Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Showcase your artistic creations, whether that be sprites, music, drawings or literature, and whether they be related to the Ace Attorney universe or not.

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Ferdielance
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Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by Ferdielance »

Well, most of these sprites aren't going to really be my original work, as I have no formal artistic training. But adaptations, I can do.

Edit:
I do not object to any use or modification of the adapted sprites, since I don't consider them to be my property. However, if you use them, please do the following:

* Credit the original sources for the sprite bases that were modified. That is, Days of Memories 3 for Ash and Palmstroem, and 999 for Palmstroem's jacket base.

* Please credit my contribution if you use something I modified, even just a piece of a sprite - not because I own this stuff, but because I don't want to be accused of plagiarizing from you!

* If you're unsure how to make a piece from one of these fit with your Frankensteined sprite, just ask and show me your work in progress, and I'll suggest some tricks to make it look more natural. You may need to use semi-transparent color washes to make the skin tones blend nicely or keep the hair/clothes from being too jarring, or cut down the number of colors in the component to match your sprite's palette.
------

Inspired in part by Blackrune's use of custom Hazama animations, I searched for other games with sprites that fit the AA look. Problem is, they don't exist. AA sprites are pretty much unique, as far as I can tell, in their combination of cartoony stylization, varied poses, and attention to detail. That said, searching The Spriters Resource, I found a gold mine of a game called Days of Memory 2, which features front-facing, semi-detailed-but-still-animesque views of videogame characters!

In particular, look at Ash Crimson's sprites...
Spoiler : Promising. :
Image
He'd be perfect, except:

* His head is too big.
* He's cut off too high; I'd need to scratch or Frankenstein his body.
* His shading isn't quite as uniform top-down as most of the court sprites.
* His style is off in certain ways from the 'AA style' (though no more so than Mike Meekins or some of the victims!)
* And finally, he has no mouth movements yet.

So I got to work. Much cursing and finicky shading and animating later, I give you two sets of talking/blinking sprites for...

Ash Crimson: Obvious Villain?

Edit: Smoothed out blinking animations.
Edit: Very subtly lightened outline around head.
Spoiler : Here he is! :
Image Image

ImageImage

ImageImage

ImageImage

ImageImage

ImageImage

ImageImage

Layer count: Blink and speech timing were based on Kristoph Gavin's sprite. This meant 36 layers for each speech sprite and 9 layers for each blink sprite. Fortunately, efficient use of the GIMP tools make this a LOT easier than it sounds.
----
Edit: Added new sprite:
Dr. Johann Palmstroem

(Bases were Geese from Days of Memories 3 and Ace from 999:)
Spoiler : Dr. Palmstroem :
Image Image
Suggestions for improvement are welcome!

If I ever finish my trial, he's definitely going to be in it, but seeing as I don't own any of Ash's features, feel free to borrow him - or to take bits and pieces of him for Frankensteining. I'm hoping that the more people adapt sprites from other sources, the more we'll be seeing new and creative sprite components in our OCs.

---

Edit: I was able to make a background from a photo! It was troublesome, but the editing practice I've already gotten helped a lot.

Here's the photo:
Spoiler : Source image :
Image
And here's the resulting background:
Spoiler : background :
Image
Suggestions are welcomed!
Last edited by Ferdielance on Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:37 pm, edited 21 times in total.
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Phantom

Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by Phantom »

the shading on the suit....I daresay is perfect looking
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by enigma »

Fantastique~! Say, you said you were inspired by Runes Prosecutor! Hazama, right? Why not, you know, make talking sprites of the other BB and GG characters?

Edit: Actually, can I request you do your adaption thing for the Umineko sprites?

Specifically, Battler?
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by Ferdielance »

Thanks for the kind words!

Those are in an excellent state for adaptation, but there's an awful lot of them! If you have a specific plan or trial in mind and know which emotions you need, I could try to make some time? At the very least, it would give people more parts to Frankenstein from, even if we didn't get a full Umineko trial.
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by Lind »

For what it's worth I've been planning a massive crossover series for ages. Don't know if I'll ever actually do it though.
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by Sligneris »

Second set of sprites (this more villainous) have a problem with his eyes, when blinking.
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by ~Count Olaf~ »

The blinking animations are choppy, particularly on the sprites Sligneris mentioned. Other than that, it fits with the official AA sprites well. Good work.
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by Ferdielance »

Thanks for the suggestions! I've smoothed out the blinking animations somewhat; part of the problem was that I tried to have the eyebrow lower as he blinked, on the theory that when I close my eyes my eyebrows tend to drop a bit. But looking at slow-motion video of human blinking shows that this really shouldn't produce a noticeable effect unless a person is deliberately closing their eyes. In addition, there were other little stray pixels making them look bad, and the pupils were wandering a tad more than they reasonably ought to.

Do they look more passable now?
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by ~Count Olaf~ »

Ah, I see. They look much better now.
$Fth wrote:A man with such a name as that is a clear gentleman.
GuardianDreamer wrote:That name sounds like it belongs to some peaceful person who doesn't want to be disturbed, but then when you DO disturb him, he goes berserk and destroys you.
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by Aer »

Hot damn, those are some well-done sprites. Usually when someone were to do what you attempted, the results would be quite terrible, but this is really really REALLY good!
Hmm, suggestions... the top of his head is quite dark; the outline, I mean. Try brightening it up with a dark shade of brown, because the black pops out way too much and its a distraction from the rest of the sprite.
Other than that, GREAT job!
--
I like to scratch sprite. Feel free to ask if you need anything :3
Not very experienced at backgrounds, action shots, nor evidence, but I'd love to try.
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by Ferdielance »

I think I'll post a mugshot edit I did years ago! Here's one of the original dialogue sprites of Laura Bow, from The Dagger of Amon Ra.

Image

Promising, so I adapted her to make my original character Iolanta Hayes, in something a bit closer to the original PW style:

Image

If you're interested in how I did it, here's the tutorial I did back then:
Spoiler : Sprite adaptation tutorial - old! :
Making new full-body sprites is seriously only recommended for people who know what they're doing, a group that I'm not part of. However, in spite of my lack of artistic training, I've found that it's possible to make little 70 x 70 pixel mugshot sprites without too much trouble, provided you stick to minor edits.

"But what good are new sprites if they're only minor edits?" I hear you ask.

Well, the trick is that you don't need to use PW sprites. This means that you can have witnesses whose faces are not familiar to the players. On one level, this is just an aesthetic choice, but on another, it might really effect the way trials turn out. If you use a sprite belonging to, say (SEVERAL SPOILERY CHARACTERS), the look of perpetual innocence isn't going to fool anybody. They know what's coming.

What you'll need:

A decent paint program. You could use Photoshop, but that costs money, and I've found that the GIMP works pretty well!

The tricks:

1) Start from a large image, edit it carefully, scale it down to 64 x 64, and add the border. Any minor mistakes you make will be obliterated. This is preferable to trying to copy-paste pieces of 64 x 64 PW faces onto each other, and ending up with subtle errors in positioning as a result.

2) Make sure your source image is not a photo, unless you're good at tracing. The best sources, I think, are probably pixelated old VGA games. First of all, they often had large character images. Secondly, the shading shouldn't be too subtle.

3) Don't go overboard on Gaussian blur filters. Instead, gently, subtly smudge to make shadows. Put an original PW image next to yours to get a feel for the shading.

4) CREDIT YOUR SOURCE, PLEASE. Plagiarism is wrong. Really, even doing this is sort of a gray area.

The step-by-step instructions:

1) First, grab an image. I already had a source character in mind for Iolanta Hayes, so I just needed to Google. Here's what I started with:

(Posted Image)

This is Laura Bow, from the Sierra On-Line game The Dagger of Amon Ra. Not as big an image as you might like, but workable. My plan: Make her blonde, then coordinate her hat and clothes with her hair by using the GIMP's Colorizer and Hue, Saturation, Variance tools and a bit of hand-editing.

I began with a .PNG file, but quickly turned it into an RGB JPEG. Why? Force of habit, I guess.

2) Crop the image. Most PW sprites don't show much below the neck, so there's no point in wasting effort. Just crop the sucker. It's wise to use this opportunity to adjust the canvas size (use the "unlock" button to avoid scaling the canvas diagonally), and make sure it's a perfect square. Otherwise, you may have headaches later. Here, it was necessary to add a few lines of gray at the top of the image.

(Photobucket won't let me post this image right now - down for maintenance. I'll put it up later.)

NOTE: Be sure you're working in full RGB color mode from here on out, not Indexed mode! This makes shading work much easier!

3) Turn the background gray, using a PW icon as your color source. This shouldn't take long - just use the Color Picker to get the grey you want, and use the magic wand tool to select everything that isn't the character. Fill at 100% opacity.

4) Try scaling the image down to 64 x 64 and seeing how it looks at PW dimensions. Note any problems - one issue will be that some lines will lose sharpness. Undo the scaling, now that you've been warned of what to expect.

(Why 64 x 64? You need 6 pixels on all sides for the border.)

5) For the rest of this tutorial, you should work at very high magnification, so that you can catch subtle problems. The first thing to do is to fix the shading. The old game sprite was made with a limited palette, which doesn't look very good when scaled down. Using the color picker and the blur tools, give it a more PW-ish shading.

"What's a PW-ish shading?"

Look at a PW sprite; the cheeks aren't overemphasized, unless the character is old, but there's a bit of shading near the eyes. The chin is often sharply defined. And so on. The biggest problem with Laura is that her cheeks look entirely flat. We subtly fix this.

6) Now we fix the hair. This is not as hard as it looks. Just use the Color Select tool to pick out everything that's red, using SHIFT-click to add to selections and CTRL-click (and the Magic Wand tool) to remove stuff that you don't want turned yellow.

Once you've selected the hair, then go to the Hue, Saturation tool under the Color Tools menu, click on the "Red" color in the Master menu, and turn it orangish-yellow by changing its hue, then fiddling with its saturation and brightness. The hair should now be orange! Fill in the unsightly black spots with a color that looks right to you.

7) Next, we fix the hat. This is the most time-consuming part, since the original black hat was not very well-shaded. To do this, we first turn it entirely white, then add grey shading, then add a yellow hatband, possibly using the original as a model. Good luck!

8) After that, fixing the shirt is trivial - just use your Magic Wand and Color Picker skills to swap out black areas for white, and fix the shading a bit.

Bingo!

9) Finally, scale down to 64 x 64, put it on the border of a PW profile sprite, and you're done!

Scaled and given border:

(Posted Image)
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by Koda »

Hmm... they're quite good for what they are, though just personally, I think they definitely could benefit well from a smaller palette if you really want them to look like Ace Attorney sprites.
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by Ferdielance »

Thanks. I made a conscious decision not to try to emulate the palette restrictions of a classic game sprite because I reckoned that the gain (closer resemblance to the originals in the fine details) wasn't worth the cost (spending even more time doing pixel-by-pixel shading to emulate those games, rather than having shortcuts available.) Shading has to be pixel-perfect when you have very few colors to work with, but having more colors lets me make my borders slightly ambiguous so that the viewer's eye can correct for some of the misjudgments I make.

If I were actually a professional animator, I'd risk limiting my color use, but it's more important that the sprites look good given the skills I have.
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by Ferdielance »

Finally, I've got a sprite for the victim for my trial, Dr. Johann Palmstroem. I wanted to make a big, slightly disheveled guy - an absent-minded professor who doesn't seem to have the knack for occupying his own body. First, I started with some sprites of Geese Howard from Days of Memories 3:
Spoiler : Base 1 :
Image
A bit menacing, but I can make him a bit dorkier, giving him the expression of a person who's always a little lost. Anyway, he needs a grease-and-reagent stained jacket on a big body. For that, I used Ace from 999:
Spoiler : Base 2 :
Image
After heavy recoloring and mashing, I ended up with...
Spoiler : Dr. Palmstroem :
Image Image
Suggestions and comments are appreciated, as always!
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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Re: Adapted sprites by Ferdie Lance (critique encouraged)

Post by lazyplague »

Okay that is just...
beautiful.
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