The dragon(cat)'s shiny pixels: 4/2/2015 Extreme Makeover: OC edition

[Lt.Smirks]

I believe eliwan is referring to the width of the weapon's handle not the overall size or weight. It's like trying to hold a log in one hand: if your hand can't span it you'll drop it easily.

[Dragoncat]

Oh okay. Will fix that.

[Anacybele]

Looks better, but I think Leo still needs a bit more chin and forehead. Move his hair up a bit and his chin down a bit. Other than that, looks good. :)

Edited April 3, 2015 by Anacybele

[Dragoncat]

Moved the top and bottom of his head up and down one row of pixels. Amazing what just two pixel rows of difference can do...also fixed the eyebrow facing away. And, I thinned the weapon handles so they don't look like big logs, shortened the axe handle too because lances are longer.

[Eliwan]

The forehead, on our left, should have less shading above the eyebrow-- the lightest shade should probably extend all the way to the peak of the eyebrow that you have. That would lessen the roundface.

On the other side of the forehead, similarly. His hair isn't blocking the light from hitting his forhead, so the only real way for it to have the shading that it does is for his head to be really round.

And human heads are not really round, they're really curved.

Examples of what I mean pixel-wise: http://i.imgur.com/rhupJ2U.png

For all of these people, the light hits their forehead above their eye, including people like Erk-- who have some hair blocking the light.

But on a fair number of the men, you can see where their forehead turns into their temples.

... His head lacks that turn, and instead looks like it's perfectly round in the front-- or his temples are pushed into his forehead triangularly.

Edited April 4, 2015 by Eliwan

[Dragoncat]

Quite easy to fix.

[ghast]

try going custom and bring his weapon hand down, so it seems like he's resting his arm, maybe something like the fighter. that axe is still massive.

[Dragoncat]

That might be hard to make a fighter like pose if he's a wyvern mounted unit...

I might ref the wyvern rider with axe in the animations in the rom hacking section...

[Kon]

Gonna make a quick ref and give you a run-down of stuff

Not sure why you made Wil's face fatter like you did. It messed up the far side of his face, and with how you pushed his nose over, it really screwed up the angle of his face

So, I shoved his nose back over and did some replicing to regain Wil's face shape, with a little fiddling to keep the shorter face, because I think that was what you're going for?

You need to be more careful when recoloring your sprites. I found like five or six stray colors from recoloring Treck's armour

Related to above, you also neglected to take out a bit of Wil's collar when splicing him and Treck.

With using Lowen's palette, you can get away with using the darkest skin tone in some of the darker parts of his armour

You can also get away with using it for shaping the trim more like how it is on Treck

I took the liberty of fixing up the part of his armour-collar thing that looked kind of broken. I imagine it looks that way because you didn't figure out how to redefine it after erasing Treck's head

Also, his hair/line was kind of messed up. so I respliced Glass's hair to regain the original shape, with a little but of cutting to fit it on his head better

I also made the hair behind his ear and neck flat, since his hair isn't long enough to stick out in the back like that.

And I gave Will his ear back, since Glass's ear looks weird and is too high up compared to Wil's

Fixed the weird shading on his neck, and reshaded some parts of his armour

And I fixed the shading around his eye so it's more obvious that it's a splotch on his skin rather than a really badly shaded eye, as well as taking the extra third shad above his eyebrows. Wil's eyebrows are thick enough on their own ;p

Oh, and while I took out all of the stray colors, you still have like 18 colors on the guy. I dunno of you ever plan on putting him into a hack, but if you do you're gonna have to reduce his color count by three. I think the easiest way to do that is changing the silver trim with skintone, since that seems like it would save you the most trouble, but it's your choice

Most important thing!

I really hate Glass's hair D;

It's so badly undershaded it hurts

So I tried playing around with the shading in his hair so it would bother me less

[Anacybele]

His birthmark is under the wrong eye now though... :P

Not a bad fix-up at all anyhow. Still needs a bit more forehead, and the ear IS a bit high. But that's all, really.

Edited April 4, 2015 by Anacybele

[Kon]

Just flip him :V

It's not like I spent that long working on him, and even then it's only meant to be a ref, so don't expect it to be perfect ~o3o~

[Dragoncat]

Yep, the birthmark is still where it's supposed to be, that's not a problem.

If I ever fangame WoC, it would be with FEXP instead of a romhack, so I'm not worried about color count. You get a cookie for knowing who I used...I mean Glass' hair is kinda obvious, but the others...wow.

[Toa]

Even if color count doesn't matter for inserting it into a game, you should try to avoid spare shades.

[Kon]

Yep, the birthmark is still where it's supposed to be, that's not a problem.

If I ever fangame WoC, it would be with FEXP instead of a romhack, so I'm not worried about color count. You get a cookie for knowing who I used...I mean Glass' hair is kinda obvious, but the others...wow.

I used to splice a lot, so picking out parts is pretty easy, especially on simpler sprites ~o3o~

And even if you're not too concerned about the color limit. it's always a good idea to try to stick to the standard color limit, so that you can get used to properly managing your colors. It's also really handy to keep some color samples so that you can avoid all those stray colors you have in your sprites

[Anacybele]

I could tell you used Glass, because the ear and hair looked like the ear and hair on my mug of Eliot and I got them off of Glass. :P

To avoid stray colors, I use the eraser method in Paint when recoloring stuff. This method is where you make the current color the foreground color and the color you want to change it to the background color. Then take the eraser tool and right click. The color you want to change should automatically change to your new color.

[Eliwan]

To avoid stray colors, I use the eraser method in Paint when recoloring stuff. This method is where you make the current color the foreground color and the color you want to change it to the background color. Then take the eraser tool and right click. The color you want to change should automatically change to your new color.

A slightly-better-but-more-obnoxious way to do this, with Windows Paint:

Select the color you want to replace with eyedropper + rightclick.

Select the color you want to replace it with.

Ctrl+A.

Ctrl+X.

Fill bucket the color you want to replace it with so that that's the only color in the image.

Ctrl+V, making sure that 'transparent selection' is on.

This way, you are guaranteed to remove all instances of a given color and replace them with the second color~

[Dragoncat]

I used the eraser method and I'm familiar with it, guys.

[Anacybele]

You couldn't have. The eraser method doesn't leave stray colors.

Edited April 4, 2015 by Anacybele

[Dragoncat]

Then I probably neglected to drag it over everything.

[Anacybele]

That could be it. I think I might have made that mistake once in awhile myself, now that I think about it.

[Kon]

Solution: use [Ctrl] [Number pad +] to make the eraser as big as you want so you don't miss anything on accident ;p

[Book of Ereshkigal]

Solution: use [Ctrl] [Number pad +] to make the eraser as big as you want so you don't miss anything on accident ;p

Oh my god this is amazing.

(I still prefer to use the cut paste thing, just to make sure I get everything.)

[Anacybele]

Solution: use [Ctrl] [Number pad +] to make the eraser as big as you want so you don't miss anything on accident ;p

Whoa, I didn't know you could do that. o.O

[Kon]

I actually learned it from a super old video Vamp posted :D

It's the best for when you're recoloring big sections of a sprite. The cut and paste method is pretty effective for finding stuff you might have missed, but I find the big eraser to be the easiest~