Muzzbook

[OtherMuzz]

this is out of my comfort zone... need to keep pushing.

[OtherMuzz]

Ok that painting was shit... it was never inspired, but still i had to do better.

[Samszym]

y'know, I like the design of the first one better as a composition, the strong white light helped break up the space and give some variety. To me this one feels like too much red. Awesome that you're playing around with such crazy colors though!! It's cool seeing how it still works since you got the values right.

[OtherMuzz]

I certainly think the first one is more filmic. With strong filmic rim lights i like to leave them to last, as it is very hard to be accurate with sculpting form with a strong rim light. I'll probably add it into the second when i add light back in. However i was mostly focusing on rendering quality and anatomy what i feel i did really badly on the first.

I also realized i made a boo-boo with the lighting on the first, in the terminator of the strong lighting one there should be a blend back to normal colours as there is a pert where normal local colour would shine through.
Unless it was a red light so bright it over exposed the camera! (yeah that's not gonna happen!)

Thanks for the comments dude!

[OtherMuzz]

Haha i just keep on iterating on this after doing studies and so on.

[OtherMuzz]

I did a bit more work on this thing. I'm done.

Now devin challenged me to make a full illustration... so i guess that's next.

[OtherMuzz]

not quite yet...

[Tygerson]

That red painting is so cool! What a fun, brain stretching experiment!

Thanks for the lighting explanation, by the way--I was so stumped.

[crackedskull]

That red painting is pretty interesting. Fish boss is awesome, love the way you portraid him as he's gasping for air, reminds me of that episode in Spongebob.

[Finnjamin]

Glad to see you're still kicking, Muzz. Regarding your current study of faces here's something I quickly cut out of what I'm working on;




You're rendering fine, but your works are still wanting, this means your brush control is great, but your thinking about it will have to develop next.

Colours, I recently found that the solution is also the simplest, take the ambient colour of your image and blend towards a strong flesh tone, add in almost transparent dabs of bright colour depending on what's relevant to the facial area.
For cheeks, and nostrils, red.
Lips, eyelids, and nose tip, are purple.
Shadows will be close to the ambient background colour.

And again, pressure-controlled opacity is your friend. You can be as subdued or bombastic as you like, but the answer for colours is always between the [ambient background colour] and the [strong accurate colour].

Textures. Faces are rough, and your colour choices aren't strong enough and your lines are too lazily defined for me to assume that you're going for the smooth stylized look. So you should paint faces as rough, flexible surfaces. This means patterns of texture and smoothness according to light and the angle of the surface.
Get a sort of dot-scattering brush, give it roundness jitter and pressure-control opacity, use that to perform the major light-shadow blends, depending on face type and (again) angle you can employ a simple brush to scratch some elongated lines in the nose, as pores there might have oddly linear shadows and highlights.

I realize Muzz that I may have over-explained this for you personally, I only did so for posterity.

Finnjamin out.

[OtherMuzz]

Thanks Fin, I'm not sure i follow you on all of these points. I'm not currently working on my painting, so i'll have a re-read when i'm going back through that stuff. (i didn't see this update as i've been super busy)

EDIT: just to nitpick though

"Shadows will be close to the ambient background color."

Well kinda.... actually no not at all. Grey are always the ambient color and the weaker the chroma of a local color the stronger the effect.

But i totally agree on the texture part. I really need to work out what I'm aiming for. Absolute realism, or stylized, i keep ending up in an awkward place in the middle.

Anyhow... almost finished this sprite set.

[Madzia]

wow the sprite is super awesome, i especially like transformation to super hero :D the motion in idle isn't to strong maybe? it's hard to say in compilation but compering to others it have more movement than rest i'm guessing ;p

[OtherMuzz]

Yeah i'm not too happy with the idle. I find subtle motion much much harder to do than energetic. I might eventually redo it but i do actually need to release this game at some point.

But thanks!

[Samszym]

Oh man, that sprite is super fun to watch! I definitely want to play your game :D
I think that wrist flick and ight at the beginning might be going by too fast to see what's going on.

[OtherMuzz]

Cheers dude!

it's strange having these in the game on the iPhone seems to exacerbate all the problems in the animation... i think i might have to double the frame count of the idle :/. (after fixing jittering)

[OtherMuzz]

something a bit different than usual :).

[OtherMuzz]

Messing with that riley head stuff that madzia linked to.

Rad

[OtherMuzz]

[Madzia]

congratz!! :D let us know when it will be available on itunes!

[OtherMuzz]

Thanks! The game is out, but sadly i failed to market it... so i made it to 250 sales before it dropped off... i think i'm going to cut my losses and release a performance update then let it into the world free as a bird.