User blog:Sunder4321/Tutorial - How to make shadows on Custom Sprites

Hello there ! Welcome to Sunder4321's tutorial on how to make shadows on defaced sprite parts. Josh27 asked me how to do them, so Josh and to anyone else reading this, I hope this helps.

NOTES BEFORE STARTING:
 * You're gonna need to have an image editor software for this. Right now I'm using Paint.net which is my default image editor, but you can use other, more familiar image editors (examples are Photoshop or GIMP).
 * This tutorial is for shadows. For making custom-sprites, go here. I also suggest you read that first before reading this because it will give you more insight.

Step 1a: Finding the light sources
For this tutorial, I'll be doing Modern Hisako Ichiki aka Armor, and I have already started her out as seen here.

http://i.imgur.com/63qjJqF.png

It's unfinished, obvi. The torso is just a plain color and it doesn't have any shading because I have filled out the torso. Before we add the shading for it, we must examine the official in-game sprites and see how the shading values are done there.

http://i.imgur.com/MtceVdM.png

I chose Kitty Pryde because she's the base for Hisako. We can now see the lighting and shadows. In the example, the light is coming from the right, which means the shadows are coming from the left. There's also some light coming from the top, and a white line in the edges. Let's look at another example, Crystal.

http://i.imgur.com/TzTWxdM.png

Again, we see that the shade is coming from the left and the light from the right (that rhymes, not to mention) and also, the shade is coming from the bottom and the light from the top. Now we now the shadow values, light in the right and top and shadow from the left and the bottom. This is 'kinda like math.

Step 2a: Shade our sprite
So we go back to our sprite. Now we do what we learned. We use the eyedropper tool to select the plain color and adjust it to an even darker color, but lessen it's opacity. Now we paint over it.

http://i.imgur.com/Mu0VqXX.png

http://i.imgur.com/jyDUn0x.png

Step 1b: Brightness & Contrast
So let's go to another kind of shadow. We see here that our Hand Spy is wearing black today, but we want him to wear white. We discussed this in Loupi's black-to-white tutorial.

http://i.imgur.com/rwvhEw4.png

Now what we tend to do is set the brightness level higher but keep the contrast the same.

http://i.imgur.com/bxCXEW5.png

Well, that's not how lighting in M:AA works. M:AA sprites have very dark shadows. Let's look at our examples again.

http://i.imgur.com/MtceVdM.png

http://i.imgur.com/TzTWxdM.png

We see that shadows go from light yellow to brown in both examples. So in order for our shadows for our Hand Spy to be even with the color, we set the contrast level higher.

http://i.imgur.com/wc3dxVC.png

Much better.

Thanks for reading! I hope you picked up something from this tutorial. See you next time!