Which way am I facing?

R-Tape · September 2011

I'm not sure if this is one of those tricks of the eye or not. Two different sprites, is it clear which way each one is facing? (I've saved as a gif so the flash attr will confuse things, sorry about that).

Mark R. Jones · September 2011

It's a little man with a big hood on isn't it?

Rebelstar without a cause · September 2011

Yellow facing right
Blue facing left

Do I win a prize?

R-Tape · September 2011

Hi Mark, yep but only one's (meant to be) a hoodie.

Hi Rebelstar, sorry no prize, incorrect!

Ralf · September 2011

I think I know what you may be talking about.

There are pictures that can be interpretted in some different way like for example this famous one:

gestalt%20(1).gif

Choose young elegant woman or old hag, whatever you like more.

Yours are more obvious, it's a guy in a hood, the yellow one is facing right, the cyan one is facing left.

But there is something true. The cyan one is better. If you interpret face as eye and hood as nose then you could say that he's facing right.

R-Tape · September 2011

You've spotted the other sprite Ralph, answer is wrong though (intended as 2 different sprites).

Both sprites are facing right.

The yellow one is meant to be a hoodie with 2 eyes.

The cyan one is meant to be a big nose style thing, only 1 eye visible.

It sounds like the hoodie is the more obvious thing for the eye.

How 'wrong' does the cyan one look to you guys?

Wookiee · September 2011

R-Tape wrote: »

You've spotted the other sprite Ralph, answer is wrong though (intended as 2 different sprites).

Both sprites are facing right.

The yellow one is meant to be a hoodie with 2 eyes.

The cyan one is meant to be a big nose style thing, only 1 eye visible.

It sounds like the hoodie is the more obvious thing for the eye.

How 'wrong' does the cyan one look to you guys?

agree, the different eye count makes these two different characters for my money

joefish · September 2011

If the cyan one is meant to be a guy with a big nose and a giant eye, the problem is how far back around the head the eye goes. There's no space that constitutes the back of the head. Where would his ears be? The eye needs to be smaller, higher, but most importantly more to the right.

And I don't know if that's meant to be an arm or a bit of mouth. If it's an arm on the side of a tiny body, then in a head that big you should probably expect to see a line for the mouth.

R-Tape · September 2011

Cheers Wookie, did your eye find the cyan one instantly or try & find a hoodie?

Cheers Joefish, big heads and eyes are my style but agreed, it does need to look right. A mouth didn't really work but, howsabout this:

Eye moved forward, nostril, do we see a lizard man? The arm issue should clear up with movement (not that I've got plans to use this, just an exercise).

Wookiee · September 2011

R-Tape wrote: »

Cheers Wookie, did your eye find the cyan one instantly or try & find a hoodie?

Eye moved forward, nostril, do we see a lizard man? The arm issue should clear up with movement (not that I've got plans to use this, just an exercise).

I clocked the yellow fella was a hoodie and the other one looked to me like a cartoon bird with a chunky beak rather than the nose you're run with in this new green one

I'm probably adding to the confusion now :lol:

R-Tape · September 2011

Cheers, I think I'll shelve the big nosey thing and develop the other one.

redballoon · September 2011

joefish wrote: »

If the cyan one is meant to be a guy with a big nose and a giant eye, the problem is how far back around the head the eye goes. There's no space that constitutes the back of the head. Where would his ears be? The eye needs to be smaller, higher, but most importantly more to the right.

Jesus, Joefish, are you wanting sprites to be anatomically correct now? ;)

I bring this up as I've had countless arguments with others on this, particularly in another pixel art forum. It's "cartoon-y"/ a stylistic choice!

R-Tape · September 2011

I quite like the no holds barred critical opinion ;)

Gives me an excuse to show a graphic I was going to use in a game called Arty Pants that I shelved, then Wunderchar$ (but replaced with Clive Sinclair).

The names in the file if you can't tell who it's meant to be.

zxbruno · September 2011

The one on the left could be a miniature version of Link :p, and the one on the right could be someone with an over-sized turtle head. :p

joefish · September 2011

redballoon wrote: »

Jesus, Joefish, are you wanting sprites to be anatomically correct now? ;)
I bring this up as I've had countless arguments with others on this, particularly in another pixel art forum. It's "cartoon-y"/ a stylistic choice!

You mean, no-one should comment, even if the artist himself starts a thread specifically because he is having doubts as to which way his own sprite is facing? I quite like the revised big-nose one, as it's a lot clearer now. Reminiscent of the Inspector from the Pink Panther animations.

Cartoons are exaggerations and caricatures that play on our instinctive ability to recognise a face or figure even if it's massively deformed out of shape. But there are still some significant things, like which side of the head the eyes are on, that give us clues as to where a face is pointing. Even ruddy Picasso understood that.

The real problem with sprites though is that pixellation introduces a lot more ambiguities than a sketch or your original idea. You may think you know what one pixel is supposed to be when you draw it, but you can't always tell how someone else will interpret it.

redballoon · September 2011

Of course you can comment but i think when you question where something's ears will go, then it is getting a bit pedantic. In a similar vein, why do most of the characters in The Simpsons have their eyes mostly on 1 side of their face when not directly looking at camera - sure, their nose overlaps the 'back' eye slightly which suggests everything is as it should be, whereas really you should see less of the back eye. What about how the classic Warner Bros Looney Tunes or any Fritz Freling cartoon? But going back to sprites, particularly on the Spectrum, where things either have to be suggested/implied due to restrictions? Whenever i do any characters, if it looks like you can tell where it's facing or what it's doing then you've partly succeeded. And that might mean it has large eyes, but unless the ears, for example, are 1) key to the character or 2) key to the game then the last thing i'm going to say to myself is "**** me, where will his ears go?" And why should i? The brain assumes he has ears!

joefish wrote: »

The real problem with sprites though is that pixellation introduces a lot more ambiguities than a sketch or your original idea. You may think you know what one pixel is supposed to be when you draw it, but you can't always tell how someone else will interpret it.

Yeah, but there is no solution to this. And this has already been touched upon in the Dingo thread with Mark's Koala/Panda/Bear ;) graphic. To Mark it looked fine. To others it looked fine. To me it looked fine. To even more others it looked wrong. To you it looked wrong....and then cue tons of differing graphics. Unfortunately, that's just how it's going to be.

But, Joefish, i was only having a light-hearted elbow digging about your ear comment, but this is something that really baffles me. It's like producing a caricature rabbit sprite and it has massive ears and then somebody comments, "Aye, but the ears are too big! There's no way in Hell that the rabbit would be able to walk or keep those ears upright. Here's my suggestion.....". And it's all, like, WTF mate! It's a cartoon! Hey, let's talk about proportion with characters, next! :)

R-Tape · September 2011

joefish wrote: »

Even ruddy Picasso understood that.

:lol: you ARE Brian Sewell!!

The litmus test: what do you think of Jack Vettriano? :p

redballoon · September 2011

joefish wrote: »

even if the artist himself starts a thread specifically because he is having doubts as to which way his own sprite is facing?

But you can get far too "close" to what it is your doing that you actually lose sight of what you are trying to achieve. I can remember doing a "top-down" sprite for a game and got it reasonably 'right' first time around...but, then, I focused on a small part of the sprite's leg when walking. I agonised over the placing of a pixel for weeks. I thought to myself, this is how Stanley Kubrik must've felt and then I just couldn't figure out what it was I was trying to achieve. I had to ask someone else and they chose the way the sprite looked before I went pixel mental. It was only a 16x16 pixel sprite, too!

R-Tape · September 2011

redballoon wrote: »

But you can get far too "close" to what it is your doing that you actually lose sight of what you are trying to achieve. I can remember doing a "top-down" sprite for a game and got it reasonably 'right' first time around...but, then, I focused on a small part of the sprite's leg when walking. I agonised over the placing of a pixel for weeks. I thought to myself, this is how Stanley Kubrik must've felt and then I just couldn't figure out what it was I was trying to achieve. I had to ask someone else and they chose the way the sprite looked before I went pixel mental. It was only a 16x16 pixel sprite, too!

Indeed, I think you can play too much with these things. In this instance I reckon the 'big nose' sprite could work as is (was) if the loading screen or inlay made it clear that's what should be seen. Judging by the feedback though it does look like it needs some work. Just playing around at the moment though.

Apologies for the ignorance, for interest: is any of your stuff in the archive redballoon or are you referring to sprites in recent non-speccy work?

R-Tape · September 2011

redballoon wrote: »

!

Yeah, but there is no solution to this. And this has already been touched upon in the Dingo thread with Mark's Koala/Panda/Bear ;) graphic. To Mark it looked fine. To others it looked fine. To me it looked fine. To even more others it looked wrong. To you it looked wrong....and then cue tons of differing graphics. Unfortunately, that's just how it's going to be.

I know this was all discussed in that topic but it's worth saying we don't know that to be the case. There may be a silent majority who saw the koala correctly but didn't comment :-).

joefish · September 2011

redballoon wrote: »

What about how the classic Warner Bros Looney Tunes or any Fritz Freling cartoon?

What about them? Look at them, and properly study them. No matter how deformed the characters and facial expressions in those characters, you get two eyes on the front of the face. Even in rabbits, which strictly speaking should have eyes on the sides of the head, Bugs Bunny has two eyes on the front of his face. His design is more human than rabbit, and we don't have a problem with it. In fact, we can empathise more with Bugs Bunny than with the more accurately drawn rabbits in Watership Down because of his human features.

But then real people don't have eyes that big. Or tall and narrow ovals for eyes. But if they're approximately round, that's good enough for our instincts to recognise them as part of a pattern.

redballoon wrote: »

Whenever i do any characters, if it looks like you can tell where it's facing or what it's doing then you've partly succeeded. And that might mean it has large eyes, but unless the ears, for example, are 1) key to the character or 2) key to the game then the last thing i'm going to say to myself is "**** me, where will his ears go?" And why should i? The brain assumes he has ears!

What you're not getting is that's exactly what I'm saying. Your brain tells you "that's not right" or it assumes "that's where his ears would be", but if your brain assumes the ears go in one place but there's a great big eyeball there, then something feels wrong. I'm not saying draw ears on it, I'm saying the brain expects the eyes to be on the front of the head because there's other stuff to go round the sides.

I'm not telling you things have to be anatomically perfect. I'm telling you that your brain is hard-wired to recognise certain features as a face, and whether you want to admit it or not, you can't escape the fact that you're playing along with that when you're tinkering with your own sprites and judging what works and what doesn't.

Take another example: take a pair of googly eyes and stick them on a mug to make a face. Imagine it.

Now, you don't stick those two eyes at the bottom. You don't stick one on each side of the mug. You don't stick one directly above the other. You stick the two close together somewhere just above half-way up. Everyone does. If you take the side of the mug facing you as a head, that's roughly where human eyes would be. Anything else just 'feels' 'wrong'. Because your instinct to recognise a face doesn't work on it otherwise.

P.S. It wasn't me dissing that walking rabbit animation. I loved it.

R-Tape · September 2011

joefish wrote: »

Take another example: take a pair of googly eyes and stick them on a mug to make a face. Imagine it.

Now, you don't stick those two eyes at the bottom. You don't stick one on each side of the mug. You don't stick one directly above the other. You stick the two close together somewhere just above half-way up. Everyone does. If you take the side of the mug facing you as a head, that's roughly where human eyes would be. Anything else just 'feels' 'wrong'. Because your instinct to recognise a face doesn't work on it otherwise.

I agree that if no-one sees it the sprite doesn't work, but not everyone sees the same things. To me the fun is that we can really bend the rules with these things, eg we don't have to have eyes at the top half way up. There are no rules, if it works it works:

joefish · September 2011

R-Tape wrote: »

:lol: you ARE Brian Sewell!!

I'm not a big fan of Picasso, but I think it's interesting how far he goes to distort a face and still keep it a face. Using the eyes, nose or jawline to imply a face looking in two directions at once is clever, and yet probably the most pleasing example, The Dream, looks like almost a clich? of it nowadays - his other faces seem to do it just because he can, though most would say that makes them more open to 'interpretation'. I'd say bold, but gets too much pretentious praise.

R-Tape wrote: »

The litmus test: what do you think of Jack Vettriano? :p

Never heard of him before, but I've seen some pictures. I particularly like those beaches with reflections in the wet. Very optimistically British. The low angles are a nice touch too - nostalgic; a child's viewpoint. Also puts the characters against the sky rather than the landscape; solves Constable's problem of trying to put a few points of interest in the frame when he wants to show off the skies. There's more nostalgia in the bold contrast, reminiscent of Victorian rail-travel posters. Modern classics, and a good money-spinner no doubt. I suppose you could say it's art aimed at a mass-market, but then is he just boldly doing what he does best and it happens to find its 'niche', just like you could say about Picasso?

joefish · September 2011

R-Tape wrote: »

Well, looking at the big sprite I see two eyes and a monobrow. Looking at the smaller sprite, I see a ghost that's unhappy because you've turned him upside-down! To me, that's breaking too many rules if you want it to be clear - put the eyes at the bottom, but then if you must have eyebrows make them normal. A monobrow is unusual, and would work if the eyes were higher, but here its similarity to an upside down mouth makes the whole thing ambiguous.

But drawing something ambiguous, if that was your intention, doesn't prove anything. If you want it to be ambiguous, so be it. But most cartoonists don't - they want at least most people to see the same thing they see, otherwise they can't get their point across. I mean, we can use CGI to make anything we want nowadays, but you don't design characters with a face like this:

if you want people to keep watching.

Feel free to draw things that deliberately make people ask, "well, what is that? Is it a frustrated were-mug or is it a sad upside down boxy ghost?" But also don't be surprised if they say the graphics are unclear. Most great artists got a lot of stick in their lifetime.

But then so did a lot of crap ones. :p

R-Tape · September 2011

joefish wrote: »

Feel free to draw things that deliberately make people ask, "well, what is that? Is it a frustrated were-mug or is it a sad upside down boxy ghost?" But also don't be surprised if they say the graphics are unclear. Most great artists got a lot of stick in their lifetime.

But then so did a lot of crap ones. :p

Gaaah! I'm so misunderstood!

And all I can see now is a bleedin' monobrow:mad:

joefish · September 2011

Well it's always a good idea to have a second pair of eyes look over your work.
You could ask that girl in the picture...

joefish · September 2011

R-Tape wrote: »

The litmus test: what do you think of Jack Vettriano? :p

Okay, having written that above I've now had a look at his later work and read up about all the other rubbish that goes with him. How he's far too popular for any of the establishment to have him in a gallery. What can I say? I'm not mad or devious enough to bid millions for a Hirst or Emin installation so I can't imagine what goes on in the minds of that particular clique. But I do wonder if they realise that everyone else is just pretending too? I mean, Saatchi has no appreciation of art. He just buys it as an investment. But everyone's too worried that someone with that much money might know something they don't that they imagine he's an expert. Either that or they're just too desperate for his money to treat him as anything else. So when he introduces a talentless slapper like Emin they go loopy and award her prizes. As for Charles Saatchi himself, the woman he married should be a big enough clue as to where his tastes really lie...

That Vettriano has captured the mood and the popular imagination in his lifetime is quite an achievement. Whether he likes it or not, you could compare him to film makers and authors more than other painters. They have their obscure, tortured geniuses and their blockbusters. George Lucas and J K Rowling are never going to win a critical prize for art, but then they're making more than enough money to not give a toss.

So, coming back to Vettriano; that galleries won't display his work is sad, but that they won't explain why is revolting. He just has to accept what anyone with above-average achievement realises quite early on: they only ever give the prizes to the 'special' kids.

dmsmith · September 2011

Out of interest, what is the editing program, is it something you wrote Rtape, looks pretty good?

R-Tape · September 2011

dmsmith wrote: »

Out of interest, what is the editing program, is it something you wrote Rtape, looks pretty good?

Hi dmsmith,

Aye it's my Pixel Pimp, I'm quite pleased with it, still needs a bit of work with the save and undo functions but it's exactly what I wanted in a sprite/block designer.

More on it here:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/showthread.php?t=35694

Cheers

Which way am I facing?

Comments