Orephin and Co.

[kurthnaga]

CRITIQUES AND COMMENTS APPRECIATED

Here is my sprite gallery, focused upon the adventures of Orephin!

Sprites

Orephin: Main Lord, an Archer - will not promote to sniper, but into a bow knight maybe?


Kurthnaga: Secondary Lord (a la Hector), Orephin's brother. Most likely swords of some sort.

Blason: A cavalier


Flymn: Another Cavalier


Dryle: The fliest of fliers


Nuldr: Mage


Julne: Cleric

Nelson: Thief

Beltor: Fighter

Chelk: One-eyed Armor Knight

Asylm: Myrmidon

Maps

Here's my first map... I know it sucks, but so did my first sprites :D

Prologue

The two units will start in the top right and move to kill a boss in the top left - any ideas to what I should put over there?

Chapter 1

Units will start in the bottom right and move to defeat a boss standing on the top left village

Chapter 2 - Route

The objective will be to route all of the bandits raiding the village - I'm not quite sure about this one, and any advice on how to make it better would be +10 points to you.

Edited January 28, 2014 by kurthnaga

[EldinnerPlate]

Not bad. It's missing some shading where the forehead meets hair and where the hair meets clothes on the left side(our POV). Hair is also a bit choppy in the far back and on her left shoulder.

[kurthnaga]

Original Post updated with new versions and sprites!

[kurthnaga]

Questions for whoever may want to help me:

Orephin's neck has been altered, I'm not sure if its correct or not - I have pretty bad eyes so even if it looks good to me it may not to you guys, so I'd like critique on her. She's also the main character in my mythos, so she needs to look good.

Kurthnaga's hair is sketchy. I wanted him to look enough like Orephin to be her brother but not like the same, and I didn't like what happened when I used the same hair color palette. I think I did good on the shading with him, however. Should I add another color to his hair? Or a headband or something? Is that what's missing?

Flymn: This one came together a lot faster than the previous two (I have no idea why). I think he's the best one I've made so far.

[ghast]

you need to update your posts in new posts otherwise no one will see your new stuff.

also as for your sprites. The first thing you need to start doing is not using default paint colours. Basically all your "custom" colours are super bright and clash with the skin tone. Just use pre-existing fe6/7 colours instead.

also every one of your sprites need cleaning up, theres like random pixels on the neck and forehead and stuff

Also many of your mugs are splices of different mugs with different angles.

Percival Hair, Lugh Face, Saul Robes

Percival's hair is like that because his head is angled differently than Lugh's head. When you put them together it looks bad.

and your last 3 sprites seem to have big big foreheads.

You should look up splicing tutorials if you want to get better as you seem to want to do. you can find them on this forum somewhere.

Edited January 16, 2014 by GhastStation

[kurthnaga]

Thank you for your critique! I have been researching tutorials but I'm having trouble finding some. I wasn't posting to update because I felt that would be double posting.

Question: Is it okay to put together splices of characters from different games?

[ghast]

nope, in terms of fe678, 8 uses different skin tones, outlines etc. so mixing them is bad. but you can take pieces from 8's and place em on 67's, so long as the colours are consistent

[kurthnaga]

So if I recolor parts from 8 then it should work if the angles match?

[ghast]

i guess, im not great at mugs lol

[EldinnerPlate]

So if I recolor parts from 8 then it should work if the angles match?

Yes. From my experience, you can splice just about any fe gba portraits together as long as the angles match up. Recoloring is very easy with the eraser method, which is also very easy.

[kurthnaga]

Thank you! As another question, what programs do you use for spriting if you can't afford Photoshop? I've been using Paint.net.

[Kon]

Hell, you don't even need to use a fancy program like photoshop to sprite. Many spriters (myself included) do just fine in MS Paint ~o3o~

As for your sprites, they're... badly spliced. A lot of them have issues with their angling and when they don't the parts haven't been connected properly. They also have pretty bad colors that make me kind of sad. :c

Oh, and Orephin has too much of a Lucius face to look like a woman. Lucius does look feminine, but his face is still too masculine to pass for a woman's.

When I get done with an assignment I'll see if I can give better help. c:

[kurthnaga]

Here's my new Orephin - I removed the thing on her forehead because I didn't like it and kept Fiora's headband - I think this is a lot better, I used a few tutorials as well.

Also, Kon, I disagree about Lucius's face.

Next I'm going to try and make a Kurthnaga that looks good and doesn't have stupid colors that make people cringe.

Such as this Kurthnaga... maybe

Edit: Grammars

Edit: Kurth No. 2

Edited January 17, 2014 by kurthnaga

[ghast]

kurth has red in his hair lol

[deranger]

Orephin's headband inexplicably disappears. Why does it not show on his?her?its forehead. Kurth needs shading where his hair was spliced on, and hair that didn't have colours eliminated when being recoloured (and also needs the normal outline colour, 99.9% of the time the outline colour will encompass your portrait). Same with Orephin. Change the outline back.

[kurthnaga]

I didn't even realize that was part of a headband, but I like it how it is, so I don't think I'm going to change that. I can't believe I missed that red in Kurth's hair :D.

Edited January 17, 2014 by kurthnaga

[ghast]

you're not going to attach the missing part of the headband?

[Kon]

Here's my new Orephin - I removed the thing on her forehead because I didn't like it and kept Fiora's headband - I think this is a lot better, I used a few tutorials as well.

Also, Kon, I disagree about Lucius's face.

You can disagree all you want, but the fact is that Lucius's face alone does not a woman make. His nose, chin, and jawline make it pretty obvious that he's a male, regardless of how pretty he is. If you want Lucius to look like a woman you have to change those features. Just take a look at Prince Zephiel, if you need an example. They have almost the exact same face and eye shape and yet no one's trying to pass his face off as a woman's.

Now I did a quick resplicing and made Orephin less masculine, because until you specified I honestly thought she was a he. Also I was bored.

To make Lucius look like an actual woman, I took the bottom half of Fiora's face and spliced it onto Lucius's, and then adjusted the mouth and nose to better fit the angle of his face. The rest is pretty simple stuff that I don't think I really need to explain~

Oh, and a good way to reshade spliced pieces (especially where things meet the skin) it's best to take a look at the shading that the spliced part belongs to and try to imitate that. Like with Kurthnaga having Raven's hair, when you reshade it, look at how it's shaded on Raven's head and try to replicate it on Kurthnaga. It might not work every time but that can at least give you something to work with.

[kurthnaga]

Thank you for the advice. However, I think that I will keep my Orephin's facial features as is. The shading is by no means done, but I don't notice enough of a difference between mine and yours for me to warrant changing it. I understand your Point, but I'm going to use looking masculine in her back story and the story of my eventual hack - mainly for humor.

Edited January 17, 2014 by kurthnaga

[Lenh]

I don't notice enough of a difference between mine and yours for me to warrant changing it.

-> (your original -> Kon's polish)

Take some more time to look at it before rejecting it. Most of the edits fix an issue in the original mug.

- The forehead : Shading/shape/symmetry fixes. When you had the dark outline there it looks more like the edge of a face mask instead of a hairline. The eyebrows are symmetrical and aliased properly in Kon's. It'd be worth it for you to work on this because all your splices have shading errors in the forehead area.

- colors : Kon removed most of the blacks you had in the mug itself, which follows standard FE style. Looks like the blues were lightened too, which goes better with Lucius hair.

- headband logic : unless she's wearing a giant wishbone, connecting the headband and defining the knot is a good idea.

- cloth fixes: the folds look less like they were pasted on in fragments and softened up to look more like cloth instead of knotted tissue paper.

- The ear and jawline is changed too, and the head moved forward relative to the body, but those are parts I think you can decide whether it was a useful modification or not..

[kurthnaga]

I should be more clear, it was the jawline that I didn't intend to change. I understand my shadings still need work, among other things you mentioned.

[kurthnaga]

Here's the new Orephin - I changed the face I used to be Rebecca's instead of Lucius, so as to avoid anymore controversy about the gender. I also worked a little harder to make the heir not touch the robes - what do you guys think?

[Kon]

It's closer, but not quite there. Her jawline needs to be smoothed out and it looks like Rebecca's far eye is doing weird things. The hair looks better, but it cuts off suddenly on the right, which it where you might need to do a little customing to fill that in. It also looks like you're giving the scarf too contrasting colors. If you'd like you can just use the one I made and just change the face to Rebecca's or something. ~o3o~

[kurthnaga]

Since it's going to be my main character, I'd rather do it completely by myself - at least the actual editing. I see what you mean about the hair cutting off - I'll fix that pretty soon, as well as the scarf colors.

Edit: Kurth 2.1

Edit 2:I forgot to recolor the hair - so scatterbrained

Edited January 18, 2014 by kurthnaga

[kurthnaga]

Orephin (hopefully final):