Stephen Stills said, August 21, 2010, 04:40:49 am

My retry of Troy

His head looks tall. I make that distinction because while the head seems to be too tall, it is actually just as tall as Ryu's is. Nonetheless, it looks too tall. Consider shrinking it down anyway.

A good way to practice cvs style is to copy palettes. In your case, I would copy the skin palette from another cvs character that has similar muscle definition to the character you are making. The reason you should pick someone with similar muscle definition is because muscles themselves create shadow on the limbs they are connected to. More muscular characters have more skin shades to imply the pits and falls of various muscle groups. Another reason is that you'll be able to get a general idea of how to shade certain muscle groups by looking at the sprite you got the palette from. Take my incomplete Feng sprite, for instance. That skin palette is infact, Ryu's. And from looking at how Ryu's sprite uses these colors to highlight and define his muscle groups, I was able to make good judgements and highlight and define Feng's muscle groups. As a side note, Feng and Ryu differ the most in their deltoid muscles. Feng has some weird shoulders!

Now, onto the torso. He's got a bit of a pot belly there! Part of the reason it looks that way is because of bad anatomy, and the other part is due to poor anti aliasing. I'll talk about the bad anatomy first.

While pectorals can take on any number of shapes (look at Feng Wei artwork. His look like man boobs!), yours just don't look like pecs. Because of the shading you used to outline where his pecs word be, they look like...well...man boobs! It looks like this character is supposed to be wearing a slightly baggy a-vest, right? These shirts are always tight around the upper chest area, so anything you do up there will look skin-tight when you do it on a sprite.



Here is an example of a character that wears a tight shirt. Do you see how the shadow basically defines the shape of the pectorals? Also, every A-shirt I've ever worn is tight all the way down to my waist. Look at how Yamazaki's shirt utilizes shading that implies the muscle groups underneath, but doesn't define them as much as a bare-chested would. That's what you should be aiming for. That will get rid of the pot-belliedness, and help define where his waist actually is, so his legs will seem longer. Also, keep in mind that the lightsource in cvs sprites is directly above the character. Because you have the highlight shade going so far down, it looks like his stomach is protruding out far enough to be catching the light!

Now, onto the subject of anti aliasing. The whole point of anti-aliasing is to blend colors into one another. It's hard to describe this concept without a picture, but I don't have time to do that so I'll do the best I can.

What you have done is called "pillow shading". Basically you have taken one color, placed it next to another, and outlined (or traced, both words could be used) the entire resulting edge with the shade inbetween. This is a no no! You are only to place this "in between" shade at areas where this jagged line created by placing these two colors together is noticeable.

(I know. Didnt I say I didn't have time to do this? Oh well )

This should explain it fairly well for you. Obviously, you have alot more shades to work with, and you have to deal with curves and completely different colors intersecting. How you deal with that is something you'll have to learn on your own.

Good luck!

@Jp many of the things I just said apply to you too, but your character isn't even human so alot of what I said doesn't apply too. Just work on your anti-aliasing and you'll be alright. Awesome job so far!