[UMC] Level 4 ghoul

[doofus-01]

Hah, the eye/nipples thing was funny (Mattise? My memory and Wikipedia are failing right now...). I think I see where you're going with this, Dugi, but it only goes so far. Do you have a draft of the sprite?

[Dugi]

Hah, the eye/nipples thing was funny (Mattise? My memory and Wikipedia are failing right now...).

I was not copying anything specific, I just saw that the eyes were roughly where nipples might be so I decided to use the eyes as nipples. Similarity with that Mattise something is purely coincidental.

Do you have a draft of the sprite?

I want to make the sprite in a few days. I had to put this on rest for some time, I had to study. Since I have graduated today, I no longer have to study, I just need a few days of rest until I stop seeing equations every time I close my eyes.

[Dugi]

I have made it. Given that I could make sprites very quickly with 3D rendering, this one has 118 frames, for each direction it has 3 attack anims, one defending anim and a movement animation, about 5 frames each.

[ChaosRider]

Well...
1) I think it's too out of wesnoth sprites style, it's more in Baldur's Gate (if you have too much time you could try create mod/patch with new npc/quests/items/units classes)
2) Uch, a lot of these images, 118! In WOTG Part2 has 3 dragons sprites which is something near 2200 images... also in 3d style. How long it takes to create such a sprites and in what program you created it?
3) Still I think it's too slim as for a ghouls advancement.

[Dugi]

1) UMC is full of units with alien styles. As frankensteining is not usable in this case, I would not have drawn it better.
2) A sprite is a matter of seconds in this case, but setting all things up takes significantly longer, making the animations took me a few hours and making the model itself took me many hours. The program I used was Blender.
3) It is quite slim, but I was unable to picture anything fatter that can move. Some things look quite acceptable when drawn in 2D, but in 3D models it does not quite fit. I have no idea what is the position of legs of Ghast - is he sitting, standing, crouching or what?

[iceiceice]

Dugi: out of curiosity, did you use this shader or something similar? http://www.cgchannel.com/2015/02/this-f ... pixel-art/

Also, fwiw I think one serious difficulty with this is that pixel art usually requires the human to consciously enlarge the features they want to be readable, so like, the head is made larger than normal proportions would dictate, and inordinate numbers of pixels are reserved for the eyes and such. At least you really need this if you render the sprites as small as wesnoth sprites. I think this is why it's kind of hard to see the "mouths" in the sprite, they just get crushed down to lines.

The closest thing to an automatic solution I could think of is to use one of these "content aware scaling" techniques. I think the idea is a few years old now, its a bit hard to describe, here's a video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=019mu8FTy6M

There's a lot of free versions of this on the web for still images now, I don't know if there's a way to adapt the idea for animated sprites though. Maybe some combination of that with linear scaling would give better results?

/end rambling

[Dugi]

I haven't used that shader, because it's Windows-only (and it's an .exe downloaded from the depths of internet) and primarily because I haven't found it before. I have simply played with some settings until it looked relatively good. A shader like that might not work for sprites so small anyway.

The thing I have focused on were the tentacles. I considered those the most important part and the main maw and other parts were just meant to add similarities to the ghoul. Most of its attacks and many defend animations are using the tentacles.

I wonder what would those content aware scaling techniques do with something as small as sprites.

[johndh]

it's an .exe downloaded from the depths of internet

I'd stay away if it were me. You never know what malicious code those things might contain.

[Crow_T]

If I were to attempt to create a sprite from a 3D model I'd use ramps for specific colors, or a toon/cel shader for a more automatic one (it's been a while, but I'd guess a combination of both would work). Using ramps one can specify the exact colors of the shading per material and control what looks best in terms of a soft or hard edge between colors. I won't guarantee results, but that's what I would try

[Dugi]

I tried to use such a shader, Blender has some of those in possibilities for diffuse and specular layers, but it did not look quite good - I believe that it was because the colour levels were not applicable on all surfaces, one surface had a different incident angle than another and as a result, the levels looked good on one and not on another. Maybe it would have looked better if I had not used a texture.

I disabled shadow casting, it helped something but not everything. I have played with many parameters like light colour, outline width, specular colour, etc and it helped a bit.

[iceiceice]

Dugi: Btw I randomly remembered what the name is for the resizing thing, it's here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_carving

The do a much better explanation of it than the video I linked before.

I think the basic idea should work on images of any size, even sprites. But I didn't try it myself, so take it fwiw.

They mention some stuff about marking some "protected regions" like faces that shouldn't be touched no matter what by the algorithm. I guess that's what made me think of the sprites.

Ahh it feels good to remember something that you tried before and couldn't... like a splinter has been removed.

[Dugi]

I've investigated and I found that it's in GIMP under the name Liquid Resize. I have experimented with that, this is what I managed to create:

Shrinking other parts than head

abomination_liquid_rescale.png (7.48 KiB) Viewed 4900 times

Expanding head

abomination_liquid_rescale_2.png (10.72 KiB) Viewed 4896 times

I somehow don't think that it's better. If I try to keep the shape of the tentacles as well as head, it either ruins the thing completely, deforms some other vital parts or does pretty much no change.

Thanks anyway, I know of some application where it will be useful.

[iceiceice]

Thanks anyway, I know of some application where it will be useful.

Okay, good for you. I was glad to see the results of your experiments.