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Jatta Pake's Endless Sprites - Use In Your Mods!


Jatta Pake

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Greetings everyone!

These are my item sprites I'm creating. Feel free to use any in your mods. HAVE ANY REQUESTS? Ask away!

 

* Update 20140111: These are all drawn and created by me. Any resemblance to real products or images is purely coincidental.  As I'm trying to capture the generic essence of certain items, some sprites may resemble real objects.  Please send me any feedback or post it below.

MODS_01.png
[Future Index Will Go Here]

 

INlCVu5.jpg - Bowling Ball 

x9UP6YI.jpg - Cologne

yTd6ZC7.jpg - Soccer Ball

vcEOvwE.jpg - Basketball

0cmKWz3.jpg - Board Game

8V7Wa47.jpg - Evening Gown

ClkkoKd.jpg - Tuxedo

p3ycAcw.jpg - Magnifying Glass

xvDLpsW.jpg - Vacuum Cleaner

4fiMMni.jpg - Feather Duster

awp3mVN.jpg - Kite

YZXRdCP.jpg - Oil Paints

hGRhc0F.jpg - Bar of Soap

InO61Sa.jpg - Compact Mirror

d0K06tP.jpg - Shampoo

CfEXyPY.jpg - Clothes Iron

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Specifically, the cologne/perfume, compact mirror and whistle are actually product photos of current product. The Ant Farm is, well, the first hit in Google Image Search and seems to be a product, as well. The skateboard, for exmaple, appears to belong to the course materials for a university. I'm not sure how Zombidicide (the admittedly fitting) board game would feel about being included in PZ.

Public domain or images where copyright has been given up by their creators are fine, of course. Or stock images that you've purchased the right to use (though they generally stipulate that you must provide a copyright notice).

=/

Sorry dude.

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You might want to look into a technique called dithering. Depending on how much space you have on an object it might help to blend colours.

Stuff like your bowling ball sprite might benefit from it :)

Also, try to rework the edges of round object, especially the bowling ball.

Some other stuff might benefit from "implied lines", too.

There are great tutorials in the internet that you can and should make use of.

One of the oldest but bestestest I know (which was way back in the day when I had a two-day love-affair with pixel art and then dropped it like it was a hot potato) is this one:

http://www.yarrninja.com/pixeltutorial/

It covers a lot (a metric fuckton) but some chapters will definitely help you improve.

There are a lot of guidelines that will appear logical to you and are easy to grasp and internalise.

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I'm not sure the bowling ball would benefit from dithering at this point.... dithering is more used to hide subtle differences in gradients that cant be blended. for example, if you use the gradient tool in photoshop & you end up with light banding between tones you can add noise to help "blend" it.

If you are going to block in your shading as you have with the bowling ball, learn to love the smudge tool.... start off at about 75% strength & work your way down until the gradient appears as smooth as you desire then (if necessary) dither afterwards for smoother shading.

The other way to do it would be to draw the circle with your neutral color then use your brush tool at about 5% opacity with the dark extreme of your neutral color (or black if you wish) & add your shading in layers (runs, not photoshop layers).

You could also "block" with more subtle variations in color but it wont give as smooth a result as the first two techniques 

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A full chess board doesn't seem to work very well with this style, maybe try making each piece and the chess board separate?

 

Something like these then. I do believe I did well on the shading, gimp is handy for that although the bases for the knight and rook look slightly too big compared to the others.

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Thanks all.  I finished nasKo's recommended reading yesterday and the tutorial has a lot of great information and pixel art theory.

 

I am struggling a bit with the design direction.  I ran the Bowling Ball through a Blur filter (similar to ExcentriCreation awesome smudge suggestion) and it looks a lot less "pixel art" and more like a resized image of a bowling ball.

 

Here is where I am stuck:

 

Pixel Art used to be confined to a limited color palette in the 80s and 90s. Thus "dithering" was used by game developers to trick the eye into seeing a wider range of colors.  This "dithering" effect continues to be used in "retro" style indie games today as a conscious design element for games that are designed to look "old school" even though 21st Century computers can handle many more colors.

 

My cursory study of Project Zomboid items, though, does not seem to limit itself to a limited color palette.  While the "Wooden Planks" Plank.png item does use five (?) colors and dithering, the "watering can" Watering_can.png uses more colors with various subtle shades.

 

To me, the "Wooden Planks" seem more consistent with the overall style of PZ than the "Water Can" which looks more like a resized image of a real item.  At the end of the day, maybe modders don't care, but part of my enjoyment of doing Sprites is capturing the "look and feel" of PZ.

 

I'll do some more re-works of the Bowling Ball in various styles.  Maybe I should create a Poll and get feedback on several versions of Bowling Ball.

 

I suspect part of the issue may be that I was creating Sprites sized 32 x 32 as I thought this was the size limit for all Sprites.  But further examination of the items on the PZWiki seems to show a wide range of sizes.  For example, "Wooden Planks" and "Hammer" are massive 120 x 120 while the "Sweater" is 32 x 32.  If anyone can enlighten me about any reasons behind the size differences, it will help me with the design process.

 

Lastly, I think ZedHead has the right direction with the chess pieces vs. a full board with pieces.

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The Pool Ball doesn't seem to be blended at all & probably gets away with it because of the different neutral colors. The Bowling Ball looks HEAPS better. I wouldn't worry about the style too much, your a different graphic artist & it stands to reason that you will have a slightly different style (like Doublebrain said). It definitely fits in with the other PZ sprites & I would say it is a happy medium between the 2 examples you gave above. Nice work :)

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I'm getting the hang of round things:

 

Soccer Foot Ball - yTd6ZC7.jpg

Basketball - vcEOvwE.jpg

 

What do you do when you find yourself bored out of your gourd during the Zombie Apocalypse?  You play the classic American board game Pig*! See who can be the first to hog all of the piglets. The winner brings home the bacon!

 

Board Game - 0cmKWz3.jpg

 

*No, it's not a real game.

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Not sure if it's the compression effing up the colour but try doing the outlines of the tuxedo in a darker grey (if you're using PS, use the colour picker on the tuxedo's grey and then drop the brightness). They appear a bit blue-ish.

 

Other than that, good job! Nice to see you improving from set to set :)

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Not sure if it's the compression effing up the colour but try doing the outlines of the tuxedo in a darker grey (if you're using PS, use the colour picker on the tuxedo's grey and then drop the brightness). They appear a bit blue-ish.

 

Other than that, good job! Nice to see you improving from set to set :)

 

Yeah, I used a really dark blue instead of a darker grey, hoping the contrast would make the outline pop more.  But it bugs me too.  I will use a dark gray.

 

Believe it or not, I'm actually using my iPad to draw these hehe.  I'm using an App called "Sprite Something".  I think they natively export as PNG to my Camera Roll but get converted to JPG upon uploading to Imgur.  To zip them, I would need to figure out how to do that on my iPad.  Probably easy to do.  I had noticed that the items on the wiki are PNG so I kind of figured I would need to offer them as PNG files at some point.

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