Hello again guys! Okay so if some of you are wondering why there hasn't been a lot of progress on my Link re-spriting, one of the reasons is because I've been a little more focused on this, at the moment. Doesn't mean I'm not going to finish Link, It's just that this is something that I figure shouldn't take too long. Now I absolutely love Infinite for completely taking the old Cloud char and completely revamping his gameplay to beautiful standards (no offense to the original creator). Sure, his sprites aren't the greatest, but with practically all the specials from just about every title he's been in, and great diverse combo's to destroy your enemy, he's just about the Cloud I've always wanted for Mugen. However there's been one slight thing that's been utterly bugging me with every match I play with him, and as you can obviously tell from the title, it's his stance. Now normally I'm alright for this kind of thing and don't get too worried about it, but I find Cloud's stance to be rather iconic in the FF7 franchise. So I took it upon myself to try and handle this little pet peeve of mine and as a bonus, maybe upload it for downloading, for others if they feel the same. Here's how it's looking so far.Original New I'm kinda iffy about the shading on the right arm. Here's what I'm basing it on. The movement probably won't be exactly identical. So uhh..yeah. Tell me what you guys think.
Taybear took the words out of my mouth. Bend that arm at the elbow a little. It looks too rigid right now.Good call in doing this, though. I hadn't even thought about it but it makes a lot of sense.
Okay how's the elbow on this? Tried to tilt it a bit. Also added more of the handle to his Buster Sword as well.
So I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out whether I should try bending his arm, or go for the straight look. While the reference is straight from Final Fantasy 7, it seems to be slightly inconsistent with other games.For example, here's his poses from Dissidia and Kingdom Hearts. It seems to boil down to which stance just looks better. The original, or the classic. :/
It looks quite good, but I feel that in the transition he lost some of the definition in his arm (being mostly noticed in the artists left) and perhaps thin them out slightly around the joint, it is looking quite good though.
I would say tweak it a tiny bit if you can, the adjustment seems like it should be minor if anything, but I think it's useable in its' current state too. Hmm...maybe the angle of the arm could be a bit more also, the way I see it myself is that it seems difficult to replicate the straightness of the arm if you do try and do the pose yourself.
Alright so I tried doing a little clean-up like you said and here's how it looks. Tried to even out the joints a bit and such. Really small stuff.But I think I'll try and bend it a bit more. If I can't come up with anything, I'll just stick with this one.
I like the iconic stance too, but won't that stance hinder some of his basic attacks n terms of animation?
This is something I've actually taken into account. What I plan on doing is basically just replacing the stance, and seeing how everything else goes from there. A rather unprofessional method, but that's my plan. If there ends up being too many disruptions, I'll call a quits for the mean time, and head back over to Link. For now though, I just want to see how far I can take it.
Thankfully, it looks like his sprites are already some-what jittery, and might proceed seamlessly. So adding in this stance might not end up too bad.
Okay so I added some of the details from his arm in the first pose onto this new one. I feel it's definitely a significant change.
SuperGohanSunderland said, February 07, 2014, 04:35:19 amthe line you drew to define the bend in the back arm is good, put that back into your most recent stance.
Okee dokee! How's this? Also, should I leave the shoulder muscles on the background arm, or take that out too?Small detail: The holes in the Buster Sword are now transparent.
I'd fix that big patch of darker shade on the background arm, try to keep the line in that one but add in some of the detail work of the previous one I commented on.If that makes sense?You're getting there.
HereI was trying to explain how to improve the shading on the interior muscle lines on the background arm, but it was easier for me to just do it.I killed the transparency by accident but it should be easy enough to fix.
Hmm, it's a slight detail but it helps a bunch. I see what you meant now. Nice job, and don't worry. The transparency's no biggie. Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and move on to the animation now. This is when it gets interesting..
And I am just about done. Most of the animating was just replacing the arms of the old stance with the new one.Original New Thinking about maybe changing up the speed or something.
Looking pretty good, I may suggest maybe some slight movement on the lower legs and feet, as it feels like his top have is just gradually sinking into his knees and then lifting up again.
Maybe gve the new arms a little more tone...they are a little fatter then the original..but this stance looks great
Okay so I did some polishing, rearranging a lot of the misplaced colors on his pallet, and overall just giving the sprites a good clean up. So I think it's about time to release this. The nice part is that most of the sprites and animations ended up blending in pretty well with the stance, meaning minimal modification was required.C-G-U said, February 08, 2014, 10:38:24 pmLooking pretty good, I may suggest maybe some slight movement on the lower legs and feet, as it feels like his top have is just gradually sinking into his knees and then lifting up again.Sorry, but I'd rather not tweak anything with the feet or lower legs. I've kind of hit the point where I don't wanna mess up anything that's there. Plus, this is about how the original looks. But It turns out that in the last one I'd posted, I'd forgotten to implant a frame which happened to be where Cloud's legs went slightly more down. So I'm not sure if that will completely fix your problem, but I hope it helps. If you really feel it's that much of a problem though, I'll look into it. Thanks for the suggestion though.Here's the polished one. Slightly sped it up too.So now's the tricky part. I just got a MediaFire account and uploaded the character for everyone. Since this is my first upload, nobody get too surprised if the link doesn't work. Tell me how it goes.https://www.mediafire.com/folder/x06c44blebd18/Cloud
It does look a bit smoother that way yeah, in the first one it looked a tad slow and too sudden, I think that'll work fine then.
It works? Well that's good to know. And yeah, sorry about it not being in a zip folder. Still figuring stuff out on the site.
