Making sprites out of portraits

[Reepurr]

Better...um...sort of...
His boots aren't shaded at all, since you shrunk them far, far too much.
And I just realised he's lit from the wrong direction. Wesnothians are always lit from the top right hand corner.

And, personally, I just prefer scratch-making sprites. I can get more detail and a crisper sprite that way...Though I may be proved wrong.

[homunculus]

Better...um...sort of...
His boots aren't shaded at all, since you shrunk them far, far too much.
And I just realised he's lit from the wrong direction. Wesnothians are always lit from the top right hand corner.

And, personally, I just prefer scratch-making sprites. I can get more detail and a crisper sprite that way...Though I may be proved wrong.

i completely agree with all your statements.
the light being from the wrong direction is the reason why i used the mirrored image of pikeman for comparison.

[thespaceinvader]

Lighting direction is not a terribly awful problem, given that wesnoth flips its sprites. The rest is pretty valid, but the boots aren't a huge issue.

[Zerovirus]

Well, yeah, it may look better, but it's not as satisfying as an artistic work unless you do it by hand. It's like buying one of those resin-cast sculptures from the store instead of learning how to sculpt, or even buying a mold and pouring in the resin yourself.

[Sgt. Groovy]

You can use an existing image as reference for a sprite, but the actual work has to be done from scratch. There are three important steps in the conversion:

1. Change the proportions into more cartoony: big head, stubby limbs.
2. Filter out the unnecessary detail. This is not a straightforward part, you have to decide which detail "make" the character and leave everything else out. For the face, you usually keep only the eyes and the chin (and beard if he has one), the mouth will have to go and the nose only stays if it's very pronounced.
3. Overemphasize the detail that stays. Practically all the items he's wearing will have to be oversized.

Homunculus' attempt is not half bad, but his face is a blur, the muscles should be more pronounced and cartoony, and the sword should be bigger and more detailed.

[Tet]

@ all: Thanks for the good discussion so far.

@ homunculus: I am deeply impressed, what you maneged with that picture. I still try to figure out the exact things you are describing.

About the animated column. That was a gif picture, not a in-game castle wall. It would work like a animated campfire in-game.

There is however a way to create a very simple animation. If the picture is symetrical it can be mirrowed. The result is a dancing animation. It gives meaningfull movement for at least idle, defense and attack movements. If the picture is not symetrical the non-symetrical things can be changed in the big picture without much efforts before scaling to sprite level.

The picture can be turned 5 to 10 degrees too. To make it look decend it has to be mirrowed inbetween. Please understand this is meant to help an art noob like me to get movement on screen in no time.

This time I took a really bad picture for the process. A fellow with white socks, green pants and black shirt. If somebody would want to use it for real it would need some recolouring. I did a few dark lines in the resized portraits by hand.

To say somethig good about the picture. The light comes from the right side.

About the learning advice. I do agree, but learning is a process which takes time. Sometimes results are desireed more quick. So that is where tools can come in handy to help with lacking skills. I do try my luck to edit real sprites too.

[Reepurr]

Problem is, his shirt's far too dark. If you lasso'd (not sure what it's called in GIMP) the shirt, popped it on another layer and did a lightness increase on the shirt, you'd get something closer to decent, aka Assassin, shades.

Animation really does look naff. The light bit on the trousers goes from right to left, which looks, um, stupid.

I would like to see you use a saurian and turn that into a nice sprite, because saurians have good shading, and legs.

[johndh]

Please understand this is meant to help an art noob like me to get movement on screen in no time.

I think that's exactly what we do not want; i.e. a flood of derivative non-art made haphazardly by people who don't know what they're doing. You know why the art quality in Wesnoth is so good despite being done on a volunteer basis? It's because the developers and contributors have standards. They put time and effort into doing things the right way, and the result is slow and apparently painstaking, but beautiful. Your way may be fast, but it's not good. I'm not a sprite artist, but I won't hesitate to tell you that this animation is garbage. Substandard methods produce substandard results.

[thespaceinvader]

Please understand this is meant to help an art noob like me to get movement on screen in no time.

I think that's exactly what we do not want; i.e. a flood of derivative non-art made haphazardly by people who don't know what they're doing. You know why the art quality in Wesnoth is so good despite being done on a volunteer basis? It's because the developers and contributors have standards. They put time and effort into doing things the right way, and the result is slow and apparently painstaking, but beautiful. Your way may be fast, but it's not good. I'm not a sprite artist, but I won't hesitate to tell you that this animation is garbage. Substandard methods produce substandard results.

QFT. Anyone can make awful art. You're welcome to do so if you want (but unless you've permission from the copyright holder to release their work under the GPL, you cannot upload it to the add-on server), but don't expect anyone to be impressed.

On this particular note, no movement is better than pointless movement. This is pointless movement, it doesn't have any purpose other than just to BE movement. It's not a natural motion, he's not doing anything.

[Frogger5]

...and the lighting source is darting all over the place.

And to state the obvious, there is no decent detail in the sprite at all.

[homunculus]

i hope you have a grain of salt nearby...

[...]@ homunculus: [...] I still try to figure out the exact things you are describing.[...]

i wonder which part was unclear?

1. the beer?
if you drank a beer you would certainly notice that the "dancing" sprite's fist merges into the orange sash, and when you mirror it, it looks as if the guy was holding an orange tray or something way in front of him.

2. how to get proportions?
i see you have problems with that, don't you?
drag a mainline sprite into gimp window, resize it 10 or 12 times or whatever you need, and then resize the head of the image to same size as the head of the sprite.
if you feel you cannot possibly make the head so much larger, a beer might help with that, too.
and you will also need to adjust body proportions.
i guess you can figure out the rest as you go.

3. how to get rid of transparency?
suppose you have resized the image to small size, but want to get rid of transparent pixels on the edges.
i do not know if this is the correct way of doing it, it just seemed that i got rid of some "ugly things" by using a neutral color at a few pixels at the edge of a sprite.
i made a layer of solid medium gray, merged the sprite (with transparent edges) into the gray layer, selected the gray by color, and pressed 'delete'.

by the way, i deliberately corrected as few pixels as i possibly could.
the topic, as i understood it, is about resizing, not pixel editing.

for dancing or whatever animation, i guess you might rather want to make sprites from a video.

[Tet]

I managed a even shorter barbarian with a even bigger head!

And I discovered your secret! You bumped up the contrast to 40!

Posterization I did not like. If you pick around 20 its ok. Otherwise it blurs.

Merging in grey I did not like. I really believe in copying on top of each other. It makes the deviation in transparency much more narrow, but keeps some variation. For the small barbarian I had to do 6 copies on top of each other.

I know that the dancing fellow sucks. I just wanted to show the process not a good results.

[Frogger5]

But what is the point of having a process in the first place if it don't give good results?

I'm not going to believe this works until i see a decent sprite thats been made using it.

[wayfarer]

Well if it works for you, can't complain about it.
It is like cookie-cutter compared to hand made. It has it uses.
Sometimes I can sit for hours on a sprite even if I just want to do something really simple. I think it has some points.

[artisticdude]

I sometimes use downsized pictures to get an idea of a pose or a certain anatomy at sprite scale. I would not advise using downsized pictures as sprites, but using them as reference material can be quite helpful at times.