Chinese Nymph sprite

hagabaka · Post by **hagabaka** » July 31st, 2007, 5:11 am

Hello,

This is my first sprite

She's supposed to be a lesser immortal from the heavens in Chinese mythology. The Chinese and Japanese word for these is 仙女, and they're quite common to see on anime or TV shows with a fantasy Chinese setting. this search should give an idea what they usually look like. I modeled the sprite after this photo, although I think it looks different enough to be not copyright infringing.

I plan to submit this to the far east faction, but I hoped to get some comments on the sprite first. Compared to the other sprites I think it's lacking a lot of definition, and her robe also looks boring, but currently I don't know how to improve that.

My ideas for the unit: she should have above average physical and magical resistances, being protected by the magical clouds around her. She should have a weak (or no?) melee attack, and a decent magical cold ranged attack. She also has quick movement on open flat terrains and water, but less on mountains, caves and forests.

[EDIT: improved shading a little]

hagabaka · Post by **hagabaka** » July 31st, 2007, 8:19 pm

shaded a little more, shrunk the head to be more similar to existing sprites, and adjusted the shadow

Ryorin · Post by **Ryorin** » July 31st, 2007, 8:22 pm

Not bad. I like its design and colors, both of which are very good. The presentation is a little off, not to worry everyone's is at first.

What this needs most is some contrast. The yellow and the white are both too bright with no darker border between them, it helps to make the yellow and white more noticeable and different.

The other thing is improve the shading. It looks better than it did, but still needs some work. The face is a little blurry too.

Raith · Post by **Raith** » July 31st, 2007, 9:26 pm

alright I could give you basic advice that I have learned (so far still fairly new to spriting or art in general) or tell you some minor details that are specific to this sprite,

1. The head needs to be a little more distinguished, it looks like a very tiny head with 2 black bugs popping out

2. The magical aura around him is cool but possibly unneeded. First you can only see it half the time, second maybe you should save that for a frame of an attack.

other than that just work on the basics like ryorin said and HAVE PATIENCE! if you don't get it the first, second or even third time, keep trying it will eventually come as I have experienced first hand with my Soul Thief and his melee attack. Check out the topic I have in this section labeled "the soul thief" it has all of the help I have recieved from other players in addition to my work

hagabaka · Post by **hagabaka** » August 1st, 2007, 4:00 am

Thanks for your comments. I've added more borders to make things more distinguishable, and I think the eyes and face are much more similar to the other sprites' style now.

About the clouds, I think they're needed to prevent this from looking even more boring :p Also I think it's more natural if she moves, fights, and stands with them around her, instead of switching them on just in battles. I tried to make them more visible though.

hagabaka · Post by **hagabaka** » August 1st, 2007, 11:15 pm

Some more touch ups. I think I'll give the sprite a break and try to start animating the now. While the comments still apply, I'm not sure how to improve it without messing up.

hagabaka · Post by **hagabaka** » August 2nd, 2007, 2:50 am

Added a whisk as her weapon. it's something like this, but the unit won't get so "martial" with it

Also see proposed stats for the unit.

hagabaka · Post by **hagabaka** » August 2nd, 2007, 5:44 am

I think I can use the robe for team coloring. It even looks better when I used gimp to automatically shift the color! Using the {MAGENTA_IS_THE_TEAM_COLOR} macro, will team coloring automatically work with the magenta colored sprite?

I also attached the gimp xcf file.

Post by **Jetrel** » August 2nd, 2007, 6:42 am

hagabaka wrote:I think I can use the robe for team coloring. It even looks better when I used gimp to automatically shift the color! Using the {MAGENTA_IS_THE_TEAM_COLOR} macro, will team coloring automatically work with the magenta colored sprite?

I also attached the gimp xcf file.

You have to use the -exact- set of RBG values specified in the game's .cfg file (probably in team-color.cfg or something, I'm not sure these days). An easy way to get colors in the set is to sample them from existing mainline units).

99% of the colors we call magenta will not work for team coloring, only a super-small subset, which has been explicitly declared in the game's data files, will.

Post by **Sgt. Groovy** » August 2nd, 2007, 7:36 am

An easy way to get colors in the set is to sample them from existing mainline units

It might be a good idea to have premade palette files in the Art wiki.

Post by **Zhukov** » August 2nd, 2007, 8:09 am

Sgt. Groovy wrote:
An easy way to get colors in the set is to sample them from existing mainline units
It might be a good idea to have premade palette files in the Art wiki.

Already done. Palette about a third down the page.

The palette:

hagabaka · Post by **hagabaka** » August 2nd, 2007, 8:25 am

Thanks. Now team color is working, but I'm having trouble controlling the shading of team colored sprites. It seems that the colors in the palette which look almost white don't map to similarly light colors after team colored...

hagabaka · Post by **hagabaka** » August 3rd, 2007, 9:58 pm

some teams still look worse than others, but I think it looks mostly all right now

Ryorin · Post by **Ryorin** » August 4th, 2007, 3:03 am

Good improvement. Still could use a little more shading, especially in the face. But I like it.

toms · Post by **toms** » August 4th, 2007, 8:09 am

IMHO you should not highlight the hair that much.