WIP Graphics Showcase III

[PROX]

Did somebody say "Emerald Tileset"? Well, not exactly emerald, more like gemstone, but I think it gets the job done.
Seriously though, such a coincidence two of us worked on something gemstone related.

Spoiler: show

ah, so you finally showcased it o.o

[FireyPaperMario]

Did somebody say "Emerald Tileset"? Well, not exactly emerald, more like gemstone, but I think it gets the job done.
Seriously though, such a coincidence two of us worked on something gemstone related.

Spoiler: show

Looks nicer than my own emerald castle tile. Pretty!

[Fuyu]

Thank you. I did get help from PROX on this one. It probably wouldn't look as pretty otherwise.

[PopYoshi]

I'm still wondering what do you use to place the tiles like that in a so ordered way

[Fuyu]

I just put 2px in-between every 32x32 blocks. Besides that, I'm using Paint.net.

[Emral]

[Eri7]

Spoiler: show

Well damn, thanks Enjl for making our lives easier!

[PopYoshi]

I wonder how much money you received to make that announcement
Kinda sad that they don't have a phone number

Ahem. Whatever, thank you for making our lives easier!

[Taycamgame]

Spoiler: show

You could have just said "use a checkerboard to make spriting easier", but your efforts to make a visual guide are well appreciated!

On a side note, do people here usually make tilesets that they will use in their own projects / levels? I'd like to get into making my own tilesets but i'm usually busy with my SMBX project and end up using gfx that are already existing. Is it a good idea to just make a random tileset that you yourself will not end up using?

[Eri7]

Spoiler: show

You could have just said "use a checkerboard to make spriting easier", but your efforts to make a visual guide are well appreciated!

On a side note, do people here usually make tilesets that they will use in their own projects / levels? I'd like to get into making my own tilesets but i'm usually busy with my SMBX project and end up using gfx that are already existing. Is it a good idea to just make a random tileset that you yourself will not end up using?

Yes, i make tilesets to use for my project/levels or else why would i make them in the first place?
So it isn't really a good idea to do that since if you are not going to use it and your time will be better spent on your project, the tilesets that you will make won't be useful to you, the only reason why it might be a good idea is for you to improve your spriting skills and provide more graphics for the community to use.

[Emral]

Drawing sprites without deeper meaning can be a fun distraction. I highly recommend it.

[Taycamgame]

Drawing sprites without deeper meaning can be a fun distraction. I highly recommend it.

I may try it out. Any suggestions of what sort of things to try? I mean, by now, plenty of different grassland, castle, cave etc. tilesets exist. How can you make your sprites more unique as opposed to being just "another graphic on the pile"?

[Eri7]

Drawing sprites without deeper meaning can be a fun distraction. I highly recommend it.

I may try it out. Any suggestions of what sort of things to try? I mean, by now, plenty of different grassland, castle, cave etc. tilesets exist. How can you make your sprites more unique as opposed to being just "another graphic on the pile"?

Practice? Have good ideas? Try out new stuff?

[PopYoshi]

Spoiler: show

You could have just said "use a checkerboard to make spriting easier", but your efforts to make a visual guide are well appreciated!

On a side note, do people here usually make tilesets that they will use in their own projects / levels? I'd like to get into making my own tilesets but i'm usually busy with my SMBX project and end up using gfx that are already existing. Is it a good idea to just make a random tileset that you yourself will not end up using?

I do
End of the story

It's funnier when you and only you know what you want when you're making them only for you to use

[Emral]

Drawing sprites without deeper meaning can be a fun distraction. I highly recommend it.

I may try it out. Any suggestions of what sort of things to try? I mean, by now, plenty of different grassland, castle, cave etc. tilesets exist. How can you make your sprites more unique as opposed to being just "another graphic on the pile"?

Draw an idea when you get it. Don't bother about originality, do what you want to do.

[PROX]

Drawing sprites without deeper meaning can be a fun distraction. I highly recommend it.

I may try it out. Any suggestions of what sort of things to try? I mean, by now, plenty of different grassland, castle, cave etc. tilesets exist. How can you make your sprites more unique as opposed to being just "another graphic on the pile"?

Start off small and learn how to draw things. I recommend looking at how professional spriters shade things. Don't try to do something complicated right off the bat (like I did and it didn't turn out well). Start off small. Have a foundation and then build off of it later. It's also a good idea to learn the fundamentals of spriting as well. Colors are also very important as well.

[Taycamgame]

One of the main troubles i have is with fill tiles. For example, one of my tilesets has a fill tile which is really basic:

this was meant to be a grassland but turned into something looking like a cookie?: show

Looking back at this, it's also clear that the shading on the slopes is incorrect, any suggestions on how to handle slopes?

When i look at tilesets made by other people, the fill is almost always really detailed (such as the gem blocks Natsu showed, and the one at the top of the checkerboard banner thing Enjl showed)
I'm willing to put the effort in to practice spriting, but i wonder, how long it took you guys to get to the level you are at now?

[Eri7]

For me its around a year and few months(and i still have a lot of gfx i want to release but i am too lazy to make it compatible with 2.0), my main reason to do spriting is to make assets for my project because nobody else wants to do it.

[Emral]

One of the main troubles i have is with fill tiles. For example, one of my tilesets has a fill tile which is really basic:

this was meant to be a grassland but turned into something looking like a cookie?: show

Looking back at this, it's also clear that the shading on the slopes is incorrect, any suggestions on how to handle slopes?

When i look at tilesets made by other people, the fill is almost always really detailed (such as the gem blocks Natsu showed, and the one at the top of the checkerboard banner thing Enjl showed)
I'm willing to put the effort in to practice spriting, but i wonder, how long it took you guys to get to the level you are at now?

I've been at it since 2012, lord help me.

What you have here is a good start, but I don't recommend directional shading for tilesets personally... Either "top-center" or "inward" is what you really want because of how unpredictable the tileset placement can be. Let me show you:

I personally prefer inward shading because it reduces the amount of junk tiles I need to create for blends of different shades. You can see with top-center that the transition from top- to bottom slopes wouldn't be clean, and that with your approach you would even have issues with some slope-to-same-slope setups.

One VERY important thing to consider is how the tileset appears in 3D. I've added some bold shadow areas to the interior dirt section in my sketches that would show roughly how the outer ring would generally shade the fill with each method.

Also, just for the heck of it I recoloured the dark sizeable at the very bottom. Reason for this was to show you that you can stay in-palette when creating darker objects for your tileset. The light brown on the dark block is now the dark brown on the light block, same for the greens.

Basic fills are nice. You generally want fill tiles in which the pattern isn't too obvious. They should be fairly uniform so that you don't start seeing weird made-up shading patterns out of the corner of your eye (i.e. if you're making rock fills it's usually a good idea to make all the rocks similar to have none stand out). What you have is about as safe as one can be.

Make sure to research color theory and play around with it in order to create more appealing palettes, too.

[Taycamgame]

I decided to create a new tileset, just for some practice:

This is the main 3x3 set of tiles. The tileset is supposed to look like it's made out of cardboard and there will be other sorts of things like this included. The hardest part for this set was creating the corrugated parts on the edges (especially the corners), i sorta feel it works but i'm not so sure. Thoughts?

Also, it uses colours from the SMW level palette, though i think the fill makes it seem like the SMB3 wood blocks?