Foreshortening is hard

Longtime pixel art hobbyist, never messed with nes sprites till recently...

I don't have a ton of work to show off or anything right yet, but can someone give me some foreshortening tips as it applies to low res pixel art? I'm really struggling to get this character's sword to look good if he holds it in front of himself.

Any criticism is welcome.

Have you tried modeling your character in Blender 3D to get the angles right? I tried it for pictures that I posted to this topic. Or would that be cheating?

Sometimes it's worth giving up on the realistic approach, i.e. just have the sword stick straight down, perpendicular to the camera's perspective.

That's a really interesting way of doing things. I might take a weekend to learn blender and see what kinds of results I can produce.



You know that really didn't occur to me. I might give that a shot....

...okay so I've got two more results here... I might end up having to come back to this.

What's wrong with the one on the left?

Also, although not visible in the shot, I really feel like you could make a cool design o the front of the shield, similar to the Hylian shield:



In fact, I actually noticed that your first shield is kind of lopsided.

That's what I like to hear. Excellent, I was hoping it looked so good.
As far as designs on the shield goes: I want to, but I'm not going to touch that yet. Right now I'm going for a really barren look until I've got much, much more of the game drawn out and coded before I worry about that since I may decide to have equippable shields with different graphics. I dunno, man, CHR RAM is exciting. That's probably way too much though.

...yeah, it does look lopsided. I was going for some shading sorta. It looks better when the shield's tiles are isolated:

Though I can't think of any reason you'd see it separately from the character aside from shop menus.

The one on the right in "some more tries.png" looks more distinct to me, whereas i misinterpreted the one on the left at first - it blends in with the armour, and maybe feels a bit broad. Maybe the upper line can be redrawn to sort that?

You'd really want to use a bright colour for the sword, not this dark gray. Also, the combination sword is up before attacking, and down after, works fine for my game.

Didn't comment before because I was in a hurry and had to be somewhere, but the one on the left in "couple more tries.png" looks fine to me.

Seconding the suggestion that you should pick a lighter shade for sword/armor, though the NES is a bit constricting in that regard.

Now, if the sword was red like the hair it would stand out way more easily.

I need to keep my character to using two fixed palettes max, unfortunately. I will play around more with palettes but I've had a hard time coming up with alternate color schemes... I wish there were more grays, the next shade lighter blends in with his skintone, which I can't change without completely redrawing the hair...
Thank you though, that gives me something to work with.



That's a distinct possibility. Once I have more sprites drawn and more animations coded in, I'll play around with the sword belonging to the armor palette or the head palette and see how things look. Thanks.

What I meant is that, you should consider use skin colour for the sword instead of gray. Gray for armor is fine for me.

Yes, a sword might look "gray" in real life, but it is shiny metal gray, not dark-stone gray. Since the weapon in an action video game is what you use to hurt enemies it is particularly important and its graphical representation should stand out.

This is of couse just my opinion.

Using the skin color for the sword is another interesting option. I took some inspirations for the sprites from Willow, and looking to willow again it looks like the sword and shield constitute a third palette. I haven't played enough of the game to see how this effects enemy colors though. As I get more art drawn out for enemies and such I'll revisit this idea and see if I can spare an extra color for the sword, or if changing it to flesh tones looks better.
Thanks.

Everyone with a dirty mind who has played Zelda 2 knows the downside to using skin color for a sword.

I think that sort of association happens even in games with much better graphics than NES. Any time a male character is carrying something long and pointed at the end...at some camera angle or shading or just the position of it (waist high) will make all teenage boys giggle.

I don't know if it helps, but I did it with this animation and I thought it turned out okay.

I didn't really have a particular method. I guess I start with a block of pixels and chip away at them until I don't see any improvements to make. I like to define "rules" and sizes for the different parts of my objects in my head, so in a sense, there only become so many options that I have which work for the character, when it comes to making decisions like, adding pixels to a part for foreshortening. I tried moving her head just about every way I could and only got a limited number that look good.

Some stances... just don't work. Some frames work well in an animation but don't hold up as stills. It's just the nature of the low-res, low-color work.

I agree with most people however, that your edit looks good. I don't think this this one of those impossible stances.

Okay? It looks amazing, I'd say ! Even the hair is animated, and well, which is rare for a SNES game.