Slime Salad

just a small leap in difference.

Those speech portraits totally make me think of Betrayal At Krondor in an awesome way!

Whoa.

Are these also edited with a version of your portrait generator? I'm going to assume not.

I wonder if those elliptical backgrounds aren't going to look a bit odd in-game though.

@BMR: How you doin' that? Blender?

sheamkennedy wrote:@BMR: How you doin' that? Blender?

A clever combination of the GIMP, MakeHuman/Poser/Blender, stock art, my own face, a mirror, and good old-fashioned pixel art-ing.

For the most part, the process starts out with a rough mock-up at around 200×250. I get the mock-up from (in descending order of sourcing) stock, MakeHuman/Poser/Blender, a photograph of my own face, or just rough painting in the GIMP.

Typically, the base images don't look quite like what I want them to look like. At the medium-resolution stage, I paint in features such as hair (probably the most time-consuming part), focus and sharpen the eyes, draw in features such as scars, define wrinkles and shading, etc...

After that, it's scaled down to 64×80. I then reduce it to 256 colors as per my master palette. Then, comes the process of pixel art-ing everything to look the way I want it. At this stage, I refine the pixel art, fix things that have been distorted, etc... For the most part though, there's also a great deal of complete redrawing of certain features (I'm looking at you noses, eyes, and lips) as they didn't survive the scaling-down process all that well.

All in all, a single portrait takes anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes, with the bulk (more than half, I guess) being taken up by the pixel-arting stage. That's mostly because while having something look good is a relatively simple matter at a scaled up size, once things get scaled down, you lose features, others get too pronounced, things get distorted, etc...

I can post a step-by-step if anyone's interested. Also, if anyone is interested, you can send me a shot of your face (framed roughly the same as the portraits I've posted thus far) and I can stick you into Legacy as an NPC.

In the meantime, here are some new portraits. Same deal as the previous ones, old ones on the left, new ones on the right.






I've got a lot more done (am currently at around 70ish or so), but I prolly won't be posting those here just yet, as some of the other portraits I've been making use stock I've collected from dA and I'd rather post them there first in order to inform the stock-providers before putting them anywhere else on the web. I do have some other portraits up on dA though, but nowhere near as many as I've got on my hard drive. If anyone wants to <a href="http://fav.me/d7jdy45">take a look</a> at them, feel free.

@BMR: That's so awesome. I really like the whole concept. At first I was thinking it is time consuming but I actually just realized it takes me about the same amount of time to draw portraits from scratch.

So if I was to send you a picture of my face for your game, then you'd want the picture at 200x250px?

Also, did you sign up to contribute to the pixel art book? I think something like this would make for some good material for the book.

Yeah, I signed up for the pixel-art book.

And as for time-consuming, strangely enough, I find it more time consuming to start from scratch (at 64×80, that is) as at the stage, I'd have to first set down the flats, add in the shadows and highlights, stick features in, render, etc... With this method, a lot of the large, bulky work is out of the way with the base image. All that's left really is the rendering of the smaller details and all.

Doesn't have to be at 200×250, can be any size really. I just resize to that resolution once I'm working, as it's small enough to be a good approximation of the low-res graphics it'll wind up being, while being big enough to work with larger features more easily.

Really neat. I may have to experiment with this. I like the idea of scaling down a reference image.

I'm not sure what you had in mind for the pixel art book but I'd sure be happy showing of some of these. Really cool concept. I'll send you a photo of my face later. I thought I had some on my computer but I guess I cleaned out my pictures recently.

I decided to take a character from one of my older projects and retool her into my new project

I can definitely see some improvement on my part. Thoughts?

A great deal of improvement indeed. I rather like the new sprite, has a lot of charm and character.

@Master K: I think that's great! Definitely a great deal of improvement.

Amazing jobs! Makes me wanna do more pixel before and afters.

The leaves...so many leaves...

@Master`K: Lookes really cool!
I like how you make use of shapes and shadwos.
And the leaves look just awsome!
By the way who is this autumn lady?

@^ That Autumn Lady is known as the Lady of Famine. A female representation of one of the four horsemen. I really like the way she turned out.

This one here is the Lady of Death. I tried to not go with a standard Grim Reaper appearance. Her dress is made of ghosts, and there is a burning candle at the top of her head. I felt a little bit iffy on this one, but I think it turned out pretty decent.

Next up on my to do list, the Lady of War.