Character Art

Brilliant!

I can't wait to see any new characters, that'll be awesome.

 

Well I do like the new sprite but two things bother me: His posture, I liked the older one better, and his head looks too big, but other than that, it's nice.

I'd like to know this technique they use as well, I know they've got tutorials but ehh, you have to download them, and Media Player crashes on me, and I think downloading videos is a hassle anyway. At least when YouTube is an option. Any chance for something written on paper or hosted on the web somewhere?

 

The tutorials were really for "uber" style shading. It's come a long way since then, and most of the tutorials are now either out of date, or not very in depth (they tell you what to do but not how to do it). I also don't understand why the original tutorials were never uploaded to YouTube. It's so much more convenient...

 

I thought for a while that it was because of publicity, but you could always set a video to private and give a link, but if they're outdated now, I guess it doesn't really matter. I'll miss the uber shading though, I'd love to see how to do that even if it's no longer relevant to the project... I love your avatar by the way, I used it to learn to use Inkscape when I was trying to grasp it.

 

I have to ask: Vincent, did you shade it (all the images of sonic) yourself (After UBER, I mean)?

If it were me, I'd be pee'd off about how many times I have re-shaded it.

 

Thanks . Yeah it's surprising what you can do with Inkscape if you give it a bit of time and just muck about with things for awhile. I definitely prefer it to GIMP as an open source alternative to professional software. It's nice and simple.

I was wondering about that too Vincent. You'd have to have been working 24/7 to get all that done!

 

I believe he was using Illustrator, but Inkscape is good too, apart form the pen tool.

 

Who? Now I'm getting confused :S.

 

Weren't you implying that Vincent used Inkscape to draw Sonic? If not, never mind.

EDIT:
Clean PNG version of the Inside the Art: Sonic sheet:
http://img560.imageshack.us/img560/9783/in...artsonicpng.png

 

Ahhh, no definitely not :P.

 

I actually hate Inkscape, it doesn't do what I want it to most of the time and it's so simple that I can't have a decent shade tool, I have to use individual shapes for that, with a gradient option that's made of equally basic shapes and I don't like having so much going on at once so I switched to Illustrator 10 which at least has a mesh tool and a blur tool and a functional pen tool that doesn't drive me crazy. (I do prefer Inkscape to GIMP, but I think GIMP is horrible anyway, but I've been using Paint Shop Pro 5-8 for years now and professional grade programs are definitely preferable to freeware. I suggest just pirating some commercial grade programs instead of hoping freeware will give you anything.)

I don't know if I've said this before but I'm using the older version of Tails as a reference instead of the newer version. But since shifts have already been worked out for the artists, I might just use my version to make suggestions to the more skilled artists. It'll probably take me much longer to do anything successful than it will them anyway.

 

Haha, fair enough. I absolutely hate GIMP. After reading all the "GIMP is a great free alternative to Photoshop!" comments around the web I had high hopes... But found that it was messy, slow and needlessly complicated. You're right, shading isn't so easy with Inkscape. It definitely has it's limits. But I find Inkscape's version of the pen tool fine. Once I looked up some guides at least... The one thing that really frustrated me with Inkscape was choosing colours. But other than that I think it's got some potential.

That's probably a good idea. Unless you have the patience to go through hundreds of frames!

(assuming that was ever your intention)

 

I love Inkscape too, but you can't really compare it to GIMP. One is vector, the other is pixel, totally different purposes.

Well, that's not really the program's fault is it? You're just not used to its interface. Coming from CorelDRAW, I had a lot of trouble with Inkscape at first, but now I like it much more than Corel.

In Inkscape, I shade with clipped blurred shapes (it does have a blur option!) and it looks great IMO.

Again, not a good idea to compare them. Have you tried editing a photo in Inkscape? I'm pretty sure that will not go well.

I actually went the other way... I was a huge software pirate in the past but nowadays I use free/open software almost exclusively. The only pirate software I still heavily rely on is Windows, but I'm sure that is about to change because I have no intentions of using Vista or 7.

I think you just got that impression because you were used to Photoshop. Much like when transitioning from CorelDRAW to Inkscape, I had problems going from Photoshop to GIMP initially. But now I can do everything I did before without problems. You have to know that most of the features are there, but they are in different places or work in a slightly different way, so it does take a while to get used to, and to discover new ways to do what you could do before because the overall philosophy of the program is a bit different.

I'm really glad I switched to these programs, I was absolutely tired of pirating software and having to deal with cracks, activations, viruses, spyware... I'm really glad that's all in the past.

 

1. I meant as an alternative to their professional counterparts. For example, I think Inkscape is a more realistic alternative to Illustrator than GIMP is to Photoshop.

2. That sounds like what I should be doing, I'll try that!

3. Maybe I didn't really give it a fair go. But the tools I used just seemed clunky and illogical, and in most cases I didn't feel that it would matter whether I was used to them or not. I'm not going to say that GIMP is terrible. Because if it works for some people, then it must have it's uses . But I don't think it will work for me. I'm far too picky.

4. I've started to find it difficult to feel comfortable pirating. I think I'm past that now. I gave free software a go, but I really do need the professional software. Which is why I just recently bought CS5 Design Premium. I don't think I could spend that much on Inkscape and GIMP were they commercial software (I found it hard to justify myself spending it on Adobe... but I suppose it'll pay for itself).

But if you can live with the free alternatives then I think you're very lucky.

Sorry, I think we strayed a bit from "Character Art" .

 

Ah, I see. I think both are decent substitutes, once you understand their design.

Just to elaborate a bit on what I do, since you want to try it: I draw the basic shape of the object, then I draw the shape of the shadow/highlight on top of it, then I blur this shape and tweak it until the shading/highlighting is like I want, then I finally clone the basic shape of the object being shaded and use that to clip the blurred shape, to prevent the blurring from spilling out of the object.

I see... I could never justify spending more than I spent on the computer itself on a software package... but I don't want to pirate it either, so it really is a good thing that the free alternatives are enough for me ATM.

Not so much I think... =) The new shading on sonic, for example, I'm pretty sure I could replicate it in Inkscape using the method I described above. In fact, I "discovered" that technique while trying to mimic the airbrush style used in classic Sonic artwork.

 

The blurring makes perfect sense. Luckily it's also just one more step to what I've been doing anyway :D. I wonder if that actually was how the new shading style has been achieved?

 

Well since part of that post was in reply to me, I did use the blur function to shade on Inkscape and I hated it. I prefer Illustrator because it does the work for you. You don't have to line up two shapes perfectly (The alignment tool never worked for me) and even though I'm just getting used to Illustrator, it feels more comfortable and actually has a tool for making shades that doesn't involve perfectly lining up shapes with other shap0es for an hour.

I actually don't mind doing some of the frames, though right now I'm just trying to make this one frame look right. As soon as I'm satisfied I have a good interpretation with the outline, I'll post something with an explanation about why I did it like that and I guess the staff can take the suggestion however they want. At least I can say I had a lot of fun doing it.

 

I'm surprised no one has brought this up but what art direction are you going to do Knuckles, considering there are two official art directions.



(I hope it's not the one on the right because that one is fugly.)