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Graphic Critique

Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2011 8:26 pm
by Ian A
I thought it'd be better to start a thread for the specific purpose of critiques even though I posted some tiles I'd been working on in another thread, but I'm sure the mods will chime in if it's not.

This image
Image

is a redo of this:
Image

I would appreciate some criticism. For example, in my new image there is a rock with a vertical line. To me this makes it REALLY easy to tell exactly where the image repeats, and I'm probably gonna rework that section.

Which version do you prefer?

Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2011 8:50 pm
by 3gengames
I can't notice the repeat unless I look for it, so I think it's good. The 2nd looks good to me! :)

Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2011 9:04 pm
by tokumaru
I like the new one better (the old one looked like dirt with rocks embedded, the new one actually looks like a pile of rocks), and I agree that it's not so easy to spot the pattern repetition unless you specifically look for it.

The grass could be less flat though, and you still have to do some different shading on the rocks to use as walls, like I suggested you in the other thread. I'd say you're on the right track! =)

Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 5:44 am
by Grumskiz
The rocks in the new picture look nice, but tokumaru is right, they need a little bit of shading.
The grass is very flat. Try removing the outline on the top and then play around with it a little and leave some spaces, so that looks more like grass and not like green carpet ;3
Another thing you can add later is little bushes or piles of grass that stick out. You'll need some more tiles for that, but it'll look far more interesting!

Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 8:08 am
by cartlemmy
To me it looks really good. I like it when grass doesn't look real on the ol' NES. The only thing that stands out to me is there are no tiles for the vertical edges.

Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 8:33 am
by tokumaru
cartlemmy wrote:I like it when grass doesn't look real on the ol' NES.
It doesn't have to look real, just less flat, IMO.
The only thing that stands out to me is there are no tiles for the vertical edges.
Yeah, those are the ones I said need special shading.

Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 10:30 am
by cartlemmy
tokumaru wrote:
The only thing that stands out to me is there are no tiles for the vertical edges.
Yeah, those are the ones I said need special shading.
Ah! My early morning mind didn't get what you meant :P

Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 12:45 pm
by Ian A
Okay, solid guys. Thanks for the opinions!

Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2011 7:43 pm
by Ian A
Okay, which grass style do you prefer? One of these two or the old one? Or blow all of them up and make a new one?

ImageImage

Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2011 7:56 pm
by Shiru
That 'shadow' under the grass could look like a ground surface, with grass on back plane, kind of pseudo-3d. That is confusing. If you break border between grass and ground, make it fuzzy, it will look more like shadow.

Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2011 8:52 pm
by tokumaru
Ian A wrote:Image
Definitely this one, but the top is still just a flat line... It should be an irregular surface, even if the collision mask itself isn't.

Like Shiru said, making the bottom more fuzzy would help too. Don't bee so conservative about attribute boundaries... even if the colors don't match, you can still give the grass a sense of continuation, like it overlaps the rocks a bit, rather than the sudden break you have now.

Most NES games that have grass like this use a dark color present in both palettes to make the transition, a color that can shade both the grass and the rocks/dirt. Even if the colors aren't the same the effect still works if they are similar enough (brightness is more important than hue).

Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2011 9:02 pm
by clueless
Contra has similar graphics in levels 1 & 3, if you were looking for another example. I'm not stating that Contra has excellent graphics, but I've always liked them. Then again, I'm not that picky about graphics.

Example:
http://www.geek.com/xyzimages/stories/a ... ra_nes.jpg

(Pardon the obscene Google Image search url. idk which pieces I can remove and have it still work, and I'm a bit too lazy to figure it out right now).
It doesn't have to be obscene if you use the [url=] syntax --MOD

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2011 8:36 am
by Ian A
Thanks you guys, for the responses again!

The Contra link was a good one. I don't know how I missed looking at that! Also, when looking at more NES games, there is similar terrain in the second level in Gimmick!, although, I'm pretty certain that white is the background color in that area, which helps out with the color blending between the areas, and is far more thought out than what I am doing at the moment...

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2011 9:52 am
by cartlemmy
This is the kinda thing I was thinking.

Image
nes7685 by cartlemmy, on Flickr

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2011 10:10 am
by Dwedit
cartlemmy wrote:This is the kinda thing I was thinking.

Image
nes7685 by cartlemmy, on Flickr
Sweet!