Rotating Planet (moon)

[robert83]

Hello,

Can someone tell me what is wrong with this ? I've created this rotating moon planet thing myself... but somehow it does not feel like it's really rotating... and I don't know why...

517


Greetings
Rob

[Traveler]

It's difficult to say without actually seeing the animation, but my guess is that the texture is just moving horizontally and lacks any sense of depth.

[robert83]

I've made a 508x128 base texture for it... I'm moving the frame of the moon trough this to the right in stepst of 8 pixels.

519

Can you please tell me how can I fix this ? How do I add depth to this ? Sorry I'm just starting to learn pixel art, and I don't know so many thing yet...


Greetings
Rob

[robert83]

Here is one frame of the moon a bit larger , sorry but I'm using GraphicsGale and cannot make GIF with it...

520


Whenever a texture touches that light line it goes white... I thought that would make it feel round....

[User137]

Thought i was going to make small test app to see the pattern rotation, but i quickly realized about your texture that:
1) The moon spheres are overlapping. You can't clearly distinct the border between each animation frame.
2) You are using jpg for image that clearly needs alpha channeled transparency. Please use PNG for this, because from JPG it is impossible to extract random shades of purple. JPG is not color or pixel perfect format.
3) Your texture size is not in power of 2. 579 x 579 is awkward size to load... graphics engines would load it as 1024x1024. Maybe you could squeeze it in 512x512.
Also when you divide 579 pixels with 8 spheres, you get PatternWidth that is 72.375, which further tells about the overlapping.

[robert83]

In fact I'm using PNG 128x128x4 , only during upload it changed the resolution...

That large image with all the patterns is 1024x1024x4 png .

The texture size for the moon is : 508x128 PNG , got 49 Images made with it size 128x128

Did it by starting from 0,128 ... 8,128, 16,128 etc...

The rotation is fluid... only thing it does not feel like I'm rotating...


Here it is zipped 521

Rob

[User137]

Makes sense :)

Well, it looked like Traveler said, no depth. The image is moving left, circlular piece is cut from it and glow added on top. I'm sure many image softwares can do the needed "bump" effect on 1 go. Roughly it means corners pinched radially towards middle and center scaled up. But doing that all by hand for each frame could be frustrating i assume, some frame was already a few pixels off the place but it wasn't very noticable.

Even when the animation has so many frames, trying to rotate the moon slowly looks animating in big steps so it was only watchable in high speed. Some fading effects could alleviate that, or there is no issue if it's shown almost still.

Also the looks is very cartoony. You could have alot more contrast even up to fully black side.

[Traveler]

I have created a little viewer [click (http://www.gameprogrammer.net/zip/moon.zip)] to see what it looks like. I stand by my previous explanation. It sort of looks like you're looking through a tube which is moving over your texture. I'm not sure if it's any use to you but I included a render of your texture mapped onto a 3d sphere, too. (switch using buttons [1] and [2])

[robert83]

Thank you,

I just tried to do that with spining globe in gimp ( you've also did that ? ) ... created a new texture 512x512x24 ... it actualy works nice when I set it to make 60 images... the only problem is that it looses it's cartoony touch, is there a way to preserve it? Maybe I should use much darker colors and it would look better on the sphere?

Also how did you extract the images from gimp ? Is there a one click extract all created images ?

Rob

[Traveler]

Hmm, I think you misunderstood. I did not use Gimp, but Lightwave. That's a 3D modeling and animation program similar to 3DStudio Max, Maya or Blender. I created a 3d sphere and attached your texture to it, which I rendered to a spritesheet in 48 frames.
It's an entirely different process than what you're using.