The slow grafix revamp

[LexThorn]

Faces are extremely difficult to work with in such a small resolution, especially so for someone that has never worked much with faces like me.

I wouldn't exactly call them "very ugly" though, that seems more like a dissonance between what kind of faces you like on your cartoon women and what kind I like.
and i just happened to miraculously stumble (about 100% of all the face stuff past the basic eye/nose/mouth layout and skull structure is trial and error) into a facial structure that i like

Excuses, excuses. But I'm not afraid to admit my own incompetence.

I agree about dissonance. Tell me please, is that a smile on their lips?
PS: not a single word about incompitence, bodies are great IMHO.

[Gunner-chan]

I think they're pretty awesome myself, and can't wait to see the whole game revamped.

One bit of criticism I can level though is the pink hair + pink skin looks strange. You might want to darken or brighten one or the other to make the hair and skin more distinct from each-other.

[Bloax]

Most of them are smiling pretty broadly so far, with some eyebrow action going on.

I can't really do much about the pink hair, since it's already just about too dark as it is.

[Dioxine]

Well to be honest I personally find these faces repulsive (too sectoid-like, and the hair looks unnatural), but hey, everyone has the right to their own aesthetics, and the image quality is undeniable. It's always better to have a choice as a player, and I think the work Bloax is doing is amazing, both in scope and in attention to detail. An artist expressing him/herself is never in the wrong and I'm not going to play critic.

[Boltgun]

The faces looks a bit scary but not downright inhuman. It makes an uncanny combination with the outfits and I love it. Perhaps that's not what you were aiming for it has a lot of personality.

The heads from your last post are the best so far, my favorite it the redhead one.

However if you wish a bit of criticism:
- While the TAC armor gal's eyes pierce nicely through the visor, it feels like she is gazing through our soul with the helmet off.
- A blue light should give the night ops armor a better nocturnal feeling, and more contrast than the purple one.
- Are the gals winking? I thought for a while that one eye was to look normal and the other glow in a shadow, like a terminator effect.

But, again, it's really good.

[Bloax]

However if you wish a bit of criticism:
- While the TAC armor gal's eyes pierce nicely through the visor, it feels like she is gazing through our soul with the helmet off.
- A blue light should give the night ops armor a better nocturnal feeling, and more contrast than the purple one.
- Are the gals winking? I thought for a while that one eye was to look normal and the other glow in a shadow, like a terminator effect.

1) Entirely intentional. :^D

2) Not quite more contrast, but it's certainly more moody:

me likey
Edit: and speaking of moody;

mmm

3) And yes, that's winking.
That's why it's so purple, since I for some reason decided to add purple makeup to them and found that it both looked good and was good for differentiating the eyes from the rest of the head.
Fair warning though; the faces aren't really made to be viewed on extreme closeups like this, but rather with at a 2-4x magnification (the images are 10x), which is why some facial traits (primarily the mouth) are quite high-contrast.


Oh and yes I do enjoy reading through nitpickings, although I can't guarantee that I'd like to fix all of them.

[Bloax]

I shouldn't be doing stuff while tripping on sleep deprivation, it's not good for the quality control.

[Gunner-chan]

Looks good though to me!

Are you gonna make maskless/helmetless versions like that one official mod includes too?

[Bloax]

Of course.

->
Defender finally done.

[Evaristo]

- While the TAC armor gal's eyes pierce nicely through the visor, it feels like she is gazing through our soul with the helmet off.

The tac armor gal is one of my favorites for that reason, though I can leave the hair (I'm one of those who will personally lean toward more practical styles). She's the freakiest of them all by looking like she crawled out of the bowels of some hellfire ridden place. I tend to find myself quite immersed in the game's scavenging, irrecoverable world and the aberrations portrayed by these paper dolls do really well to fit in with my mind's eye of this great mod's setting.

That's just me though, I can totally understand where people are coming from if they're not into it and prefer other aesthetics.

I just want to encourage Bloax to keep up the good work and I hope you to keep experimenting on that hair! I'm not huge on the brighter colors nor the more wacky styles (Sentiment I feel both toward yours and certain ones in base X-PirateZ). I have no problem with them, I just hope to see some more that are toned a couple notches away from the anime margin.

2) Not quite more contrast, but it's certainly more moody:

me likey

That said though I like what you're trying with the multicolored hairstyles. However with the blue and red style on the night ops gal, the blue blends in with the darker skin somewhat and the red stands out as something that is floating above her head in a way. It might be mitigated with a lighter skin color wearing that particular 'do or a color reversal but idk, no matter the case hope to see more stuff!

[Bloax]

The nightops head does look a bit too busy for its own good, but minor incompatibilities like that are inevitable in such a variant-heavy environment as this.

The situation is much better when there's not a big-ass headpiece fucking everything up.

As for hair, then I'm pretty much throwing some random shit together every now and then as I roll along at this point.
The lack of direction is staggeringly bad, and working in such a limited resolution isn't making it easier to make hair look good at this angle.

Good to see that people are liking stuff though.

[Dioxine]

The situation is much better when there's not a big-ass headpiece fucking everything up.

Indeed, but you NV goggles are anything but big-ass, they're actually tiny And damn it, I really need to update these M0-M3/F0-F3 heads so you'll stop showing my first attempts at pixel art next to your work to make it look better (indeed M1 is the ugliest of them all)

[Bloax]

So decided to give the synth suit a go.
I had a bit of, uh, inspiration along the way.

Spoiler:

Maybe it should be a bit more nanosuit-ey rather than Muton-spandex-musclesuit, haha.

Although that does pave the way for the Brute armor to be more like

heh heh heh

[Gunner-chan]

I would say keeping it as the weird skinsuit makes the most sense, since well that's what it is. It's the exact same armor. Though shouldn't it be a different color than green like the default one? I don't think they'd put themselves in the most dominant mercenary color, which is why I think the original was blue.

[Bloax]

I could make it the blue-gray/dark grey combo that the original is pretty easily;

Spoiler:

But I really like the idea of Muton-suits.

Edit:

In fact yes, it would be quite amazing if Brute was repurposed to be a not-nanosuit, it even has the synthmuscle+chemicals bullshit.