Off and on I've been working on a sprite of Saber from Fate\Stay Night. It's based on Agrias's sprite.
Here's a couple of frames of it. How does it look? Does anybody have any thoughts or advice on how to make it better?
Hi Fox great start on your concept reminds me of how I started spriting. I suggest to lower a bit on the details. As great spriters before me defined pixel art is made of simplicity. To much detail will clutter it. 1st of try cutting and pasting parts from sprites on hand this will make things easier as you do minimal editing on a large sheet, 2nd convert and select palettes with graphics gale as this would help you match things easily before cutting and merging the pixels. Last I guess is look at references. The saber in this sample is not yet perfect but you can see the less detail approach and improve from there (sprites by Kiskekokanut)
I messed around with it some more, and did some more frames as well. This look any better?
Yes looks better. But I wish Asmo was here he used to critique all spriters to death. Other tips I can give you is use copy paste and observe what they call depth to make your sprite look more simple but efficient.
Keep up the good work Fox, just giving spriting a shot (as a lot of FFHacktics members have learnt) is the best way of learning and getting better. The most important thing is to keep trying and not give up. Seushiro has shown you the best way to do things, find parts that look closest to what you want then make edits from there using other sprites as references :).
Good luck
Also, for starters, avoid trying to use custom colors for your sprites. I recommend using colors from vanilla sprites and from most submitted sprites here. You could basically achieve that by following Twinees and Seushiro's advices. For example, if you need yellow hair, then take the colors from Ramza or Agrias' hair, just like what Seushiro did. But if you really want to use different colors not normally found on the sprites I recommended, then at least look at each vanilla sprite shades' color values, and change the values consistently. What tool are you using?
Thanks to all your advice I've managed to improve it significantly I think. Here's a sample of some of the same frames improved.
Is there any way to tell what arms on the sheet are used for what? If at all possible I want to make it so that part of her hair can exist just barely in from of the shoulder in certain frames. Knowing what the heck each of these arms is for might help.
Quote from: Fox on March 17, 2014, 07:40:25 pm
Is there any way to tell what arms on the sheet are used for what? If at all possible I want to make it so that part of her hair can exist just barely in from of the shoulder in certain frames. Knowing what the heck each of these arms is for might help.
The best way to see this is in the ShiShi Sprite Editor. It will highlight the frames for each full frame, and you can see your WIP animated fairly painlessly.