Sword sprites

alright, yes all the sprites here are basically the same thing, but hey… I need critiques on all of them. SO CRITIQUE LIKE CRAZY! And I know I’m not that good, so if you’re just going to say “These suck” Or something pointless like that, just don’t even say it.
starting with the more simple:




And I’m sparing you guys the 50 differant wip and beta versions.
the blue is supposed to be an ice, and the red was supposed to be fire-ish or rage. And the cracked one with glowy letters is supposed to be some kinda ancient freaky one.

edit: YAR! I can’t make a living sprite! at all! not even a simple little buggy thingy!! Or a giant plasmatic worm with a huge stinger and gargantuan jaws! alright, now that you know that worthless piece of info, continue.

I like the designs, but the shading needs a lot of work ;-;

“You may improve the shading by…” might make a nice addition to your post, Dazuro.

First, let’s think a little. Are swords entirely level? Well, they usually have a higher center than the edges. If it was entirely level, it would be weak like a piece of paper. So there’s the first problem: another shade is required for one half of the sword beyond the peak of elevation. Now, let’s think about material. Swords are generally metallic, are they not? Well, metallic objects are nice ‘n’ reflective. Stick in some high contrast and darker spots, and then you’ve got metal. Now, for the handle. If the handle was that thin, I’m pretty certain it would snap off when you swing the sword. Thicken the handle a little bit and shade it cylindrically–bright on one side, high contrast to the middle third, low contrast throughout that section, and high contrast again as it fades to black.

Now for a problem that’s not related to shading. Never outline a sprite in black: that’s just terrible and unrealistic. How many objects in the real world have a black outline around them? Black objects or objects on black backgrounds, yes, but other than that, nothing. I’d recommend using a color about 64 units lower than the next brighter one for your outline.

Truly, truly I say unto you: do this and you’ll be considered a much better spriter. Essentially everyone has the potential to be a good spriter; their problem is usually the unwillingness to improve. Therefore, you should heed our words and improve to the best of your ability. :slight_smile:

Black outlines aren’t always bad. A lot of games use them, so you’d need to as well to fit the style, etc… Most use a dark blue though, only on the NES do you really see pure black.

well, you know how I was talking about those beta’s? These are still IN Beta… I wasn’t going to keep the black, and I was going to work on the shading, but thank you for the tips in shading ^^V And the reflecting… um… I’ll work on that…

and ANY hints on living sprites? Any at all?? because I tell you what… it looks a lot worse then my swords

Yeah…don’t try to make them perfect in the sense of shape to begin with (anti-aliasing can make a better indentation than an outline), and use manual anti-aliasing within the sprite so it looks like a creature rather than a bunch of pixels.

yeeah… I’ll do that. But one question… what’s aliasing and anti-aliasing? :confused:
Well, I’ll say this much, I made this worm thing, with a big stinger on the back… the only part that looked good was the stinger :confused:

I’m coming to the conclusion that at this point, I’m only good at weapon sprites…

I’m terrible at explaining things, so I’ll simply hand you an illustration that my cat coughed up. :stuck_out_tongue:

The second image looks smoother than the first because of anti-aliasing. Aliasing is, as defined by www.dictionary.com, is defined as “the appearance of jagged distortions in curves and diagonal lines in computer graphics because the resolution is limited or diminished”.

Now, this isn’t the best anti-aliasing it could be; more varying shades could also be used to make it even smoother in appearance. I used the 45? anti-aliasing (one pixel of a 50% color change) even on the 10? part of the curve, which was rather silly, but it’s just a quick illustration.

Oh, but here’s another one (I once called this my best sprite) showing the reason anti-aliasing is bad on sprites’ edges:

The second one doesn’t actually have anti-aliasing removed completely; I just removed the darkest shades. While the more anti-aliased one looks smoother on black, it looks much worse on a light background.

alright, that second metroid sprite DID look a lot better… on both of them. I’ll work on that, and try to figure out EXACTLY what that means, instead of sitting here like I have for the last half hour, slightly lost…

edit: lol, I went and looked up anti-aliasing on dictionary.com , and it said rather clearly, removing jagged or unsmooth edges in image editing.