What is LF2 style?

[YinYin]

HOW THE MOST PROBABLY MARTI WERE DOING IT.

Good you mentioned it, the questions sure didn't look like it.

- Do we have to firstly draw sketch of figure (template), or straight away trace shapes with bigger color brush?
- How many layers? One for base and second for shading? Or maybe one for everything?

It should be impossible to tell on the final result, thus it doesn't matter. At all.

- Bakcgrounds! Also in 200%? Without use of opacity brush?

Backgrounds seem to contain very few drawn parts and a lot of resources edited together. So I'd say Martis tools and technique varied so much on each one of them that it doesn't matter yet again. The result counts.

- How to choose, when it's better to use 3 instead of only 2 colors of shading?

In my book it's always 2 shades per colour. If you spot a third one that's actually a different colour surface (like the sole of a shoe or the border between two larger dark/light surfaces of the same hue).

- What about copying AND ROTATING parts of character? Allowable or not? (in 200% size ofc)

Definite yes - you can easily spot that on all characters. However in my experience you get a noticable quality loss at 200%. Go for 400 instead.

[YinYin]

What would be next? Rendering and outline! We got a pretty big Davis here so let me shrink him down to game size quickly:

Aww crap what's this? I guess you get what this will be about :D
Considering all the small black dots that were on LF2s sprite sheets I'd say Marti didn't pay much attention to this initially. And if you worked clean and have the right image interpolation when scaling down you may not have to worry about this point at all, but as you can see here it can end ugly.

The analyzing part itself will be pretty short, so I will also tell you how I do this process.
(Be sure to tell me how you do it!)

Since the question has recently been raised:

How do you always get a good smooth black outline? (mine's are crappy)

I figured I should do it now.

edit: If you are using the dark forum theme I suggest you to view the images in a separate window to get a contrasting background - I guess I should've considered this first but I didn't.

So as we can see the outline of the above render is ultra crappy. I admit that I exaggerated on purpose, but if you aren't careful you'll end up with the same mess.

Let's first quickly analyse the correct render used in game:

As you can see it's pretty sharp and even without the actual sprite the outline of this shape already conveys character details: his hair style, his posture and the type of pants and shoes he's wearing.
On top of that this outline seems to be a very subtle black, never any thicker than a pixel width. With these things in mind I advise you to always have the final shape of your sprite in mind from the get go - no matter what size and drawing techniques you start with: only seeing the outline of your sprite should not be a confusing sight. The rest only boils down to either working clean or knowing the right tricks to easily create and manipulate outlines.

Clean working
So let's pretend we have the 200% version of Davis without a background:

This is a pretty clean work of art. If we simply size it down with appropriate interpolation (if you can choose different ones just experiment with it) and put it onto a black background it will look like this in LF2:

Go compare it to the original game render above. It is a little different because I do not actually have the large sized Davis without background (and don't know which interpolation Marti used), but at first it is a sufficient fit. The outline of his hair isn't quite as sharp and his shoulders turned out edgy instead of round. The cleaner you worked on your source material the better the result will be by just doing this.

Outline manipulation
If you either don't work clean enough for the above method to be sufficient or simply want to have full control over the final outline on the pixel level, here is how I do it:

First I size the background less source down to game size.
Second I underlay it with a black layer and select and delete all visible black areas (wand selection or colour range with 0 tolerance).
To demonstrate the effects of the used tools I only created a limited black rectangle - you should of course do the whole area.
At that point I have already arrived at the outline you would get with the above method, except it is a separate and purely black layer.
Then I connect the downsized sprite layer to this outline layer as a clipping mask (it will not draw beyond the outline layer).
And finally I can edit the outline shape without messing around on the actual sprite layer by using pixel brush and eraser tools just on the outline layer.
To demonstrate I have sharpened the outline of the hair, made shoulder and hand round and erased a smiley right into his chest.

This method is also useful to create sharp outlines that aren't black. All non physical objects in LF2 for example don't have a black outline (energy blasts).
All you have to do to achieve this is simply fill in your black outline layer with the desired colour.


How do you create your outlines?
And what are your experiences on the fourth and last step?

• Animation (steps 1-3 with a bigger picture in mind)