Quote:
Originally Posted by llamabeast
You're a legend Burnsaber, that's a really excellent tutorial. It seems we use very much the same methods on the whole. I think that kind of systematic bit-at-a-time with lots of copying and comparison with existing sprites is definitely the way forward.
|
Oh, I'm a legend now, like Conan the Barbarian? Sweet. Now I just have to wait for the scantily-clad busty chicks to show up.
Yeah, the constant copying also has the nice side-effect of making the finished sprite seem "dominionsy", easily fitting in with the rest dom3 graphics.
Quote:
Originally Posted by llamabeast
Once or twice I've made original sprites from scratch (like the Anubite in Tomb Kings, which is definitely not my best work but is tolerable). When I did that I simply drew something from scratch which was absolutely terrible, and then went through similar processes to those here to gradually converge on it being tolerable.
|
Well, I've also done sprite by hand. The "Manifestation" pretender in Alugra. But he's not a human, more like a geographical shape so he doesn't count (anyone can draw a star).
Quote:
Originally Posted by llamabeast
Oh, one other thing. When you want to change the colour of something, you can just select it (using the select-by-colour or some other clever method in GIMP), and use Hue-Saturation (or Colourise for grey things). I use these loads, and might, for example, use them to make that grey arm brown. It generally takes a bit of messing around to match the colours correctly, but probably saves time. In simpler cases (e.g. I want this red robe to be blue) it saves loads of time.
Actually all the options under "Colours" in GIMP get lots of time from me. I like Brightness-Contrast too. For example, when doing the skeletal horse in Nehekhara, I started by copying KO's skeletal horse, but it didn't have proper ribs. So I just drew the ribs in, using only two colours (light for rib, dark for in-between-rib). Then I needed to add shading, which could have been laborious. Instead I selected say the bottom four-fifths of the rib cage, and made it darker using Brightness-Contrast. Then I selected say the bottom three-fifths and did the same again. Then a few times more with smaller sections each time, so the very bottom bit got darkened quite a few times. I might then have decided that the back of the ribcage should be darker than the front, and darkened another couple of selections. By darkening regions in thsi iterative way it's easy to end up with really nice shading without too much work.
|
Sounds cool. I'll try that sometime.
I really don't use that "boxing" method I descripe in steps 4-7 anymore , but I remember that it was a great help to me when I was starting.
I'm just a bit scared of the advanced GIMP tools. I remember completely spoiling some graphic of mine with the "smudge" tool. Since then, I've just been using my trusty Pen. You can't go wrong with Pen. But on the other hand, my biggest sprite is the Big Ape hero (size 4), so I haven't encoutered any super-large areas to shade.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sombre
Man my methods are completely different from that. A cool tutorial though. Hopefully it will wean people away from copying resizing and pasting graphics from other places (which looks awful in my opinion).
I guess I could do a step by step for the next unit I do, though it wouldn't involve tool explanations since I doubt anyone else uses PSP. Would probably just be a series of graphics with comments.
|
Yeah, I also find the copy-elsewhere graphics horrendeous. They often have wrong perspective, proportions, size and just do not fit in.
I'm also intrested in hearing about your methods.