Rise of the Orcs - artwork on page 3

[homunculus]

Oh, thanks for the clarification, now that I read my previous posts again it took me a several minutes to understand what the hell I wrote there myself.

Human assassin is level 3 thief in the game.

As for pillow shading, this is such a common mistake, Google can help you find some tutorials that explain it quite well.
I have wondered why it is such a common pitfall, maybe it is an attempt to force the viewer to see the outlines, or fear of non-smooth gradients near the outlines?

[dipseydoodle]

Ok. I do understand what pillow shading is, and how to eliminate it, that is not the problem. I just wasn't sure where it was at, that's all.

Thanks again!

EDIT: just used another computer to view my sprites... They are dark!

[homunculus]

Ok. I do understand what pillow shading is, and how to eliminate it, that is not the problem. I just wasn't sure where it was at, that's all.

Ok, I see. You don't see where it is at.

My previous mention of pillowing must have been not extremely constructive.
The problem is that pillow-shading is in the brain.

maybe it is an attempt to force the viewer to see the outlines, or fear of non-smooth gradients near the outlines?

Maybe you should try to reproduce a photograph on a, say, 800x800 image as a shaded sketch, trying not to get into small details (because when you scale it to Wesnoth sprite size, the details would not be visible anyway), and then compare to the original image. Also, it may be a good idea to create a Wesnoth sized sprite from a larger photograph and compare to the down-scaled photograph, like in http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php ... =barbarian. Shading is not about smoothing the outlines towards the center.

EDIT:
I found a little vagueness here, the references that I attempted to suggest would need to have a dominant single light source to be useful. Light from too many directions would just be confusing. Google image search for "single light source" would be a nice illustration of what I meant (no images there that would be suitable for making sprites, though), it is better if the lighting is somewhat similar. This is how I made quickest progress myself, this is why I suggest it.

[dipseydoodle]

That sounds like a good idea. I'll try that. Right now I'm taking a couple days off from developing this right now.

Thanks!