Random doodles: climbing skeleton WIP

[homunculus]

Ah, thanks for showing me what you meant. Nit-picking is actually appreciated.[...]

i wonder which of those in the previous post was a nitpick?
btw you have an opportunity to return the favor if you wish, i don't think the fish is anywhere beyond crit, and i am wondering if other people see the same flaws as i do.

here is an example from Zerovirus which i quickly remembered, see the bright line at edge of the shoulder of the last unit (light seems to be from above-south-west):

though the eye (or brain) might also create more contrast where different shades meet, without the explicit bright colored line.
i wonder what would be your opinions about it?

[battlestar]

Sorry, I certainly didn't mean it that way. When I saw "not trying to suggest a perfect solution, that is up to you." I thought you meant that you were suggesting how to make it perfect but it's up to me to decide on how perfect to make it be. Then I thought, yeah, I'd like any suggestions to make things perfect, even if someone were to nit-pick. I've been thinking of "nit-picking" in a positive light as it had become an integral part of my professional life. One I misunderstood what you said, two I didn't express myself well there.

As for the fish, I suspect that you are talking about the contrast isn't very strong at certain places, perhaps under the fins. The shape, color and saturation in my opinion are very good. I need to look at it more and think about it more to come up with a more satisfying answer. (I'm pretty slow at this sort of thing, that's why I've been rotating between different sprites, so I have time to think about them in between.)

[homunculus]

[...]Wouldn't it be fun to watch someone struggle for eternity?

maybe this sums up the reason why i crit and nitpick?
but maybe not, i would rather leave people puzzled about it.

i see you were thinking i did not attempt a perfect intermediate frame because i did not want to force you in any way.
somwhat, but mainly because i did not feel like devoting a lot of time on this (having to draw the whole body, and trying out several versions, etc), and because i did not want to snatch your work from you.
rather to illustrate the concept of smooth animation (which the intermediate leg position attempted to accomplish).
and you should be way more competent in climbing animation by now than myself, anyway.
btw there is a little issue with the climbing animation that might start to annoy you when you play it faster, or maybe later when you are using it in game : )
in the spirit of sarcasm about elevated self-image, i would call it 'prophesy'.

from what you have done so far, the fireplace looks most promising to me as far as perfection goes.
my very personal opinion about what might be changed is attached, but just one quick redraw, mostly copy-paste resize and recolor, again i didn't do may iterations to try to make it better, but to have a picture so that there would be less confusion.
1) just used one color to brighten the edge, maybe it looks ok, though.
2) some geometry problems were around this corner, and it looks like some of it is too bright.
3) this corner might be brighter, maybe even in the spirit of foreground having more contrast than background.
4) the light from the fire looks muddy here, i neither did saturation properly, nor adjusted the intensity of light and shading of the stone, nor put some transparent glow on the floor.
5) it looks like this edge should not be black but should be lit red the same way as the inside. also, the red light inside the fireplace looks too static.
6) the fire was just 3 frames of mainline campfire, skewed and scaled smaller, did not saturate it properly, did not try sharpening, did not try smoothing the animation, did not try adding a fourth frame, did not properly remove outlier flames from the upper-right.
edit: also, the whole front face could use slightly more light on it, right now it looks almost as dark as the side.
edit2: there is no diminishing perspective in wesnoth, the opposite is seen in the lower left.
edit3: did not check at all if the edge directions properly fit wesnoth indoors terrain perspective (this should have been the first thing to check, as you probably wouldn't want it to appear out of alignment with the rest of indoors graphics).
edit4: at the side face, the dark lines between the stones generalize into a diagonal, you might want to mess it up a bit.

[battlestar]

i see you were thinking i did not attempt a perfect intermediate frame because i did not want to force you in any way.
somwhat, but mainly because i did not feel like devoting a lot of time on this (having to draw the whole body, and trying out several versions, etc), and because i did not want to snatch your work from you.

That wasn't it either. I couldn't expect you to do my work. How about we leave it at that I was trying to say that I appreciated your comments and they were very helpful

Could you expand more on the issue with the climbing animation when played faster and when in game?

Anyways, I'll work on the fireplace later today. Thanks for the detailed pointers.

[homunculus]

Could you expand more on the issue with the climbing animation when played faster and when in game?

has been done already, but you seem to be thinking in slightly different direction right now, and therefore there is no use in repeating again, you will most likely just feel harassed.
and you will probably be able to correct it when it starts to annoy you without major harm to the rest of the animation.

edit:
previously the suggestions were like:
try not to use diminishing perspective, verify that the edges are aligned with other interior graphics, try not to use a dark line at an edge that is facing the light direction, and other generic formal stuff like that.

i might add to the boring stuff that after looking at the fireplace against a darker gray background than the forum white or light yellow, the shading contrast on the side seems to be too high.
if light direction is at a small angle to a rough surface, like the front face, it produces the high contrast between light and shadow, like you have already done, but the side of the fireplace should be where the full shadow starts, and that should be shaded by the diffuse reflex light from the room and the nearby wall and floor, and should be shaded with a bit less contrast, like visible in the shade in the niche (bit more contrast than in this video, i guess, because in your case it is not really a niche.):
http://youtu.be/8RAxL79kNUU?t=1m
some experimenting against different gray backgrounds, maybe, to arrive at a reasonable compromise.
and also, the vertical edge that is towards the viewer might loose the dark line to the lighting similar to front face, and that might make the sides of the front face more equal in width.

ok, that was the boring stuff (in my opinion).
now, what might be more interesting, when you get to animating the fire and shading the interior of the fireplace, which is the likely focus point of the viewer's attention, you will probably have some brighter flame passing near the visible inside wall of the fireplace.
if you treat this brighter flame as a point light source moving near a rough surface (preferably done in a special separate layer to keep things adjustable), you might be able to subtly trick the viewer's brain into intuitively measuring the distance between the passing flame and the inside wall (challenging, but the part of the image being so small, it might be worth a try).
which might create a feeling of lit space with 3d volume inside the fireplace and an unexpected level of bringing the scene to life, rather than just 'well, it is a fire in a fireplace'.

also, when wood burns, the heat first breaks down some organics which vaporize and burst out of the wood, resulting in a foggy effect (hard to tell if some of it might be moisture, but here you see it suddenly igniting in the lower right):
http://youtu.be/LKaAOpQQ5bw?t=3m30s
some ambient lighting could be another of the more interesting effects that you might be able to pack into this tiny space.

(generally, the videos do not represent the fire and the lighting of the interior of a fireplace correctly in my opinion, might be because of the dynamic range of the video camera used, or because of peculiarities of human perception)

[battlestar]

Bug egg