How Sprites Are Made

[zman9000]

I think my last post in this topic was made by me half asleep... Aside from that, I have done some golden sprite editing (this was about 3 years ago) and i was working on it with a friend. I had paint and a golden sun emulator that could take snap shots. with that we tried to find a a good human looking sprite for a short animation we were thinking about making. but battle sprites were to hard to mess with, and the field sprites were to small.

So one day I went into a battle and summoned all the summons. One closest to human and easiest to edit was the only one that can heal you... starts with a Col... something

First i deleted the back ground and then used the colors to make the body, when it was done it looked like a real golden sun style person (after about 10 hours of pixel art)
Then a few more hours I had moved it into a upright and forward facing position as a base for the animation. Problem id the more i moved it from the original position the more it didn't look like a professional sprite. In the end I gave up, my friend messed around with it for a few days and then he gave up. I still have the file on a flash drive somewhere, but i can't find it.

Now my question is: Has anyone else tried to animate summon sprites or others like that? And if so and tips or advice?
(also if i ever do find it I will post what we made.)

[Atrius (He/Him)]

Cool, so theoretically you could do that with just any character?  Do you keep the model on hand afterwards?  I'd love to see Kari's base model...

I still have Kari's model, but I haven't reinstalled Maya on my computer since the old one died.  I do have a couple of higher-res renders that I did of it though.

 

Must be somewhat older since she's in a pose similar to Jenna's, and I seem to recall making the eyes quite a bit darker.

Anyway, I would be grateful if you could share the palette file so I don't have to make a new one.

I probably still have it around somewhere...  I'll post it when I can find it.

[Rolina]

Aye, her pose is different, but it's nice to see where this stuff came from.  It's like watching a documentary on how they do things. ^-^

[dwkjohn]

ok here is the full process of what i have done to my sprite over last 2 months. the last one is hopefully finished-ish... :/ meh. let me know what u think. i havent had time to mess with blender yet but im about to start. :)

[Rolina]

The problem I see with that is that it's a bit too dark.  Contrast him with Felix instead of Isaac.  Felix wears the darkest clothing of any of the GS characters, and yet it much brighter than your sprite... Keep that in mind when making the sprites.  Golden Sun is a bright, warm world, even if it deals with some dark themes at times.

[dwkjohn]

hmm now that I look closely at that picture, its wrong. it must have screwed up the colors when I uploaded it. look at the difference in the two isaacs. my sprire was brighter... ill try to fix that. but it does need to be brightened some. anyway, thanx for the suggestion. :)

[Charon]

I actually think the problem is the viewing angle - the Golden Sun sprites are much more of a bird's eye view.

I agree with Role as well - your colour choice is also rather dark - it doesn't allow for much shading.

[Rolina]

You should compare them with the character with the closest color scheme.  Don't use Isaac in your comparison, use Felix.  It should help you get a better feel for it.

[dwkjohn]

well. I still need to work on the birds eye angle but I tried to make it brighter. that first one I posted was really dark. I guess it uploaded weird but I think this one is fixed. I'm still gonna work on it though. thanx for the help guys. :)

oh yeah... how do make the white part transparent? I forgot.

[Charon]

The wonders of GIMP. You just right click on your layer, choose "add alpha layer" or channel or whatever its called, then just use the select tool to select the white and cut it out. Since its a sprite it's a lot easier to get a nice, clean cut.

[Rolina]

There's plenty of programs that can do that - the only one I know of that can't is MSPaint, and lolMSPaint.

[dwkjohn]

yes. Paint. which just so happens to be the program I use. haha. it sucks at times but on basic stuff it gets the job done. for me at least.

[Rolina]

Paint.NET and Gimp are free to use.  You should check them out.

[dwkjohn]

I do about 30% of my work in gimp. the rest is in paintive heard alot about paint.net. what is the interface like? is it similr to gimp?