KEFKA

[YoZangWu]

Yes I know that I added this to discussion board but thought I'd throw here as well since I will prolly work on this regardless

So I have noticed on several sites many people have requested Kefka. This would be the first character I would b undertakin and was curious would this b a bit much of an undertakin for a very first charcater?
This would b hand drawn and not a rip from a previous game so needless to say, will require ALOT of drawings.. 

I figured it would b best to ask those whom had experience with character creation.

extremely sketchy concept.. threw together to get an idea what i am workin wit
according to MUGEN community... is this a go?

[supa2520]

i love to see this evil ff character in action i say go for it

[O Ilusionista]

I Like it. You need to watch out for the white spaces between the outlines and the color fills.
If you will going to hand draw it, I have some suggestions:

- Draws it at the double size of a normal character (you can use MVC Ryu or Cyclops as the "normal character" reference size), so it will look HD when you bring it to mugen
- To avoid color loss, I suggest you to use hard brushes instead of soft ones, because this creates too much color tones and this will make everything hard. You can antialias the edges with hard brushes on brighter/darker tones.

If you need some references, look at this:
http://www.fightersgeneration.com/characters4/heart-a.html
http://www.fightersgeneration.com/games/hokutonoken.html


You have nice works in DA

[YoZangWu]

Good point Illusion. Doubling the size will actually make it a bit easier to work with as well. Now when shrinking down for Mugen, is this done within Photoshop or whatever program prior to import of MUGEN or is there some kinda coding that will allow the character size regardless of what the original image is set to?
Also, thank you for the references and the compliments on my DA spot!!   

[O Ilusionista]

The shrinking process is done by coding, its way better this way.
Some other games, like SF HD, uses the character 4x times bigger than a normal character, but I don't think its needed. 2x is enough.

[YoZangWu]

Awesome, thank you! I was worried I would have to be bound by the size when creating the character, this will make things so much easier and with a higher image size, will allow me to see what im doing a bit more!

[O Ilusionista]

Yeah, one the the things which makes pixel art hard is the size, its always so small to put all the details you want to.
Ah, when drawing the character, you should make him face to the right, not the left, ok?

[YoZangWu]

Noted although, could I just flip the images prior to import? I just say this as im partial to drawing my humanoids facing the left 

[O Ilusionista]

If its easier to you, you can draw it facing left, just flip it using photoshop when you finish.

[Saber Alter]

You gonna do it similar style as the other HD FF villains like this guy's ? http://page.freett.com/dager/a.html

[YoZangWu]

Saber, never saw these before. I will be doing within my style but looking at this link you provided, doesn't seem that it would be far off from his style.

[YoZangWu]

Yes its sloppy but im going through ideas 
So went through a couple of sketches and think im going with:



ROUGH DRAFT! - Yes this is very sketchy but I think this is what I will start with the idle .
I think I might tweak the hands though, now looking at them, they seem a bit weird

[O Ilusionista]

Isn't too large? It looks resized.
And remember to use hard edge brushes, because soft brushes creates too much tones.

[YoZangWu]

Yea I did this at 640 before I learned proper sizing. This is actually 1px hard brush (other than where I just slapped down colors)

Again this is just to get an idea of where to go with this. Now that I know the sizes I should be working wit, I will be redrawing it.

[O Ilusionista]

Like we say here, I don't want to teach the Priest how to pray , but take a look at this




Both brushes are 1px. The left is a pencil and the right is a brush with 100% hardness, but it still creates anti-alias.
You should use the one at left. The left one has only 2 colors, the right one has...137.

[YoZangWu]

Got it! I will try this on the next go around!

[YoZangWu]

This is basically to get the sizing down before going all out
So this is 300x300  is this a good size to work with? He basically fills the area so is that still too big? The sizing is the most confusing part for me...   

If this is good, what size would MUGEN be set at? 640x480 ?
Also used Pencil tool only ( why it looks so rough )

[O Ilusionista]

Here is the result, using a 0.5 scale


The size is a tad big. It would work better using a 0.45 scale, but this would make some pixels to be erased when scaled.

I've scaled the sprite to 250x250 and its perfect to me


The faults at the stroke are photoshop's fault.

[YoZangWu]

Agreed, 250 looks perfect. I will set forward on that, thank you for showing me the screens!

[O Ilusionista]

you are welcome Its always better to check how it looks on the screen first when you are drawing from the scratch.

[YoZangWu]

Forgive me but did you just take the image and paste on a screenshot of resolution of 640x480? Or did you somehow actually have this added within engine and created screenshot?
If the later, how did you achieve this if you don't mind me asking so I can do this going forward? Did you just replace a character's idle stance with the drawing on all frames?

[O Ilusionista]

Yeah, I added that sprite into an existing character sff and changed the xscale and yscale to 0.5. To paste over a 640x480 screenshot won't work.

[YoZangWu]

Okay so this is 250px with a bit of shading. Right direction before I go further?

[O Ilusionista]

This is the result:

Looks good to me. My only concern is the shadow inside his cape (the dark yellow parts). Why its "sharpened edge" or "pointed"? Its the shadow from the "feather" on his head?

[YoZangWu]

Than you Illusion! The shadows were meant to where the cape ruffled, where it kind of waves. Although I see what you mean they do look a bit sharp, I suppose I could taper this off as it goes up.

Any pointers on the animation process rather than draw this entire image over and over again?I am guessing maybe copy paste then move parts of the body slightly per frame. This is how I was going to go about it but if there is a better way, please let me know!