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[RPG Summon (Dragon)][SA Pixel Tutorial] 作者：Shuku [www.spriteart.com] 译者：狂人=Madman=

In this lesson, you will be learning the steps taken to create one of thoe most sought after pixel peices in any rpg game, a summoned monster. For this example, we will be using Fafnir, a legendary dragon, slain by Sigurd in Norse mythology. Well in all honesty, i cant very well do "bahamut", and Fafnir sounded like a cool summon name to me... In any case, we are going to be using some harsh restrictions, reasons for which will be revealed later. This summon monster will be drawn to scale of the SNES hardware resolution of 224x186 pixels.

This tutorial is no joke. I warn you that this requires tremendous traditional illustration skill to perform correctly, as well as a keen sense of color usage, and superb technique, being able to dither, anti-alais while having a solid grasp of lighting and good texturing abilities. This is no task for a mere novice to tackle. This does not, however, mean that i discourage anyone of any skill level to try, for you do not learn by not trying, just as those that never play the lottery hit the jackpot.

In addition, this will require your utmost attention, participating many dedicated hours on your part to perform correctly. If you think this is going to be a simple 4-5 illustration, or even if that sounds way too long for your attention span to handle, do not expect great results. This, in essence, is very close to being as hard as it gets considering the restrictions as well as the shear size. This in fact, is a fully pixelated illustration.

First step is pretty easy, in fact it doesnt get easier than this. We are simply making a wireframe of our summon beast. Decide now what exactly you are going to create. Research Mythologies to find an ancient creature of some folklore that is attractive to you. Bear in mind its personality and character, such as strength, cowardice, constitution,or intelligence, etc. and apply it to your wireframe's poise. You are basically creating the skeleton for the entire illustration to be structured around.

I envision Fafnir to be a powerful, greedy dragon that was tricked to its death. In that, i can see Fafnir personifying (or beastifying if you will), anger, revenge, mercilessness, and power. For this, i am going to make Fafnir take up the whole SNES resolution of 224x186 pixels and then some (the wings would be hard to squeeze in there), to illustrate this strength and intimidation. The wings are poised back, slightly in line with his neck/jaw, ready to unleash a breath weapon that could... well lets just say that it would be only slightly more dangerous than st0ven's morning breath... and slightly less powerful than a whales' breath, which holds a dead, rotting anchovy rancor which will not dissipate from your clothing without a firm washing. The tail will spiral backwards to create depth within the illustration. This might be the most important step of the entire process.With this wireframe which you have carefully planned and illustrated, you are going to construct a silhouette of your beast using only one or two colors tops. Do not worry about depth, do not worry about shading, and absolutely do not worry about texture or color choices of any sort at this stage. Ideally, the color(s) that you use to create this silhouette will be rather dark and contain virtually no saturation. This is done to allow your hues to blend into this silhouette, no matter what colors you decide to ultimately use. Inadvertently, this is going to greatly reduce the amount of unique colors used in our illustration.

If you must, create a seperate layer out of your wireframe to superimpose onto your silhouette as you work. You want your silhouette to be as clean and as accurate as humanly possible. If you have to spend hours simply to bring this silhouette to perfection, so be it, because it is well worth the effort to guide you along the rest of the way. Dont even think about adding color until this process is completely finished, unless youve done this many times before and wish to compress a few steps.

While you do this I am going to begin the significance of the 4bit palette. The SNES and the GBA have a significant predisposition to display 4bit, 16 color sprites. If you were to be creating a summon monster this large, especially if you had an 8 bit image, ontop of the hardware already displaying the background tiles, and whatever sprites may be onscreen at the time, in addition to that the special effect that will take place when this beast is summoned, having an image with that much transparency would do quite a number on the hardware's capability to display all that data on the screen. I dont pretend to know enough about the hardware's capability to estimate its impact, but it was great enough to convince squaresoft to cut up their summon dragons in their 1999 game "Bahamut Lagoon" into tiles, in my guess, to rid itself of the large chunks of empty data on the original canvas. however, this now poses new limitations. To my knowledge the SNES and GBA hardware are somewhat identical, meaning that like the GBA, the SNES was able to display tiles in modes. This includes either a 4bit mode or an 8 bit mode. Basically, you had the option for your tiles to either share the same 8 bit palette throughout the screen, or you could split that 8 bit palette into 16 4bit palettes (16x16 = 256, they use an equal amount of colors), and from those 16 palettes, your tile had to use 1. If you used the 4 bit tile option, the datasize per tile would halve. (note this isnt exactly in jargon of what a programmer might be using to explain what is going on, i dont presume to be an expert on hardware). Another condition to the 4 bit tile option is that you cannot pick certain color indexes from different palettes, it could use only one palette, so that complicates things. If squaresoft were to make their beasts out of tiles on a seperate layer than the rest of the backgrounds, it would suggest that they would need to use one or several of the palettes in the 16 palette bank available for an individual tile to access. So unless their other background tiles were compressed to use only several palettes, or if the screen went black which would give the summon monster free reign to any of the 16 4bit palettes, it would be in their best interest to keep the color count on the summon monsters as low as possible. Therefore, in this case, we are only using 1 4bit palette to create this monster, to mnimize the impact on these imposed restrictions. However i feel that there is even more to it than that, considering that Bahamut Lagoon's "Jorgumondr" summon, which was 15 colors including transparency, sill had evidence as though its tiles were accessing two different palettes, instead of the same 16 color ramp. Now that we are finally pleased with our illustration, it is time to begin the coloring process. It would, however, not be inaccurate to still consider this the final phase of the silhouette stage. Begin to consider your hue selection for your beast. Remember to limit yourself to only two or three hues at max to satiate the 16 color bank that we haveto work with. Once you are settled on a colorscheme, pick one or two low saturated midtones per hue, and start to flesh out the details of your beast. This is still considered to be general shading, but take your time detailing this as if it were in the final stages, because after this stage you are about 50% finished with your illustration. implement whatever dithering or AA techniques youd like to blend your selected midtones in with the existing silhouette.

One thing to try to remember is to repeat your hues throughout the image. It is a crucial unifying aspect with an image this large using so few colors. Ive decided on an orangish red hue for the underbelly/fire in the mouth, a purplish tinge for the scales, and a seafoam type green for the wings, horns, claws and any other bone protrudings. Note that I am implying detail at this stage with the midtones by forming the main body of the scale structure and the wing structure. If you were to be doing a pen and ink illustration, or even a pencil illustration, you would be best advised to start illustrating the shadows first. That is the exact step that we are going to go through with our beast. For this step, we are going to choose a very dark tone with a low to mid level of saturation, and with this we are going to start to start illustrating the detailed linework with our "black". this will cover only the areas that have absolute absence of light, or deep crevaces. There is not much to explain at this point concerning methodology, this is more of an artistic step which will rely on your artistic eye to judge where to darken.

The next step in this process is to pick another tone, not quite as dark as the previous, but close to it, and start to blend and AA those dark defining "black" details into the silhouette's midtones. At this stage you will also be illustrating some less severe definition throughout the image where necessary. After this stage is complete, much of the elements in the background of your beast, and around the perimiter edges, should have quite a fair amount of definition in them, if not finished altogether. Your darkest tones should be desaturated enough to make them independent of what hue they are darkening. It is a key step to the color compression of your beast. Unlike your shadow tones, your highlights are going to be very hue specific, and are going to account for a good portion of your 16 palette entries. Because these are more hue specific, it might be best to tackle them one hue at a time. Lets start with the wings for our Fafnir dragon. our first step is to choose 1 or two highlight colors to fill in those areas that would receive the most light respective to that hue. These colors themselves should not have an extremely high level of saturation due to the relative saturation thus far in the image. From there on out, it is a matter of your ability to texture your beast. i can only offer a step by step example, whereas your beasts' textures might be quite unique, and would require a specific palette to achieve.

As with the shades, you are now going to pick one or two midtones within that hue and start to blend your highlights into the original silhouette midtones by whatever technical means you know, including AA, dithering, a combination of both, or what have you. These hue specific midtones should once again, be only slightly more saturated than the silhouette colors, considering that it must blend your silhouette midtones into the hue specific highlights not only in terms of luminousity, but also saturation. Now go through hue by hue and repeat this process of adding bright highlights, and then blending those highlights in with midtones in the same fashion as the previous step. If you try to do all the hues all at once you might feel overwhelmed, or you might lose track of a shade or two, this way, you have a nice methodical workflow to keep track of your progress and also of your allotted colors available. Note that the lack of saturation in your color choices will allow you to possibly use the highlight of one hue as another tone in a different hue ramp. For instance, the brightest part of the wing is also used as a highlight color on the scales of the dragon. Because the blueish purple family is tightly knit, and because of the relatively low saturation, it is visibly neglegable to use that same highlight for both hues. Of course, you should have learned this in your Palette Conservation class, which is a prereq to this lesson. At this point there is only one hue left to highlight, and it is also the least used hue in the image. At this point i have two palette entries unused thanks to our clever shading tricks from our previous steps. So now I will use my last remaining entries to have one highlight color of orange to use in the flame, and on the underbelly of the Wyrm. With my last leftover palette entry i created a buffer highlight of orange to cushion the previous orange highlight and the bright blueish highlight used in the wings and horns and scales. Then i will use this highlight color used in the wings/scales/horns to accent the flames in his mouth to bring its luminousity value on par with the other main features of the summon beast, and to further repeat the color, adding to the illustration's overall continuity. At this point we should be finished our ferocious summon beast, adter hours and hours of labor.

It is unfortunate that there is not much more to say to help in terms of technique and style, this is really an exercise to culminate all that you have learned in the previous tutorials, along with much practice using your techniques. Also it requires something that one cannot teach through mere tutorials, and that is a traditional artist's eye. However, if you are not much of a traditional artist, dont fret, im not much of one either in all honesty.