General Project Thread & Feedback

No, I haven't got to it because I only just figured it out today and spent the past eight hours or so perfecting the three frames of the One Ring. My concern is of course the difficulty in trying to get something out of nothing. I have no doubt at this point that this is the best starting place for any object (at least for my skill level it's the best), but there may still be significant edits necessary to improve more complex objects and the details need to be added manually. This is especially true if we want sprites to have more shades of color because this method won't interpolate to add shades that aren't there (or if it can I haven't figured out how to do it yet).

Anyway, barring further suggestions, I think we can consider the ring mappings complete. And that only took two days! :-D

EDIT: Whoops, that was wayyyyy too presumptuous, we of course need to give CG a chance. Sorry for my big mouth...

 

Just a request, and only if it can be done easily... Could do make a big ring (x4) object as well, please?

Would come in handy in case somebody wants to start with Sonic 1...

 

One quick suggestion—it might be a better idea to base the big ring off the Sonic 3 variant rather than the Sonic 1 version. That might make it easier to tell the difference between the two.

 

Here is a 256 x 256 version for the large ring. I re-rendered this from the vector format; it's not a cheap raster scaling. You'll notice of course things look a little less perfect now (I think the face-on frame needs some tweaking), but this is perhaps a guideline of what we can expect from this method. I did not make any adjustments to the form since the smaller version, so it is possible that I could make some changes to the details and improve it slightly, but I won't worry too much about doing that at this moment.

 

I was on SSRG today, and read a post (I think it was muteKi, not sure) on a topic about ProSonic/FreeRadical, and it mentione how this would be a good test for the engine.
Anyway, I would love to see that happen. It is sort of a community project as a lot of members are involved, so why not? I would love to see this all come to one great game.

 

I removed the outline. The whole things in a photoshop psd, if anyone wants to toy with it.




Psd file here

 

I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to when you say outlines. If you mean that the stark contrast between the different colors looks like it's outlining the layers, then the solution to that is probably to add more shades (a challenging and time-consuming solution, but this isn't supposed to be easy). If you're referring to the outline that seems to occur when you put the animation on a bright background, that will not be present in the game as I mentioned previously. I do want to point out that for such a large object the four-frame animation looks more awkward than for the regular sized rings, but since we can't have more than four frames for it that can't be remedied.

 

Here is what I think ICEknight meant:



EDIT: Although, It looks better as a normal ring. =/

 

Excellent work with the ring Blue Streak

 

There's an extra edge-on frame and face-on frame in your reconstituted GIF I think, Hitaxas. :-P And yeah, don't worry about that black line on the inside and outside. I swear that is it due to the GIF format somehow and is not in the original frames. Here are the PNGs I rendered directly from the vector format and used to make the animation. As you can see (if you click the thumbnails they should appear on white) there are no outlines. I've also made some minor improvements in shape for these frames over the previous animation and the new animation is below. You'll notice things are slightly rounder I think. :-)

 

Yeah there was. Thanks for pointing that out. Also, yeah the outline seems to be the file format, yours makes black, mine makes white...

I added more shade and some blurring for a more 3d effect:

 

The added goldness with the rings is great, but I think it needs a bit more. Observe the rings in Knuckle's Chaotix.

 

You're right about that.

Actually, I've just had a look at Taxman's rings in Retro Sonic. Not only are they golder, but he has also increased the speed at which they rotate, so the rotation looks a lot smoother.

EDIT: Silly me, it looks smoother because the rings in Chaotix have more frames.

 

Sped up animation and made the ring a bit more "gold":

 

Excellent! How about we see what it's like shrunk down to size, please?

 

I personally think that's a bit too golden, but it would be nice to have a way to test the colors in an actual environment.

 

So today it was Vincent's birthday and no one noticed D:

Happy birthay, good artist :D

 

<!--quoteo(post=188628:date=Apr 16 2008, 10:58 AM:name=Blue Streak)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Blue Streak @ Apr 16 2008, 10:58 AM) [/quote]
I think this is the best one so far.

It would be nice if it could be improved without blurring it, but I don't think it should be touched too much. =\


PS: Happy birthday, Vincent.

 

I did notice, I sent him a PM this morning actually.
But indeed, Happy Birthday Vincent!

I can see why people might like to add some blur because the ring has such a wide contrast for only a few shades of color. Sonic's sprites don't need blurring because the contrast is much less intense and there's lots more detail. But, I agree with you and I think that it's better left unsmeared; unless somebody shows us some nice CG, this is probably as good as we'll do. If we're going for "high definition," blurring will have just the opposite effect.

EDIT: Besides, the ring doesn't have to be this big for Sonic 2, only Sonic 1. I think the smaller size version is acceptable.

 

Happy birthday, Vincent.

(Sorry that I don't have to contribute anything to the thread but I don't really like Sonic 2 so yeah.)