first stab at Ghora (Sol).

 

Try making them more spherical, with the tips of the flame tapering in toward the top center of each. Alternatively, you could try adding in a swirl design something like this:

 

Or something more along the lines of this?



Here is the original sprite for refernce, btw.

 

Yeah, you could try making smaller balls and then have those pumping out the fire, or you could just simply make fireballs like you did up there and refine them. I would shoot for a more rounded fireball instead of the rectangular one like you did and the one that's in the sprite.

 

I just threw this together using my existing images so it looks like crap, but do you like something like this?



Edit: fixed the image a little