Ranger

[thespaceinvader]

Following discussion with Zookeeper, i thought i'd try some more challenging sprites. Here's a first try at the base from for the Human Outlaw Ranger. Just a base frame to date, thought i would get some input before i did anything more substantial.

[zookeeper]

All right...the basic problems: it's too blurry and small. I'm guessing you drew the sprite from scratch, right? What I personally do, and how I did the my versions of the new highwayman and huntsman, is mostly frankensteining. I draw small bits and pieces here and there myself, but mostly I copy legs, boots, hands and capes from existing images and then pushbrush them around a bit to get what I want. For me, it's a great deal easier that way as the colour schemes and shading patterns are automatically ok. Of course, there's hardly ever a frankensteined limb or whatever I don't touch at least a little bit afterwards manually, but it's a good way of getting the general structure and pose right, after which you can clean up the glitches and finetune the shading.

Basically, you need to mimic the style of the rest of the units much more closely: zoom in and take a closer look at how legs bend, how big a bunch of pixels are used for drawing fists, copy the face from some other unit and draw more dark borders for most kind of edges.

Also, feel absolutely free to change the pose as well if you want.

Now, no offense meant, it's possible that this particular task is a little bit too hard for you at the moment; the original ranger sprite is stylistically rather different and the trapper (or any other unit for that matter) doesn't provide you with much material for frankensteining. Feel free to work on animating existing units instead if this seems like too ungrateful a job

Since, as always, it's rather hard to explain which pixels should go where in words, I think I'll try to do a quick sketch of this myself as an example...stay tuned.

[thespaceinvader]

Actually, i did a lot of it by overpainting the original ranger sprite. SO i can see where i went wrong...

I'm off out for the afternoon, but i'll try to do a bit more when i get back.

[Shadow]

Stupid question but Fmunonz did an rework of the original already? Which is already in use in "Under a Burning Sun"

[zookeeper]

Stupid question but Fmunonz did an rework of the original already? Which is already in use in "Under a Burning Sun"

Uh...thanks. That had more or less eluded my attention.

[zookeeper]

All right, here's what I have so far. Legs from the assassin and head and upper body from the ruffian. I'm unsure as to whether have him wear the hood or not. He of course will have a proper cape as well, but I'm undecided about whether he should hold the sword in his right hand or have it on his back as in the old one. And obviously he needs TC somewhere and probably other colouring changes, but I didn't worry about that yet.

Also, this turned out a lot better than I expected.

[Iris]

Shadow: it's Under the Burning Suns (plural).
Zookeeper: I thought I read somewhere that mainline unit's sprites must not be made via frankensteining. I thought that was applied to builtin campaigns too.

[vonHalenbach]

Zookeepers Ranger-sketch looks really good! Only the face looks a bit too small. Like a childs head. The rest is very good!

Jet has to decide if it is proper material for mainline or not.

[zookeeper]

Zookeeper: I thought I read somewhere that mainline unit's sprites must not be made via frankensteining. I thought that was applied to builtin campaigns too.

It'd be silly if the work process mattered, despite the results. My way of "frankensteining" is probably well within the bounds of it being indistinquishable enough from drawing everything from scratch. Especially when someone like Jetryl does the final finishing touches.

[thespaceinvader]

Stupid question but Fmunonz did an rework of the original already? Which is already in use in "Under a Burning Sun"

This looks to me like a better overpainting of the current ranger sprite than mine, but still an overpainting - it's still quite small, in fact, doing a quick comparison, it's smaller than the current one, and therefore also smaller than mine, by a pixel or two.

I might give the ranger another blast this evening - I like the sprites you've done, zookeeper, but they don't shout 'ranger' at me. I'll give it another shot and see what i can come up with.

[Shadow]

Well it is an overpaint of the original aka mine. Zookeepers edit is on the right track just the trademarked cape is missing.

Hey free for all if you can improve it further.

[Jetrel]

[Iris]

Most meaningful post ever. Is it because zookeeper's frankensteining?

[Noyga]

Btw zookeeper's edit would need some TC part somewhere.

[Jetrel]

Most meaningful post ever. Is it because zookeeper's frankensteining?

More like "the whole thread".


The writing on the wall is that "jet has more work to do, because things are broken here and won't otherwise be fixed." Ugh.


Aren't you guys glad I'm immune to burnout?