Darth Vader as a Mega Man Boss! (Pixel Art Study and Redesign)

hello there my name is Brandon and I make pictures out of tiny squares and post them online for fun and today we're gonna be mashing up two of my favorite franchises Star Wars and Megaman I want to take Darth Vader and make him into the style of the robot masters from the Mega Man series so now that these props have fulfilled their purpose I'm gonna go put them away we can get started on some pixel art [Music] [Music] making various pixel art versions of Darth Vader is actually something I played around with before a lot I've done a tiny Darth a sort of Ness era inspired Darth aniion like 80s Saturday morning cartoon Darth and I've even already attempted a Mega Man style Darth in the past this one's from a few years ago and while it was an accomplishment at the time I think it fails to capture everything that the Mega Man style can offer like really the only thing going on with this one is that his boots are a little bit large and like why did I make him so purple so for today I want to study the art style of the senesce era Mega Man games I'm talking Mega Man 7 which is actually my personal favorite of the series but also the X Series games just looking at things like sprite construction color count and overall style and then attempt another dart that is hopefully more authentic to that style once I learned how it breaks down so here I pulled some sprites from different Megaman games that I think could be good references and creating the Darth Vader sprite we've got base junkman and shade man from Mega Man 7 then there's Sigma and storm you go for Mega Man X and finally colonel from megaman x 4 this one was for the playstation and had more of a 3d rendered look than the others but it's still a useful reference as a character with a lightsaber and a cool outfit what jumps out to me and is probably the reason why i love the art style of these games so much is the cartoony look of the sprites it's easy to see how they would translate to or from an anime look like what's normally seen on the boxart of the promo art in pixel art this look is achieved in large part by the use of black outlines in the sprite construction the outlines here helps separate the character sprite into sections of different costume elements or things that are adjacent that will be assigned different colors you can see that for the most part the black outline alone is communicating most of the sprite design already what's also interesting to note is that the spread of colonel from x4 has a very different approach and there's not much of an outline at all the choice to not use outlines here helps give those sprites a more three-dimensional look and not feel as flat on the screen it's a cool look and x4 is a gorgeous game but for my purposes I want to stick to the cartoony outline look another quick thing to check is the sprite height this will help determine what kinds of smaller details are possible and where exactly Darth will fit in with this group the smallest right here is based at 48 pixels and the tallest is junk magnets three pixels tall well okay technically storm Eagles of tallest like if you include his wings he's 84 pixels tall but he's only fifty from head to toe and that's what we need to consider for character comparison and Darth Vader is a big guy but I don't think he needs to be quite as tall as junkman though maybe a tad taller than Sigma would be good for overall style the aesthetic I love is of course those big chunky boots something along the geometry of a base has is really the quintessential Megaman look I also love the accent details on sprites like shade man and storm Eagle so might try to work that in as well or maybe even the colored light effect that's on Junkman's boots when it comes to style I also like looking at the sprite silhouette like if you fill the entire character with black you can kind of get a good read on their design just from the silhouette alone so in this group I like seeing the sharp geometry on the sprites like shade man and kernel and look how you can still recognize stormy clothes confident pose with his arm across like that I think that's really cool and it's just something to keep in mind when coming up with the cool pose for the Vader sprite stripping this idea back a bit further we can also take a rudimentary look at the pose itself by overlaying a kind of stick figure onto the sprite when I make a sprite I usually start from a stick figure to quickly find an interesting pose so deconstructing a Finnish sprite can also show you what works and what doesn't again I really like the confident footing of storm eagle and junk man also and probably want to stay away from ambiguous type of poses like base and shade man here Sigma and colonels poses here are also really great reference for just a character holding a lightsaber oh by the way for making characters holding a lightsaber or just like a sword or any kind of weapon like that in general it is best to stick with exact angles like if you notice on Sigma's blade it's at a perfect 45-degree angle that's because that's just a slope of 1 pixel segments Colonels blade is a different angle but it still follows a perfect slope of repeating to pixel segments if you try to go off angle and just kind of draw like a random line you're gonna end up with Jaggi bits and the weapons not gonna read cleanly just something to think about when you're planning a pose for a character that has that sort of weapon lastly I laid out the color palette from each sprite just to get a feel for how many colors are typically used what I noticed is that the main parts of the costume use gradients of anywhere from three to five shades within each color group and ironically shademan use actually a great example of that he's got three different shades for his main purple color and then he also uses a white highlight for areas with extra shine and the same kind of goes for his blue accent color too Junkman's another great example with sort of an extra-wide gradient of black white and for gray tones to give lots of options for creating light gray and dark gray areas and some great geometric lighting on his chunky shoulder pauldron just a side note too I also really love the rendering on his clamp and there for lightsaber effects we can see two different examples here so Sigma's blade has three colors there's two shades of green with white at the center and colonels blade is just kind of a simple white Center with a single layer of red pixels around it I feel like there's more punch to the coloring in Sigma saber so I'm gonna plan for that level of coloring alright so with all those ideas in mind I just put together like a starter color palette for what I think I'll need for Vader so there's a simple gradient of black white and then three gray tones for his main colors and then I got a few yellow shades for accent trimming and finally some two-tone red green and blue for additional costume details think - we'll grab one of those stick figures just have a rough place to start and to make sure that we're staying within the proportion of the character set so with all that I think we're good to go so let's get to pick Selene and just reading this in real quick so that we can talk about Vader's design that we need to incorporate I realize they didn't do that sorry that's my cat um so we've got this armor here there's a chest I don't think that controls breathing I think he got that off of an arcade machine or something there's the belt looks like that speaker on it there's these side packs I think he keeps snacks in those I don't know cape boots gloves no iconic helmet design and the lightsaber so with that let's get fixing all right so to start the bitter sprite the first thing I did was take that stick figure and just put it into an interesting pose based on what I liked from looking at the other bosses I decided to have him kind of clutching his lightsaber behind him and then have the other arm via Buster cannon that's raised up I know it's kind of weird to consider Vader with a gun for a hand but he's got robotic limbs anyway so it's kind of plausible at least within Megaman world right in my original mega darth 1.0 from the start of this video one of the shortcomings was that the boot style didn't really match the source material so for this one I measured out a few foot sizes from the reference brights just for guidance I think he used a width of 20 pixels to start on Vader here which looks kind of crazy when it's just a stick figure but it quickly starts to shape together by the time you add more of the lake so you see at this point I'm really just using that outline color to create a basic silhouette and then erasing to carve out the main details since this will be an outline sprite like the references I wanted to spend a lot of time finding a strong outline that communicates most of the sprite details before adding color they also see throughout that I flipped the sprite to its mirror image frequently often what happens is your eyes get used to seeing the art from the original perspective so flipping the canvas just kind of refreshes your perspective and can help you catch wonky anatomy and things like that and since I have the reference brights here too I'd pop him up sometimes to that set just to see how he lines up and to see if his style was being consistent with those guys for Darth Buster cannon I figured it was a perfect opportunity to add a bit more of a Star Wars reference and made it into something inspired by the e11 blaster you know the rifle that the stormtrooper Zeus or it's got kind of this ribbing along the barrel I don't know if that's right to him to use probably not but I also added a tiny scope to the top just convey a bit more from that when digging into the detail and decoration on the boot here I erased the silhouette just to leave that outline pixels then fill back in some pixels for strong shading towards the dark and curved areas of the boots ever find the outline to try and get some sharper language out of the boot design just to have it looking nice and villainous and then finish them off with some details like the triangles in the grip on the bottom first helmet I figured the best approach was just to erase pixels from the silhouette to indicate areas that are raised that are gonna catch light and sort of provide the details of his mask so you can kind of see those angles on his cheeks and the front of his mask and then that flat edge going along the side of his head with those areas clearly visible the rest of the helmet can kind of play with in those gradient colors and should leave the design fairly readable otherwise it's kind of funny how much I keep coming back to the boots like I really wanted to get them right on version 2.0 here which probably leads them looking a little overworked at times but it's alright I do clean them up by the time this is all said and done for adding the color I started with just a few of the gray tones I wanted to drop in a few different shades of gray just to make various parts of his outfit stand out and maybe even convey different materials so his shoulder pads an upper chest piece are in sort of a lighter gray whereas his belt is in a darker gray and then for his upper legs I gave it kind of a stripe pattern just to show a bit of texture I used the yellow and orange to make kind of a gold trim on his boots I just thought that'd be kind of a nice detail and something else that sort of pops and I use the two red colors to give them these glowing eyes I think it's kind of a cool look for this style and I can just picture walking into a dark boss room and just seeing those glowing eyes then maybe like his lightsaber lights up and lights the rest of the area yeah that'd be sweet and the last thing I did here was add in the colored light details and then roughed out the Cape for the Cape I just tried to have it fill up space that was open so it's just kind of flowing in a way that adds more to the silhouette and they gave it a ripped look towards the back so it kind of have these like sharp edges coming off of it again you know just have that villainous silhouette some people want a silhouette that be a good band name I'm taking dibs alright so let's take a look at the finished bright for Mega Darth 2.0 aka Vader man [Music] alright and here's the full sprite again with some of the check points from along the way just that I break down some of the finishing touches and kind of compare back to the original objectives going into this so once again the process to design this sprite involves starting with the stick figure pose and then building the silhouette and line work on that skeleton before adding color and refining the whole thing in finalizing the color palette I added a slight purple hue to the main gradient rather than sticking with those pure gray tones that I set up initially I just always liked having a slight color to things even if it's something like black or grey I like adding just a touch of blue or purple to it you can just kind of sneak it in there with low saturation and it helps give a bit more appeal in my opinion I also added an extra color to use for his cape so that it was differentiated from the rest of the outfit oh and another thing if you notice the boots between these two I just decided to get rid of those bright red lights on the boots like a mentioned earlier I kind of overwork them and that extra lighting detail wasn't really necessary with all the other lights on his costume already so let's go ahead and take a look at our for sprite design categories from earlier that's the pose outline silhouette and the sprite height this sprite ended up being 64 pixels tall putting them somewhere between the junkman and sigma sprites so that feels about right I also really like how the overall silhouette came out there's lots of those sharp points that keep them very scary-looking I guess if there's one weird thing about the silhouette it's probably the way the cape curves out in front of his body but I feel like it needed to drape there anyway so it's not too big of a deal comparing him with the original reference bosses I think he fits in fairly well I mean he's darker in tone like both in color and subject matter wise but that was to be expected a bit stylistically though I'm pleased with how he looks against the others considering I'm not the artist who made that game I'm just some guy who attempted a similar look after studying those ones and finally let's put him up on the shelf with my other dark sprites oh dang he's facing the wrong way against those guys one sec there we go so overall mega dart 2.0 is looking very unique in the set and he's got some nice improvements over 1.0 and I just feel better about it knowing that it was attempted with a closer attention to how the actual Megaman sprites are put together and now these five darts price make for an even weirder looking pokemon evolution chart - so that's cool as well all right that's all I got for this one thanks for watching I know that was kind of an extended process to design a single sprite but now that we know we can maybe design some other character mashups like Luke Skywalker as Megaman maybe Princess Leia's roll maybe Boba Fett as you know I can't think of anybody that he would mash up I'll have to think about that anyway thank you for watching take care and keep it square [Music]

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 114,460

Keywords: pixel art, sprite, character design

Id: R0alqYtA6jI

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 14 2019