Face Of A Friend A vector artwork to gift a friend

[Vyoma 0]

I am not sure with any of those, friend. I mean, there are not many complete projects I did in pixel art, and nor in 3D design, though I have worked in both of them. I think, in both the cases, it would largely depend on the scale of work and also the level of detail you want to put into it.PS: The image link in the above post was broken. I corrected it.

[Chesso 0]

Ahh yep, I just copy/pasted the link in the browser, I must have forgotten to mention that lol.Well generally I'm only working with small 2D games. Right now, iv'e just gotten back in programming and I'm just making a 2D DirectX game. The map is always 350x350 and well as I don't warp it on the way, the general idea of the game is to smash open and collect blocks while avoiding enemies or traps and having things like fake breakables or collectibles and what not.I'm using a ripped bomberman sprite from a gameboy game at the moment for testing, more less size and look wise it's not half bad, but i'd prefer to have original graphics by the end, and the sooner I can get the major graphics out of the way, the less bug fixing I'll have to do later (with collisions and such).

[Vyoma 0]

Ah! I would have offered to help if it were not for my busy schedule at my job. It almost eats up all of my time, and I barely get to work on my skills.

[Chesso 0]

Ahh that's ok.

 

I mostly prefer to do everything on my own, the programming, the imagery and well iv'e tried many times to make my own midi compositions, but I think I'll stick to midi's I find around the net that sound good lol.

 

I actually just made my first animated sprite, I haven't had the opportunity to test the actual animation out in the game yet, but I'm getting to that.

 

It's very basic and craptastic I guess, but it's my first, oh well .

 

I could probably make those silly movement pixels look a bit better..... lol.

 

EDIT:

 

For some reason the image wouldn't show using the "
http://forums.xisto.com/
tags even with a direct link so I have uploaded it as an attachment (it's just a .BMP 16/17kb's or so).

Edited January 5, 2007 by Chesso (see edit history)

[Vyoma 0]

Ooooh. Music composition? Well I do learn classical guitar and a month back I gave the Grade 2 exams for both theory and practical to the Trinity School of Music, London - no, I did not go to London, they came to my city. But still, I do not dare to create my on compositions. I am always awed by the compositions of the masters, and I just spend my time I spare on it on practicing them on my guitar.

 

Now, back to topic. Yes, I too used to create sprites for games that I would code using C along with Allegro library that would result in 32-bit Dos games. Was a lot of fun.

 

And well, for sake of reference, I have converted your image to PNG (it wont loose any detail):

You can always use PNG format to upload to the net and display - cause it does not loose details and also is not as bulky as BMP.

 

A nice start there you have Chesso.

- On all the images except two you have white action lines - you should work on their flow. I am not getting the inference of them.

- And the two image, the ones on the right bottom - are you trying to show that they are hitting the ground? You should try to draw some inverted splat kind of lines around them to get the feel of the impact on the image if you ask me.

But still, it is a good start.

[Chesso 0]

Yeah I usually do convert everything to PNG but I keep forgetting as the components I use don't support PNG and I haven't found a good PNG package.I'm using Borland Delphi and the UnDelphiX package (that has drawing surface, basic sprite engine (collisions, animation), image lists, wav lists, midi lists, dxsound (midi and wav for now) etc).Yeah I made them up pretty quick , i'll have to adjust the silly movement lines and perhaps the effect if the hammer hitting, the last two are the Left and Right facing animations, I don't know how to draw the Up and Down facing animations to have the hammer swining from top to bottom so I just made it swing from side to side lol.Btw how is the vector art coming along, had any time to work on it?

[Vyoma 0]

Na. The last update was me working yesterday night. Then I replied to you today morning. Now I am getting ready to go to office. So, did not get time to work on it. I might get a couple of hours to work on it this weekend. I will post updates then.

[Chesso 0]

Awesome, can't wait.I showed my mum aswell actually lol, she found it quite impressive aswell, and the way she was talking about it makes you realize just how long it can take to do it.She's little more artsy then I am, so to speak.

[Vyoma 0]

Well what can I say?

 

I am honored, Chesso.

[leafbunk 0]

I think something that might help your vector portrait have a little more 3-d look to it is to utilize transparency for certain layers. Your shadows seem to be very defined, and if you would/could add more layers and make use of transparency on some, it might blend things a bit better.

This girl (link below) does vector portraits, and she's got a pretty good sized gallery to look through. I think she even offers a tutorial on vectoring, so you might check it out. I'm sure she has some pretty good tips to offer:

http://chewedkandi.deviantart.com/

[Vyoma 0]

leafbunk, thank you for your suggestions. Yes, I do see that I could have done a little better with use of transparencies - more exactly a linear shading fills over the alpha channel. But as I started off and continued to work on this piece, I sort of set a goal to myself that I would attempt to complete this piece of work with only flat colored paths and patches. If you take a closer look at the piece, you will notice that there are no gradients to this point - and that is a kind of style I am experimenting in this piece.For now, I am not actually aiming at a photo-realistic image, but a vector caricature that has been given immense effort in terms of details.And another reason I did not go for gradients - my PC cannot take it. (><) It almost comes to a standstill when I apply even one layer of gradient to any polygon on this piece. :)And thanks for that link to that DeviantArtist's gallery. I am checking it out. I think though that the person has been giving tutorials with respect to Adobe Illustrator. (I use Inkscape). I hope I can get some general info on technique from those tutorials there.

Edited January 6, 2007 by Vyoma (see edit history)

[Chesso 0]

The images on that link look pretty darn nice.But to be honest, I think that if Vyoma wanted to, he (well asumming Vyoma is a he lol) could more than likely do just as well.It's looking great so far, and from the changes iv'e seen it looks more or less like a matter only time to improve on it greatly (meaning whether he knows how to do this or that, he seems to get it going well).But I don't know any technical detail on all this, it's just what I see lol.

[Vyoma 0]

Ok. This is about it. I do not think I can push my PC any more.

 

 

I spent about half an hour on her hair, and there are too many polygons now for my PC to handle. I think I will have to wrap up this project. I will spend about half an hour to one hour more on this, adding some frills and framing it neatly, so that I can give it as a present for her birthday. I will post the finalized one soon.

 

Software: Inkscape

Total Effort: 9 hours

[Chesso 0]

Looking good!It's a pity your PC can't handle anymore, I'm sure there's alot you could have done , very nice work.

[Vyoma 0]

 

Total Effort: 10 hrs

Software: Inkscape

 

Thats about it. Nothing fancy. Just kept it simple.

 

And I made it in time. Few more days to go for her birthday.