Ultimate Tutorial by S.Shadowsong

[Shadowsong]

Glad to see you are attempting.
Here are some suggestions related to those sprites:

Sword - The blood on it looks too red, the whole blade needs more nuances/tones of the red color. The black outline in the handle is stands out too much (this can be fixed by AA which I am now working on next part of tutorial for), also the left wing could be a little darker, you don't necessarily have to apply the Tibia Sun effect on weapons/all items.

Shield - It looks too flat, the outer border lacks shading, or even better, color.

I would love it if you kept working on these 2 sprites until you perfect them, and I will be posting the next part of tut in less than a hour I hope, it should help a lot. :3

Edit: will post it tonight when I'm back from town. :]

Added the newest part III, including Anti Aliasing and Refining, and more helpful tips.
Find download link in this post. Good luck with spriting to everyone who attempts! ^^

 

[Prest]

The file you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

 

[Shadowsong]

Added mediafire link.

 

[Gothead]

You actually didn't seem to understand what A.A indeed is. Let me quote Redshrike:

"Anti Aliasing (aa): Antialiasing is a trick by which you try to make pixel art not look... pixely. Basically, you want to conceal the fact that it's all made of little squares. You do this by not putting really dark and really light pixels right next to each other, and putting pixels in between them which are in between them in lightness. For instance, these two circles have the same outline and resolution; however, the one on the right has the border between the black outline and the white interior buffered with gray pixels. This makes it look smoother."
And a picture which he used as an example

Overall on your blade you used too weak A.A and pillow-shaded its top. Hilt is too dark, like overused burn tool. It has random light spots but it doesn't stand for A.A at all.

Another thing about your sword is the shaping all in all. Firstly it should be looking like a sword. One common mistake newbies are doing is the pointy top.

The second one goes from really pointy to broad. About the first one I'll quote Norberg: "The other one looks... Well... kinda like a pointy dildo." So true. Yes, there are several different ways of making the tip, but this one helps to learn you all the basic stuff more easily.

Then goes your hilt. It looks really pointy so I'm just as real lazyass going to quote Nordberg's old tutorial part which is actual for you my friend.

"Handle

So, now we're making an handle. Be creative.
We'll check this out:

What is bad with this handle?
#1 - It's way too simple
#2 - It's straight, just really sharp edges
#3 - It's really hard to shade and make it look good.

To your hilt Shadowsong #1 point doesn't work, but yet its useful for you to read since the other 2 are your weaknesses.

How are we going to improve this? First of all, put a bottom part, it could be a crystal, a skull or whatever you feel like. It's only one rule, it should be pretty small. The grip part doesn't have to be 5 - 6 pixels. It can be like 3 and still look good.
About the protecting part. You have to be creative. Use sharp edges (not as sharp as the previous example) and soft edges, spikes, what ever you like. I've chosen to use a pretty simple handle this time.

- This works fine. Kinda boring, but still works"

I hope that will help you improving and solving your mistakes. There is no offence in what I wrote, just pure willingness to help you on your way.

 

[Shadowsong]

Thank you for pointing it out. Though I've given the same description of AA, I haven't focused too much on using it on this sword, it kind of looked good to me, but there's always room for improvement. That handle is just the way it is , pointy and sharp. xD

On my future sprites I'll make sure to put more attention into this, same goes for everyone who follows. Rep+

 

[Magnetico]

Sorry for bumping this since its like 1 year old, but I was really looking forward to download those files and learn a bit about the spriting art and the files are down. Could somebody help me?
Again, sorry for the HUGE bump.

 

[Shadowsong]

Sadly, I believe I lost the files when my system crashed back in August, but I think my brother may have them on his computer. I will post here after I take a look, damn...

 

[kingsley666]

hello im interested in your ultimate sprite tutorial, please add again the links

 

[Shadowsong]

As I wrote in the post above, I lost the files. But I know a bunch of people who had downloaded it, if I ever stumble upon someone who still has them, I'll re-upload. Might as well write a whole new tutorial this summer, I got a whole lot better at spriting so it will be a better tutorial too. ^_^

 

[kingsley666]

i'll be waiting for that tutorial

 

[Faceless]

Greetings!
Welcome to my ultimate spriting tutorial!
NEWS: None atm.

Yes, it has been 2 sentences since you've opened the thread , and you already are wondering about the prefix "ULTIMATE". It is a powerful word , and yet I use it .. because , yes , the tutorial is powerful. Through the ongoing period of time you spend following this tutorial , if you choose to do so .. You are gonna learn a lot of stuff. Serious business it is.
And yes , get used to my troll expressions and rotten jokes, it's just the way it is!

The tutorial is powerful .. because , it's not just one tutorial.
There's over 9000 of them... Not!

But the tutorial merges many topics explaining all of the methods required to achieve epicness. (described a bit below).

Because I, myself, on my way to becoming a spriter, have read a lot and lot of these, and they helped me A LOT. Until this day, I'm still learning , and hey! -
"The best way to learn is through teaching."

I am going to combine all possible aspects related to anything from the concieval of the "I wanna be a spriter" idea in your mind, until the creation, editing, implementation, and usage of these sprites, in order to make this "powerful" tutorial of 100% use to you. I look forward to the day when the OT community will have more custom servers with more custom sprites and more unique ideas based on those custom sprites.

This tutorial is gonna be fairly long as I already said , so I won't be able to create it whole in one day , but I will guide you through and along the roads of spriting from beginning 'til the end, during the passing days. Today , we start in Spriter's corner , where we're gonna prepare a bit , and learn some of the most basic stuff.

The tutorial is, as I already said, big and long [all together] and It would take a lot of space here, so I wrote it in MS Word. It also includes pictures of what you have to do and how, and hyperlinks to download necessary tools.. everything you'll need!

The first tutorial, as every other, will take you through the basics and the first 5 aspects you should know about spriting, defining and showing you some of the terms such as template of sprite, the outline, transparency, sprite format, etc..

(The .rar archives that you download contain 2 files, both are MS Word documents, one is saved as .docx for the newest version of word , and other one is .doc for those who have the older version.)

Please select a tutorial you would like to download:

* Tutorial 1 - Spriter's Corner , Ally of Begginers (1,24 mb)

~ Megaupload
~ Rapidshare
~ Speedyshare
​

* Tutorial 2 - Art Avenue , The Beginning (1,09 mb)

~ Megaupload
~ Rapidshare
~ Speedyshare
​

* Tutorial 3 - Exhibition, Down the Long Road (920 kb)

~ Megaupload
~ Mediafire
~ Will add more sources later...

​

* Tutorial 4 - Not Available Yet
* ....
​

NOTE for moderators: I haven't put this thread in tutorials because I find this (Small Art) place a lot more related to spriting than tutorials [there is no accent on spriting there even though this is a tutorial] , and I've also see one tutorial here stickied so... That one seems pretty outdated though , so maybe you could sticky this one when I'm done with all parts.
NOTE for readers: I'm doing a lot of alignment of pictures inside these word documents , but it depends on resolution so , if you have a different resolution than me, you might experience displacement of these pictures and the tutorial may look crappy. I hope it won't bother you though , you can also align them yourself once the document is open. I'm sorry about that if it happens.

I would like to see the outcome and the development of your sprites as we do the tutorial step by step, so post them and I'll comment and stuff... Good luck everyone!

Damn dude, cant find your files You got them laying around?

 

[Shadowsong]

Damn dude, cant find your files You got them laying around?

Ah, no, sorry. :| They got lost when my system got wiped out a year ago.
Check out my newer tutorials here: http://otland.net/threads/video-tutorials.202398/