Female Job Sprites

[Cheetah]

Kyari: Thanks that should definitely help with my testing. Though I thought my positioning was correct. Well I will do more testing and see how it is looking.

Zodiac: Well I will be honest and try to be constructive at the same time. To be frank it looks pretty bad. The whole thing is too flat because you aren't using enough shades of any given color to give any shadowing. This just makes everything else look out of wack, so that it is hard to tell if the proportions are good or not. I don't know what you are doing wrong but my guess is that you are doing too much from scratch. The thing about the portraits is that they are shrunken down drawings done by a professional artist and all the calculations for the correct colors is done by the computer. It is possible to make something half decent by making minor edits to preexisting portraits, but you are just being too ambitious. I like your concept and I think you have the skills to make something that looks much better, you probably just need to change your tactics. Portraits are hard.

[Kyari]

The biggest issues are that:
1) The hair colour contrast too sharply with the skin tone
2) The hair colours themselves don't blend with each other well, it kinda looks a little like randomly placed lines here and there in some places because of the sharp differentiations in the shades used
3) Non-realistic hair colours just look out of place compared to the aesthetic feel of the rest of the game.

[Zozma]

Zodiac i have a suggestion too because without the use of the already made portrait of "Celia" the assassin this portrait of "Lust" would never exist.. and i think i did a pretty decent job for the time it took...
i don't know if they look anything alike to you but a few pixel changes here and there and you've got a totally different character... and it matches more closely with the scheme of the game that uses certain blends of colors...

[Xifanie]

Yeah, I supose I just tried too hard.

Even though I started from scratch I based myself on balmafula & Agrias.

Man, I wish I drew more at school during classes...

[Zozma]

haha thats exactly what i used to do all during history class! i got pretty decent at miniature anime doodles. anyway, don't try to do it completely from scratch, look at the picture and then think what you want to do with the hair and stuff around the face. then just slowly build off of what you have already, zooming out every now and then to see how its developing.

[Zozma]

so i heard someone mention making Rad Alicia and Lavian have special jobs... i heard mention of rad as a red mage and alicia as a mystic knight and lavian as maybe a necromancer?

well i at least like the idea of the mystic knight so im going to give alicia a BIG makeover what do u think? still got alot of work to do but still..

In reality the sprite is inspired by Misty from saga frontier two.

[karsten]

i like it

[Cheetah]

That is good. I especially like the hair. Good use of colors as well.

[Kuraudo Sutoraifu]

I might need to grab some SaGa Frontier 2 sprites!!!

[Kyari]

It's hard to tell, since it's a badly compressed jpeg, but is it only 16 colours?

[Zozma]

in this picture it is more than 16 colors because of the brown on the dress. however the legs need to be redone anyway i knew that before i posted it. anyway that brown wont be included in the final sprite.

its all about color shading, yes i have several shades of red for the hair but its also part of the skin. the white gloves and shoes also have a shade of the skin tone in them as well.

its getting better...

[VincentCraven]

Nice! I'm loving the sprites being made. Good work Zozma.
(I wasn't planning on making Lavian a necromancer, in case anyone was about to tackle that sprite.)

[Zozma]

i like the female summoner dress without the cape, especially one of the color palettes it has a deep red wine color.. im thinking of giving that to lavian with some longer hair...

[Cheetah]

Well Zozma I think that is shaping up to be the best looking custom sprite yet, though I am still looking forward to how Kuraudo's Advent Cloud turns out.

I want to preface my next topic by thanking Kyari for turning my Blue Mage sprite ino SPR format. The results I am about to show you are hopefully mostly due to the sprite being placed a few pixels out of phase because I had the deminsions of the BMP a little small. But it might also be due to the radical difference between Balmafula and Meliadoul's arm placement (the two models for this sprite). Both of these things should be fixable with lots of testing (which I will have to do at a later point). But in the mean time here are some rather amusing glitches.

1) Her arms are so out of phase they look like they are attatched to the opposite shoulder. Note that the sword is in her hand (don't you love forshadowing).
2) Okay so the lower half of her body just dissappeared, I don't know why that happened and that worries me.
3) Okay so a screen shot from later shows the legs present...
4) Almost looks normal, if you call having a hand growing out of the side of your face normal (and I do).
5) Yes in my patch Blue Mage will have the innate skill to have their heads slide of their shoulders, and I don't care what any of you say about it ruining the "balance" of the game or being "overpowering". I'm not sure what is going on with her right arm there either.
6) Continuing to show of the head sliding support ability plus the movement ability of having an arm growing out of your stomach.
7) AH HA, the question of where a character hides their weapon while walking is finally solved. It is very clear in this never before seen screen shot that the weapons are stored in their sleeves and slide out while they are attacking. Damn sneaking sprites (conclusion of forshadowing, Cheetah hearts literary devices).
The legs dissappear again...I guess the other secret power of the Blue Mage is to be able to equip two movement skills at once. Torso Arm along with Invisileg.

[Austin]

ZOMG u use hax!!!!11!

[Zozma]

okay cheetah

some things you have to consider when adding a sprite to the game:

which sprite did you have to overwrite to add this one?
for example, try saving alma's sprite over agrias or a common theif or the other way arround...
the arms are really not where they should be!

i suggest if you arent already, use meliadouls duplicate sprite H85.spr as the one you write over.

[Cheetah]

I was more amused by the results than anything. But does it matter which sprite you are over writing? I though it must all have to do with how the sprites are spaced on the sprite sheet since I haven't heard anyone mention that there was data on how to piece together each individual SPR file. I used the female squire to over write for this since I just needed a quick test.

[Zozma]

well its strange because i thought it was all about spacing too.. but it also seems to have to do with the origional sprite as well... you can take an identical image of alma and save it over the female theif sprite for example, and the arms are all screwy... i donno its like the arms have to be moved all over again if you try to use certain sprites to overwrite with. so there is definately some compatability things. maybe because some characters are shorter, and of course a factor also might be the file size itself even if the images are the same size the files arent.....

another example ill give is, i have a completed Teta sprite shes about alma's size and so putting her file inside one of alma's duplicates works perfectly... however... but it just doesnt work for putting it over agrias's dupe sprite.. im not gonna go back and move all the arms, ill use the sprite that already works perfectly

i looked at it, and things were way out of place even if you did use the right sprite....

[Xifanie]

omg is this the legendary super stretching kongfu!?

At least 2 things affects the sprite's building in game.

- The placement of body parts.
- The sprite's Type, which are set somewhere

Type 1 is for humans, so if you take a monster sprite and insert it in a Type 1 sprite, that's not gonna be sweet.

With the 4 types, I can't recall which is for what, been a while. But it may be the reason to our problems.

If we study them enough, we could use the Type files to create a complete interface to test all possible animations using 8bit bitmap or spr files.[/i]

[Cheetah]

Having some way of previewing these things would be amazing.