North Facing Loyalist bowman base frame

[tom030890]

I've got this far with block colours, but feel the legs aren't exactly right (the feet took forever, and I'm still not happy.)
I'm also unsure about the back of the bowman's cap, how low does it come? should hair stick out the bottom?

Advise on how to improve my spriting and how to advance this animation would be great.

[perseo]

Maybe the thing were bowmans put the arrows (I don't know its name) must be a little bigger. Also the belt it's not right at all (I think).
Maybe it's too thin. Other wise I think It's a good baseframe because the most of errors when spriting are when you star to colour it well and adding shadows (Or that what I think with my little experience).

[thespaceinvader]

It would need a lot of work to get it to mainline level, on basics like the angle at which he's standing, the relative heights in the frame of his feet - general positioning etc.

See what you can do with it, but it'll stay in the Workshop for now.

[tom030890]

Turned the bowman fractionally to face more NW.

Not sure i'm happy with the bow, but I have a feeling that the shading may be a touch more important, unless people can suggest a better carrying angle for it?

[zookeeper]

Turned the bowman fractionally to face more NW.

Wrong direction.

[tom030890]

I may have got slightly frustrated when I realised the bowman was facing the wrong way.

However, I managed to make a sprite that I think faces the right direction (NE).

I'm not happy with the head, or the feather, and perhaps the bow shape needs work.

Let me know what you think

[StDrake]

the head seems too wide, even in the cap I doubt it would for such a big lump, I also doubt that the cap would conceal the whole next as well
as for the bow try taking out a pixel from the inner part of its top and bottom

[tom030890]

Modified the Hat in both frames. Unsure about the neck, should there be hair there?
Modified the bow in the base frame

[perseo]

Now I think that the head looks a bit little. (not enought big for wesnoth proportions I mean but remember that I'm not a professional).

[tom030890]

I tried shading the north facing bowman. I'm not sure about the armour, I don't think I've pillowshaded it, but it doesn't look quite right.

[StDrake]

try cutting off a column or two of the leftmost pixels from the head, thinking he might need a bigger quiver too, the pants might be a little pillowed, but the head seems to be the most problematic

[thespaceinvader]

Two frames is nowhere NEAR enough for a new animation these days

[tom030890]

Redid the head and trousers, enlarged the quiver.

@tsi: I suspected that this was the case, except for defence animations, however without having done a lot of spriting I wanted to avoid the 'only the moving bits move' and wanted to see whether people had major complaints about the animation of the movement to a new pose. Doing multiple frames seemed a bit pointless if there was still uncertainty about the base frame.

Edit: Just realised that the sprite is too small
Edit 2: fixed with v3. I hope...

[thespaceinvader]

It's not awful, but it's not up to mainline standard. Something's bugging me about it, but I can't figure out what at the moment. I'll let it sit for a while and get back to you.

[shiremct]

Couple super quick and messy edits just to illustrate a few things:

Most of the edges of the body are round; in the locations circled red, you have more or less a straight line cutting off the neckline and ankles/legs. Giving these edges a curve gives the sprite the appearance of having depth and helps create a consistent point of view.

You had the belt way high on this guy, like urkel-style high, so I dropped it down quite a bit and that alone had a pretty major impact on the composition. Lastly, I tweaked up the boots a little. Not perfect, but should give you an idea of a better angle, the one you had was too high overhead. The boots shouldn't be so sharply angled up as the viewpoint isn't any higher than for units facing south.

I didn't pull up the south-facing bowman sprite, so I'm not sure what that hat is supposed to look like exactly of the top of my head, so I can't give a specific suggestion right this second, but it isn't quite working out at the moment.

Some of the outlines may be different in the example. You had used pure black in several areas so when I pasted it into paint and removed the black, it removed some outlines, so I hastily filled some in and just left some of the black alone, but it shouldn't get in the way of comparing the changes to yours. It's generally a good idea to remove the pure black, even if it's just replacing it with something that's very close to it. Hopefully that helps a little.