Badniks & Bosses Art

This is something that should probably be figured out before too much longer, then. I have always been partial to hand drawn animation, and think it can look beautiful in HD if done right.

Of course, I do really like how the fire and lava looks in NSMB Wii. If you look at the fire at the very beginning, before he enters the castle, I think that look could work for the Ghora, and seems to be a good mixture of MaximusDM's and my own fireball.



I'm interested to know what everyone else thinks on this subject though.

 

With the randomness of fire, yours just seems so stationary. I think you need to throw in random crackles that just rise from the bottom and move upward. Not sure if we are following the same frame count of the original game, but doing that is going to make it look pretty rough. But at the same time, you want to take into account making it functional as a moving hit box that the player can recognize. Something as mine I don't think it functions as that. It is just to give the impression of fire in motion. And to show the way it trails a bit when in motion. Which was something mentioned in a previous post. You aren't going to achieve that unless there are more frames added. The actual sprite in the game was so cheesy I think.

 

We aren't following the same frame count as the original game, thankfully, so there's no need to worry about that. You would need a ton of frames to have a trail and keep it looking good, though.

The hitbox thing would definitely be a problem with my current design, and is something I didn't consider. Yours would be better for that, but then I feel the flames would need to have more substance, they seem really thin.

 

So why hasn' t this been tried? It is easily the best looking fireball I've seen...

 

It looks like a Mario fireball.

 

Actually, the mario fireball looks better than that - I still don't see why we're not using this (or just the look of this, if no-one likes the idea of having a Mario fireball in a Sonic game):

Perhaps someone could redesign this so the flames go upwards instead of in a ball? Use this as a basis for your own fireball creation, if you like.

 

Basically like this?

 

Animate this exact image, and you're onto a winner.

Sorry to the other peeps that attempted the flames on the orbinaut type badnik, but the colours in those animated flame images made me want to vomit. Although the 3D render was the best out of the lot, Subsubstantive has got the colours spot on in this image. If you can animate this fireball I'm referring to, you will have the perfect fireball.

 

It might be. The only thing that I could say is important with fire being detailed like this is to have a fire trail affected by the air with the direction the fireball is going.

Could something be done like if the fireball was layered with different flame sprites on top of each other so it would trail?

 

Well, I mean the shape. It looks like the fireballs in (I think) SMB1.

 

So, I tried to do a real quick mock-up of Ghora with the Mario flames circling him in flash and was then going to export the animation as an APNG. But, for some god damn reason the flame symbol won't remain animated once exported, so it was just static flames circling him. So... I just exported it as a flash movie file. Sorry if this causes any problems, hopefully it works.

Ghora.swf - 0.04MB

 

At this level of detail the reflections on the body almost have to correspond with the flames.

 

I like the actual flame, but something about that flash file is so jerky that I can't really give a proper critique of it. But I'd assume that is just a mock-up because the flame you made is the same one from the Mario picture with the top stretched out. Correct?

 

Yes it's just a mock-up intended to help people more talented than myself.

 

Is this anything close to whats needed?


few frames



all frames

 

I'm liking that one a lot! Nice job.

 

Thanks! I had to interpolate between the first and last frames to get it to loop though.

 

I think as awesome as that is I think the flame is too huge if it was actual in motion the way the sprite was originally. The original is more of a ugly rectangle. My concern is the hit box of the attack for the player being misleading. But again, I think its awesome the way it is and I wouldn't change it.

 

I have to agree. While the fireball sigma2x posted is incredibly good looking, the cartoony feel subsubstantive posted is spot on for the art style we're after. Let's keep working on it from that angle.