53 replies to this topic

[JuneoftheMearkat]

So I'm new here and got interested in this site because of all the cool hacking information and tools. Posting a few mugs for character concepts on a potential hack. I have quite a few others I'm working on, but I have a tendency to flop back and forth between them instead of finishing one all at once .

Constructive feedback is super appreciated, particularly on color palettes.



(Note that the eyes are closed on purpose; in a similar vein of Oscar from FE9)

[GhastStation]

hey these are pretty good!

[JuneoftheMearkat]

Finished a female reskin of the basic pirate attack. Working on the critical and hand axe frames. The reskin is supposed to match the mug concept, but I'd love any suggestions for changing the design (Particularly the face, since it still uses most of Eleanor's features).



Female pirate is still super manly XD.

[SmashedFish]

Hi there, JotM! (TWEWY reference?)

For your portraits:

First one: Outstanding overall! The one thing that comes to mind is that her shirt should be shaded around her cape (or whatever the purple thing is) to make it look like it's actually on top of it, as opposed to the shirt being a monotone.

Second one: Her undershirt should be shaded as opposed to monotone, and there should be some contrast between her hair and face, but other than that, another incredible portrait.

Third one: Again, there should be contrast between light (bandana) and dark (skin), but other than that, I love it. The shoulder scar and broken armband are nice touches.

Great job overall!

[JuneoftheMearkat]

Ooooo, good call about the shading of the shirt; I forgot about that when I was editing the cape to cover her other shoulder . As for a darker skin tone, I've noticed that the nomad characters tend to have a slightly darker tone, maybe I should go with that? Or someone like Dieck, hm...

Also I totally did not intend my username to be a reference to TWEWY, but I will say right now that I freaking love that game (so much that I have every collectible item and the blacklit planet pin set), so I may have done it subconsciously XD. It's actually a partial reference to a character from the game 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, if you've ever played that one. Thanks for the feedback! If you have anything about the battle animation too, I would def appreciate it .

[SmashedFish]

Oh no, I didn't mean darkening the skin tone (though that's definitely an option if you feel like doing it, could be nice). I just meant that



this area of her skin could use some contrast from her bandana. If I were to do it quickly to give you an example, it would look like this.



As for the battle sprite, I think she looks good! I don't have the time to compare her to the male pirate right now, but my main suggestion would be to paste the poses side-by-side and look at them at100% screen zoom. This will give you an idea of whether or not they read as having different builds ingame, which is the important thing. At a glance, though I'd say you did well.

Also, you and I aren't alone in liking TWEWY, haha. Several other members here are also obsessed with it. I've heard of 999 and I know a few things about it, but not much, so thanks for explaining that for me. I just asked because it looked extremely similar to Jupiter of the Monkey, which is one of my favorite brands.

[JuneoftheMearkat]

And here it is, a female mercenary. My god this took forever. I put the original sheet next to my new one for comparison, since at first you might think that I just lengthened the hair, but every frame has seriously been edited to make her look female X_X. She still has Raven's palette since I'm not changing color right now . Also, see if you can spot the spinning frames I didn't replace yet (cuz they're not important). Lady is on the left.


Next, I made a female thief re skin with a braid to match my mug. I used Leila's animation as the base, and the dress isn't supposed to be that shade of blue, but the cloak was changed to match the mug. Mug has been fixed up a bit, mostly in the mouth area.

[JuneoftheMearkat]

 Braid Thief Regular Sequence.gif   6.8KB   0 downloads

 

 Braid Theif Critical Sequence.gif   8.96KB   0 downloads

 

Soo I don't usually make gifs X_X... but these came out okay. Seeing everything in motion makes me think of ways I could improve these. I think I'm going to replace the pants on the female merc with tights (instead of just thinning them out). Also thief only has hair edited if its hard to see the difference. I tried to post a gif of the female merc animation, but its not working for some reason (file size? it is bigger than the others).

 

 Attempt 1.png   2.57KB   0 downloads

 

The thief the custom animation is for. Added a shoulder bag of some kind to make the design look less bland, hopefully.

 

 Chloe.png   1.88KB   0 downloads

 

Concept mug for a pegasus knight (youngest sibling of three, typical I know). Going with a pinkish-red color scheme for the uniforms as opposed to the blue used in FE6 and FE7.

 

 Raine.png   2.58KB   2 downloads

 

This is the mug for the female merc. As of now, its the least refined of the characters I plan to keep, so I'm trying to think of ways to improve it.

 

 Younger Brother (Vain Lord).png   4.33KB   1 downloads

 Vain Lord Battle.png   1.37KB   0 downloads

 

This guy is a work in progress. Want to mess around with changing the hair some as well as the collar of the armor set. 

 

I have some other mugs in the works (and most of the ones posted here have complete face maps and minimugs), feedback is appreciated, now that I have some time to try things out .

 

 

[Fire Blazer]

ooh, nice animation. the timing seems a little odd but maybe that's just me. if you care, you could always reference the timings of the original thief animation and try to mimic those (assuming you haven't already)

 

haha that look on the thief's face... is it supposed to be a "oh, I'm TOTALLY trustworthy! ^_^" face? XD

 

the other mugs/portraits look solid, I'm not a great spriter so I can't give much good critique or anything but they seem pretty cool. I guess the girls seem like they have really small bodies though, haha

[SmashedFish]

Quick feedback on your portraits:

 

1: She looks like a very fun character, haha. I'd maybe move her closed eye down by like a pixel, but that's all I can think of.

2: Maybe it's just me, but I'd move her entire face down a little. I dunno. Also, she seems incredibly lightly armored for a pegasus knight (not that they have defense at all, really, but still).

3. I like her concept a lot, but she needs more shading on her hair and scarf(?).

4. Oh boy, even this guy's portrait gives off a lot of character. I feel like I could pretty accurately predict what sort of personality he has. His battle sprite also looks nice, well done!

[JuneoftheMearkat]

Would you happen to know where to reference the timings? Because that would be awesome . What I ended up doing was downloading gifs from FEplanet and extracting the frames from them to get the positions of the sprite (as opposed to just the poses), then pasting my frames over them. It worked okay for the most part, but the frames all play at the same rate, which may account for the differences hmm... Also in-game I know there are screens that flash in-between contact frames and pauses when the hp goes down, so I wonder if I could fix that somehow.

 

Also yes the thief is totally not someone you can rely on to be consistent with their motives XD. As for the small bodies, yeah that's kind of true isn't it? The pegasus knight is supposed to be small but I could probably make the merc girl look a bit more beefy in the shoulders (but still svelte).

 

 

 

Yay got around the merc animation upload issue! All of her crit/dodge frames are done too, just haven't gotten around to making a gif yet . 

 

Oh for SmashedFish, I'm highly curious to know what kind of personality you think the last guy has. I have profiles and the beginnings of backstory written up for most of the characters (which I'm choosing not to reveal right now in the early stages, not like anyone would be super hyped XD), so it would be cool to see if there are any conflicts or similarities between other peoples impressions.

[Snow]

Cool Mugs, the lady thief is cool. The Ephraim/Lyon sprite looks awesome.

[SmashedFish]

Oh for SmashedFish, I'm highly curious to know what kind of personality you think the last guy has. I have profiles and the beginnings of backstory written up for most of the characters (which I'm choosing not to reveal right now in the early stages, not like anyone would be super hyped XD), so it would be cool to see if there are any conflicts or similarities between other peoples impressions.

 

I could be wrong, but at a glance, I'd say he looks like a smug, haughty sort of character. His expression also comes off like he's either disgusted at something or suspicious.

[JuneoftheMearkat]

 

 

Second is not my animation obviously , just put it up for comparison. I think due to palette limitations a skirt was more feasible than different colored tights for female merc.

 

Smashedfish you are correct in all your assumptions about him XD. Hah, someday I will be competent enough at hacking to start putting things together, someday... Might try full customs too (I've done similar sprite portraits for other games, and they took forever X_X) at some point, but splicing gives a good base to work with which is nice. I can edit pieces to be different than the original but don't have to start them completely from scratch all the time . Has anybody else here been working on anything lately?

[Fire Blazer]

For animation timings, there's just doing it off pure eyesight (looking at it in-game or looking at animations rips — I think you can find most if not all of the GBAFE ones here — http://www.bwdyeti.com/fe/anims/),though I suppose you could also try ripping the animations from the actual games using hacking methods and using those timings as a basis for yours. Granted, the units of time or whatever are almost definitely different, so an animation frame with an in-game "time" of 10 might actually need a GIF animation time of like 5 (just making these #'s up), but relatively speaking, you would know that if you get the speed of one frame right, you could calculate what the speeds of all the other frames by keeping it relative to that frame.

 

It's a bit of work but yeah, pretty much if you at least eyeball it/use a reference you should be able to get it decent enough that it doesn't look odd, which is pretty much all that matters, IMO. XP

[Oblivion Knight]

Raine.png

 

This is the mug for the female merc. As of now, its the least refined of the characters I plan to keep, so I'm trying to think of ways to improve it.

 I know you're saying it's the least defined character, but I'm not exactly sure why, but I like her. She's a cutey. Maybe the hair style and design? Either way I like it the most out of your other mugs. 

 

It's been over two years since I sprited anything and I feel bad trying to come up with criticism but having not much to say when I know people want it.

[JuneoftheMearkat]

 I know you're saying it's the least defined character, but I'm not exactly sure why, but I like her. She's a cutey. Maybe the hair style and design? Either way I like it the most out of your other mugs. 

 

It's been over two years since I sprited anything and I feel bad trying to come up with criticism but having not much to say when I know people want it.

 

Hm really ? "Least defined" I guess is kind of a vague term, I actually have worked on her quite a lot. I guess what I meant is I don't have a clear vision for the body/armor yet despite going back and forth on certain pieces :/. I think I'm gonna make her collar into a scarf of some kind. She's supposed to have a bit of a torn, messy appearance so maybe I should fray up the hair more and make it flare out at the ends. And no worries, I appreciate comments of any sort ^^. Sometimes just hearing the impression other people get of a character can be very informative. Any opinions on the others?

[JuneoftheMearkat]

Haha big infodump update, I was bored.

 

 

Finally made a gif of the crit animation (not timed properly, its just to show the frames). Mug dump!

 

Updated people:

 

 

Armor has been changed a bit on this guy, but the big thing was decorating the headband. I really think I should change the hair somehow, but the problem is the spliced hair is almost exactly what I imagined for the character, but I don't want it to be identical to the original T_T.

 

 

Blondie has a new face (no more Louise haha). I may clean up the eyes, but I'm happy with the way it turned out, so moving on to customizing the cloak should be next.

 

 

 

These guys aren't actually new, I've had them for a while, but they need more details. Mr. Earing (a fighter class) needs a vest of some kind (and a redesigned necklace). Grumpy guy  (an archer) is mostly done, but needs cleanup in the face and I can't for the life of me decide on a palette for him (but the hair can't be changed, it has to stay black).

 

 

AAAND, this is my latest frustration. Need more work as usual , especially shading cleanup and properly aligning the head, but I think the hair is about there, maybe need to flip the shading on the bun and detail the cape more. She's supposed to be a troubadour.

 

Yaaay, random stuff!

 

[SmashedFish]

Animation- good stuff! It'll look great when timed right.

 

1- The headband looks great! If you're happy with the hair, then don't sweat changing it too much.

 

2- You may be on to something with cleaning up the eyes. They're not bad, per se, but they could be neatened up some. That aside, she's looking good so far.

 

3- Your palette isn't too bad, imo. I'd recommend changing his shirt or whatever the brown thing is just off the top of my head, either by changing the colors or re-shading it.

 

4- I don't have too much to say about this guy yet, except that there should probably be some shading where his arm meets his shirt. Also, he seems a bit slender for a fighter, but that's neither here nor there.

 

5- You basically pointed out everything that I was going to say yourself. Good luck with the bun, that looks plain unfair to do to yourself.

[Snow]

I agree with Smashed, that headband looks awesome. Is it full custom or did you splice it from someone? I can't tell who if you did.