I know I haven't finished the female template yet, I've been a bit busy, but I've been lurking. But I will come up from the depths for a bit to critique the first sprite on the template.
First off is the hair. I know hair is hard to do, and I'm not trying to be harsh, but that hair needs a good amount of work. I shaded the sprite the same way as the RTP sprites, so go take a closer look at that hair's shading. Or take a look at the unfinished example sprite provided at the end of my post. From the front view, the hair looks tiny, and the way it move makes it look almost oiled down. Though in the back the hair is too big and is HUGE ANIME HAIR.
The side view looks ok, but your hair looks somewhat flat. Especially with the shape you have, you need to give that huge mane of his a lot more depth. Also, when you put hair on a character, you need to give it a bit of shadow over the face. Look at the RTP sprites. Usually near the hair line, they use that sorta pink color, or at least the tan one. It looks pasted on the template how you have it now.
Now for the body. First off, those are WAY too bright of colors. Those can work in drawings, but not in sprite. You can't give it proper depth when your dark colors are that bright. You need:
- More contrast
- WAY less saturation
- more shading
As it stands, it looks rather flat and plastic. And the shoes are even brighter.
One more thing. I don't think we should have weapons attached to the default character sets. We can provide a pack of weapons to put on top of the sprites, but when they're on by default it limits what the sprite can be. For example, what if someone takes a look at your sprite and wants him to be an axe-man. With that staff on their by default, they have to edit it, or try and remove it. I know this is a problem with battlers, but most RMXP users don't even use the DBS due to the need for battler drawings. I don't think putting weapons on by default.
And for your poses, they're pretty good, but he's moving too much in some frames (going from side to back to the other side to the front), which causes it to look a bit jerky. Save such broad movements for sprites made to be used with ARC scripts that'll allow more than 4 frames per animation. Also, in a lot of the poses (frame 4 on row 1 in the attack pose, frame 3 and 4 on row 2, frame 1 and 4 on row 3, and frame 3 and 4 on row 4, to be exact) look almost like you're breaking the sprite's arms. I know it's really hard to pose things, and you did a good job, but I think you need to rework the template a bit to keep the proportions right on the arms and keep them looking natural. Animating such tiny sprites has certain limitations that have to be worked with. It's better to have stiff under-stated animation than animation that looks awkward and painful. The stiff stuff won't be noticed, the awkward stuff will.
And I know I sound really harsh, but I'm just trying to give you some good advice, k?
I want our RTP to be awesome! The RTP of RMXP is what brought me to the software, since i loved the style so much, so don't underestimate the selling power of good default graphics.
Also, what do you guys think of an unfinished sprite on this template I have in my folders. I always intended to make an RTP out of this template, and he was to be my Arshes-type character. He's based on an old super cliched hero I wrote in a story a long time ago, so i thought he'd fit pretty well. Anyways, here he is. What do you guys think of him?