Neoamon's sprites and stuff

[Neoamon]

Yo, this should be just a little collection of my stuff I'm working on atm... but only portraits and "concept" sprites (the formation ones) so far, I'm not doing too well with the whole spritesheets. Maybe a little help how to proceed a bit easier on the sheets would be welcome. But okay, here we go.

So far I planned and tried to make some characters from the PS2 RPG Shadow Hearts. I absolutely loved it just as I love Tactics. Some other stuff might follow sooner or later. Would be nice to hear what you think about that kind of stuff I'm planning to do, maybe how I could improve them, might be funny to make the Shadow Hearts crew running through the FFT world. I just try to keep them detailed as possible as the palette allows me so far.

The last one was an first attempt at Fred from Suikoden III.

In case of Yuri: I thought of some of his fusion monsters too.... but there's the question, if it's even possible to change a unit form during battle and change it back at command or after the battle. Because if thats too hard, the fusions might be considered obsolete for the intended use in battle... but maybe they would still make some nice boss sprites or such. Hmm... let's see how it goes.

[Mobius]

Well, you seem to be doing allright on the faces. Not so much on the hair and clothing departments.

It's lacking depth. The color palletes on the hair have their colors too similar, that you can't distinguish them so from afar. Like a flat blob of a flat color, especially on Hyuga and Fred.

It's a common mistake, so don't worry about it. What you should do to fix them is to take from an official already existing portrait and borrow their colors. Go look for someone in FFT who has black, orange and white hair and use those color sets.
Never, and I say NEVER, make up your own pallete, if you're starting out. Borrowing is the way. Same for the clothes. Have a rule of thumb to never modify ANY colors. Work with existing ones always.



Once you do that we can move over to the actual shading. Try emulating the pixelwork of FFT by having references close always, look at them all the time, then look at yours, and keep working until yours can fit in the group of official portraits seamlessly, or as close as you can.

Every time you make a fix, post it here so we can help you out. 

[Neoamon]

Thanks for the feedback. 
Well yes, I admit it, coloring hair so it fits the original characters is not that always that easy, but good that you mentioned it.
As for the palettes, I usually imported colors - from other existing portraits - I considered fitting for each character, at least that's how I understand the part where you speak of borrowing. I never ever played around with each palette color's attributes individually. I swear, it's all only imported/"borrowed" but maybe really just tads too similar colors, as you already mentioned. Sorry if I missunderstood.

Well, most of time, the palettes get divided like the following:
- first color is background as always
- then 4-5 brownish skin colors are for face, faceborder, the eyelid parts, sometimes for some lighter parts in the hair
- 3-4 colors for clothes
- this leaves maximum 3 colors for things like edges, eye color decoration (i.e. the white stripes on the Yuri's jacket)
- and only 1-2 colors for others things (i.e. like the "turquoise" hair basket of Lucia)

Maybe some adjustment of those skin colors (which take most of the palette space) might do the trick. Hopefully without making it look weird D:

[3lric]

Fucking love the thought of having some Shadow Hearts and Suikoden sprites. However Yuris monster fusions would not be possible in the case of normal battle unfortunately.