Looks pretty good, but perspective is not quite right for the side view. You are drawing the character side-on, but you should see the top of the creature too, at about a 1:2 ratio (so if the creature is as wide as he is tall, and you draw the side of the creature 20 px tall, you should draw the top ~10px tall).
- Leg movement still doesn't really make sense to me. Each leg kind of wiggles back and forth, then doesn't move for a frame. How am I supposed to understand that this creature is moving? I think bzt's suggestion is actually pretty good. I would suggest animating one leg at a time: have the leg lift up, move forward, land, then move backward as the creature is propelled forward. You can do this in 4 frames. Then copy that for the other legs, each slightly out of phase with one another. If it helps, just animate one segment and get that looking good, then you can copy-paste to the others. You can check out Redshrike's spider for some inspiration https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-spider . Obviously you don't need to be as detailed. as him, but you might get some ideas from how he animated the legs.
- Outline should be much darker for LPC style. Consider how this will look on a background---without a strong outline, it will totally blend together. You want something like #43181c or #27232a or #2b1c1d for the outline. I would suggest making the shadow color darker too. Having several very similar shades is good for things you want to kind of blend together in the background---like the dirt in the LPC base assets. This is the opposite---a giant monster that should look three-dimensional and really pop out! So turn up the contrast. Consider also adding a drop shadow eventually. You can do this in a few ways, one cheap way is to copy the shape to another layer, replace all colors with #2f202599 (#2f2025 w/ 60% opacity), and shift a few px to the right and down. I've attached an example where I just did those two things and IMO it looks a lot better.
- In general, use shading to imply 3D shape. Think about what parts of the object would be hit with the light source, and which parts should be dark. That will help you avoid the dreaded "pillow shading" (there's a little bit of that going on here). If it helps, think about each segment as a simple shape, like a sphere, and try to shade it like that. You can grab a real object like an orange and look at how light bounces off it, or google "sphere shading." I know this is kind a "draw the rest of the owl" comment, because getting shading right is a lot of the work for making any good visual art, but constantly reminding yourself to think about the light source and try to draw in 3 dimensions is an extremely important and useful forcing function. I tried very lightly re-shading the first frame, to give an idea how you might add a little more depth. (My edits CC0, feel free to use however).
Definitely agree with Ragnar. The segments need to move in relation to one another A simple approach would be: each frame, move 1 segment 1px forward; that way the total length stays the same but the segments kinda undulate with respect to one another. Some side-to-side movement might be necessary too.
Not sure how early of a sketch you are considering this, so apologies if this is premature: you should add at least two more shades: a darker outline around the whole thing, and a lighter shade for highlights (just a few px per segment). This will allow you to imply a rounder, shinier shape. Your current darkest shade can then be used for shadows around the back/bottom of each segment.
Not sure how to help with the turning, that seems like a complicated movement...
One thing I'd recomend is making agreeing to upgrade the licenses mandatory, as long as you are the original author, so no creep can purposely post their stuff on here and farm missattributions
I'm not sure how well this would work for remixes/derivatives. For instance, I always mark "Yes, this is my own work," even though it's often a derivative of someone else's work. In that case, I can say whether my contributions should be available under later licenses, but I don't have the same authority for others... Seems like another argument for figuring out how to make the "Allow later license versions" checkbox visible to regular users...
"Allow later license versions" is checked by default and has been for some time, which is good... maybe there could be a popup warning if someone clicks to disable it, explaining that it should ONLY be unchecked if you are submitting a derivative work that you are sure can't be upgraded... or something like that?
If someone changes the license on the uploaded work now then anyone that have already downloaded it on a previous versions of the license(and can prove it) then they a free to use it under that license ... Thats probably why we have so much cc-by-3.0 assets, as others havn't known they could use a newer license...
I don't totally understand your point... but I think you are saying that, for many assets, the author originally selected CC-BY[-SA] 3.0 and "Allow later license versions", and never bothered to go back to add 4.0... but we users can't see that "Allow later license versions," so we are stuck using 3.0, making derivatives that are released under 3.0, etc. Therefore figuring out how to make that "Allow later license versions" visible to users would be helpful and should be prioritized. If so, I agree :)
As well, perhaps OGA should add a mandatory agreement that if your work is found to be being used to immoraly sue people, that the license is forced to be upgraded.
I don't know how that would work legally or technically, and that seems like a bit of a rabbit hole to me. But certainly OGA can remove/refuse to host works if the admins determine someone is not acting in good faith (e.g. that guy mentioned in the article who was uploading stuff to Wikimedia Commons, seemingly for the purpose of luring people into making minor attribution errors, then suing/extorting them). Maybe that could be made an official statement/position somewhere, similar to what they have done with NFTs.
there is a large body of work here that is cc-by 3.0, and many of the authors have allowed it to be upgraded to cc-by 4.0. BUT we can't see that under the current system, one has to contact MedicineStorm and ask her if you can upgrade licenses. a system wide upgrade for everything that was ticked with "The authors of this content agree to license it under later versions of the licenses they selected above." would be feasible i think?
I not sure medicinestorm could upgrade licenses for works even if they wanted to, i beleieve that would be up to the author to decide to do that.
For any submission where the author checked "Allow later license versions" but only selected CC-BY-* 3.0 as the license, the author has essentially agreed to CC-BY-* 4.0 (and 5.0, 6.0, etc. if they are ever released). So yes, I think the site could automatically add the 4.0 license to those submissions (and ideally deprecate/warn against use of the content under the CC-BY-* 3.0 license). (Again, setting aside whether this is technically feasible with the current setup, it seems legally/morally sound).
what do we do about all the cc-by 3.0 stuff from 2012 made by some obscure japanese artist whose original webpage exists only on the wayback machine?
Be super careful and deliberate about attribution, I guess. If you attribute correctly, you should be protected from this behavior. Should...
again, sounds like a good argument for CC0 to me. attribution is nice, and everyone deserves credit for their work. but i personally would rather my work have more utility and be more free in exchange for not demanding credit.
Increasingly I'm inclined to agree... between the whole stupid DRM issue, the issue of license compatibility between different share-alike licenses, and now this nonsense... However, there is lots of great stuff here that it would be a shame to lose that stuff. And I understand that some people are more committed to "share-alike" as part of the FOSS ethos. Just seems increasingly clear that that principle comes with some costs.
Whoa, this is actually a pretty scary article. Thanks for sharing.
tl;dr (though everyone should): people release things under CC licenses, then hire unscrupulous "law firms" to threaten users who fail to follow attribution requirements with legal action and extort them for payment. CC-* licenses version 1-3 include a provision that the license "terminates automatically upon any breach," so you are in violation and subject to statutory damage for copyright infringement immediately if you fail to attribute properly. Version 4 includes a grace period of 30 days for users to fix the problem following notification.
I know efforts to update/overhaul OGA have... stalled... a few times... But we should really figure out a way to implement some of these recommendations at the end of the article:
Upgrade on Upload: Anytime someone tries to upload a CC image with a pre-4.0 license to a repository like the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, Thingiverse or Github, they should be asked if they are the creator, and, if so, should be prompted to upgrade the license to the current version;
Upgrade in Place: Every repository that hosts CC works that carry pre-4.0 licenses should send an email to every account holder urging them to opt into a process to upgrade them immediately to the latest license.
Warnings: Every repository that hosts CC works that carry pre-4.0 licenses should place a prominent warning on every page that includes these works, explaining that this work uses an outdated and disfavored license and that a failure to correctly attribute it could attract a $150,000 statutory damages awards.
Automated Attribution: Every repository that hosts CC works should have a one-click system to create an attribution string for each of the works it hosts, which is transferred to the user's clipboard.
Some of these seems straightforward, like the warnings (though I worry about the chilling effect). Perhaps those licenses could be marked as "deprecated" (in favor of 4.0), with a link to an FAQ page explaining some of the differences/advantages?
Automated attribution functionality kind of exists through the collections feature, but it is frankly not as easy to use as it should be. There really should be an option on each submission page to copy-paste an appropriately formatted attribution statement (like on Wikimedia Commons). Perhaps this could be accomplished purely in Javascript, and thus would require minimal updates to the backend? I could prototype such functionality.
IMO the most pressing challenge is the large body of existing work here under CC-* 3.0 licenses. While a 3.0 work can be combined with a 4.0 work, the terms of both licenses apply to the result (something OGA doesn't really allow you to accurately reflect right now), and I'm not sure what the legal implications of that are for this practice.
To "upgrade" a work from 3.0 to 4.0 would require the author's explicit permission. If the author has already given that permission by checking the "Allow later license versions" checkbox, OGA could unilaterally and automatically mark all those submissions as CC-* 4.0, and should probably start doing so. (E.g., CC-BY 3.0 becomes CC-BY 4.0, -BY-SA 3.0 becomes -BY-SA 4.0, etc.). MedicineStorm, do you think that would be possible?
It would also be great to have visibility of that checkbox on the asset page (currently it is only available to admins), no idea what's entailed there.
Finally, it's probably time to think about an OGA-BY 4.0 license, based on CC-BY 4.0. Were any lawyers involved in writing OGA-BY 3.0, or was it just done by Bart?
This collection contains all LPC-styled artwork created so far, both during and after the competition (as far as I know---let me know if anything is missing!): https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-collection
If you are building clothing, weapons, accessories, etc. for a humanoid character, please consider building on these character bases https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases ; they incorporate additional animations that were developed during/since the competition and have many tweaks and fixes compared to the originals in the style guide linked above
There is a universal spritesheet generator tool here https://sanderfrenken.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gene... , which is actively maintained by Herodom (aka castelonia) and myself; we have incorporated essentially all compatible artwork for the spritesheets into the generator (notable exceptions are the "jump", "run", and "sit" animations which are much more recent and don't have many clothing items created for them yet).
The only problem will be remembering who made the assets, as I would spend hours some nights downloading stuff just trying to find the perfect assets just so I could express to any future artist what I'm kind of looking for. Hard to keep track when you download a ton around the same time. But due credit is important so I will just spend time on that when I get it all set up.
Two things that help with this:
1) I always download assets into a folder named by the last part of the OGA url, e.g. I would download https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-ship into a folder called "lpc-ship", that I way I can find it again.
2) If you go to your user page, there is a hidden collection called "My Downloads" which you can use to see all the assets you have downloaded. This is helpful if you remember downloading something but can't find where it came from. Super helpful feature of OGA that I think most users are unaware of.
Obviously there will be scenarios where these tricks don't work, but I have found them helpful temporary solutions.
The scaled image has been anti-aliased; you did not enable nearest neighbor/disable filtering when scaling.
Zoom in on the image. Notice that instead of 5 distinct colors there are many shades of grey. This is due to anti-aliasing applied by the scaling algorithm. It makes the image not really look like pixel art anymore.
FYI, even with nearest neighbor scaling, you often need to hand-edit pixel art when you scale it. Prototype 2 looks better than 1 for this reason, although it still has anti-aliasing on the internal parts of the fish.
I'd be happy to keep giving feedback on this and/or other sprites, but maybe we should move the conversation to a different thread?
Looks nice! I would just scale it down in whatever program you usally use (I use PyxelEdit for pixel art, Aseprite is also good; GIMP would work too, but make sure to set the interpolation mode to "None" or "Nearest Neighbor" so you don't get aliasing).
I am making a fishing animation for one of this month's commissions on my Ko-fi page; this will go nicely together! https://ko-fi.com/bluecarrot16
More like this (I only edited the first frame for each direction). Very minor edit, but I think it makes the light source more clear and the object look more 3D as a consequence.
Looks pretty good, but perspective is not quite right for the side view. You are drawing the character side-on, but you should see the top of the creature too, at about a 1:2 ratio (so if the creature is as wide as he is tall, and you draw the side of the creature 20 px tall, you should draw the top ~10px tall).
Good improvements, a few more suggestions:
- Leg movement still doesn't really make sense to me. Each leg kind of wiggles back and forth, then doesn't move for a frame. How am I supposed to understand that this creature is moving? I think bzt's suggestion is actually pretty good. I would suggest animating one leg at a time: have the leg lift up, move forward, land, then move backward as the creature is propelled forward. You can do this in 4 frames. Then copy that for the other legs, each slightly out of phase with one another. If it helps, just animate one segment and get that looking good, then you can copy-paste to the others. You can check out Redshrike's spider for some inspiration https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-spider . Obviously you don't need to be as detailed. as him, but you might get some ideas from how he animated the legs.
- Outline should be much darker for LPC style. Consider how this will look on a background---without a strong outline, it will totally blend together. You want something like #43181c or #27232a or #2b1c1d for the outline. I would suggest making the shadow color darker too. Having several very similar shades is good for things you want to kind of blend together in the background---like the dirt in the LPC base assets. This is the opposite---a giant monster that should look three-dimensional and really pop out! So turn up the contrast. Consider also adding a drop shadow eventually. You can do this in a few ways, one cheap way is to copy the shape to another layer, replace all colors with #2f202599 (#2f2025 w/ 60% opacity), and shift a few px to the right and down. I've attached an example where I just did those two things and IMO it looks a lot better.
- In general, use shading to imply 3D shape. Think about what parts of the object would be hit with the light source, and which parts should be dark. That will help you avoid the dreaded "pillow shading" (there's a little bit of that going on here). If it helps, think about each segment as a simple shape, like a sphere, and try to shade it like that. You can grab a real object like an orange and look at how light bounces off it, or google "sphere shading." I know this is kind a "draw the rest of the owl" comment, because getting shading right is a lot of the work for making any good visual art, but constantly reminding yourself to think about the light source and try to draw in 3 dimensions is an extremely important and useful forcing function. I tried very lightly re-shading the first frame, to give an idea how you might add a little more depth. (My edits CC0, feel free to use however).
Keep up the good work!
Definitely agree with Ragnar. The segments need to move in relation to one another A simple approach would be: each frame, move 1 segment 1px forward; that way the total length stays the same but the segments kinda undulate with respect to one another. Some side-to-side movement might be necessary too.
Not sure how early of a sketch you are considering this, so apologies if this is premature: you should add at least two more shades: a darker outline around the whole thing, and a lighter shade for highlights (just a few px per segment). This will allow you to imply a rounder, shinier shape. Your current darkest shade can then be used for shadows around the back/bottom of each segment.
Not sure how to help with the turning, that seems like a complicated movement...
Excited to see how you develop this!
I'm not sure how well this would work for remixes/derivatives. For instance, I always mark "Yes, this is my own work," even though it's often a derivative of someone else's work. In that case, I can say whether my contributions should be available under later licenses, but I don't have the same authority for others... Seems like another argument for figuring out how to make the "Allow later license versions" checkbox visible to regular users...
"Allow later license versions" is checked by default and has been for some time, which is good... maybe there could be a popup warning if someone clicks to disable it, explaining that it should ONLY be unchecked if you are submitting a derivative work that you are sure can't be upgraded... or something like that?
I don't totally understand your point... but I think you are saying that, for many assets, the author originally selected CC-BY[-SA] 3.0 and "Allow later license versions", and never bothered to go back to add 4.0... but we users can't see that "Allow later license versions," so we are stuck using 3.0, making derivatives that are released under 3.0, etc. Therefore figuring out how to make that "Allow later license versions" visible to users would be helpful and should be prioritized. If so, I agree :)
I don't know how that would work legally or technically, and that seems like a bit of a rabbit hole to me. But certainly OGA can remove/refuse to host works if the admins determine someone is not acting in good faith (e.g. that guy mentioned in the article who was uploading stuff to Wikimedia Commons, seemingly for the purpose of luring people into making minor attribution errors, then suing/extorting them). Maybe that could be made an official statement/position somewhere, similar to what they have done with NFTs.
For any submission where the author checked "Allow later license versions" but only selected CC-BY-* 3.0 as the license, the author has essentially agreed to CC-BY-* 4.0 (and 5.0, 6.0, etc. if they are ever released). So yes, I think the site could automatically add the 4.0 license to those submissions (and ideally deprecate/warn against use of the content under the CC-BY-* 3.0 license). (Again, setting aside whether this is technically feasible with the current setup, it seems legally/morally sound).
Be super careful and deliberate about attribution, I guess. If you attribute correctly, you should be protected from this behavior. Should...
Increasingly I'm inclined to agree... between the whole stupid DRM issue, the issue of license compatibility between different share-alike licenses, and now this nonsense... However, there is lots of great stuff here that it would be a shame to lose that stuff. And I understand that some people are more committed to "share-alike" as part of the FOSS ethos. Just seems increasingly clear that that principle comes with some costs.
Whoa, this is actually a pretty scary article. Thanks for sharing.
tl;dr (though everyone should): people release things under CC licenses, then hire unscrupulous "law firms" to threaten users who fail to follow attribution requirements with legal action and extort them for payment. CC-* licenses version 1-3 include a provision that the license "terminates automatically upon any breach," so you are in violation and subject to statutory damage for copyright infringement immediately if you fail to attribute properly. Version 4 includes a grace period of 30 days for users to fix the problem following notification.
I know efforts to update/overhaul OGA have... stalled... a few times... But we should really figure out a way to implement some of these recommendations at the end of the article:
Some of these seems straightforward, like the warnings (though I worry about the chilling effect). Perhaps those licenses could be marked as "deprecated" (in favor of 4.0), with a link to an FAQ page explaining some of the differences/advantages?
Automated attribution functionality kind of exists through the collections feature, but it is frankly not as easy to use as it should be. There really should be an option on each submission page to copy-paste an appropriately formatted attribution statement (like on Wikimedia Commons). Perhaps this could be accomplished purely in Javascript, and thus would require minimal updates to the backend? I could prototype such functionality.
IMO the most pressing challenge is the large body of existing work here under CC-* 3.0 licenses. While a 3.0 work can be combined with a 4.0 work, the terms of both licenses apply to the result (something OGA doesn't really allow you to accurately reflect right now), and I'm not sure what the legal implications of that are for this practice.
To "upgrade" a work from 3.0 to 4.0 would require the author's explicit permission. If the author has already given that permission by checking the "Allow later license versions" checkbox, OGA could unilaterally and automatically mark all those submissions as CC-* 4.0, and should probably start doing so. (E.g., CC-BY 3.0 becomes CC-BY 4.0, -BY-SA 3.0 becomes -BY-SA 4.0, etc.). MedicineStorm, do you think that would be possible?
It would also be great to have visibility of that checkbox on the asset page (currently it is only available to admins), no idea what's entailed there.
Finally, it's probably time to think about an OGA-BY 4.0 license, based on CC-BY 4.0. Were any lawyers involved in writing OGA-BY 3.0, or was it just done by Bart?
Some additional resources that may be helpful:
Looking forward to everyone's submissions! Happy to help if anyone has logistical or licensing questions too.
Two things that help with this:
1) I always download assets into a folder named by the last part of the OGA url, e.g. I would download https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-ship into a folder called "lpc-ship", that I way I can find it again.
2) If you go to your user page, there is a hidden collection called "My Downloads" which you can use to see all the assets you have downloaded. This is helpful if you remember downloading something but can't find where it came from. Super helpful feature of OGA that I think most users are unaware of.
Obviously there will be scenarios where these tricks don't work, but I have found them helpful temporary solutions.
The scaled image has been anti-aliased; you did not enable nearest neighbor/disable filtering when scaling.
Zoom in on the image. Notice that instead of 5 distinct colors there are many shades of grey. This is due to anti-aliasing applied by the scaling algorithm. It makes the image not really look like pixel art anymore.
FYI, even with nearest neighbor scaling, you often need to hand-edit pixel art when you scale it. Prototype 2 looks better than 1 for this reason, although it still has anti-aliasing on the internal parts of the fish.
I'd be happy to keep giving feedback on this and/or other sprites, but maybe we should move the conversation to a different thread?
Looks nice! I would just scale it down in whatever program you usally use (I use PyxelEdit for pixel art, Aseprite is also good; GIMP would work too, but make sure to set the interpolation mode to "None" or "Nearest Neighbor" so you don't get aliasing).
I am making a fishing animation for one of this month's commissions on my Ko-fi page; this will go nicely together! https://ko-fi.com/bluecarrot16
More like this (I only edited the first frame for each direction). Very minor edit, but I think it makes the light source more clear and the object look more 3D as a consequence.
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