[Request] Need help making this weapon sprite look better

[WorldEater]

I managed to make this sprite from a sketchfab model

But I'm kind of a noob when it comes to art, especially pixel art. I have a hard time understanding how shading and highlighting work, and usually when I try to add those it makes my sprites look crappy.

I was wondering if someone could help me make this look better, or even give me some tips for adding highlights and shading. I really like the sprites from Ion Fury and I saw that the penetrator uses few colors and a lot of dithering, so I tried to do that here but I still feel like it doesn't look right to me.

I plan to make a whole sprite sheet for this weapon and some others, if anyone would like to help me out with a project I'm doing. I am much better at designing levels and coming up with ideas for gameplay than I am with art.

https://imgur.com/a/s30yd4i

[Jekyll Grim Payne]

If you have a 3D model, it can be helpful to set up lighting in a 3D editor. Typically sprites are shaded in a way that the imaginary light souce is above and a bit in front of you. Ion Fury sprites started with renders of 3D models as well, which were then painted over.

There's no one perfectly correct method here, but I personally try to aim for a slightly comic book-ey look, which usually means higher saturation, higher contrast, and fairly harsh shadows and highlights. This is a rough example:



But this is my take, which is by no means necessarily the best way.

[WorldEater]

I tried to set up lighting in Blender but that never goes well for me.

That looks great. Is it as simple as just painting over it with the paintbrush tool? Or do you do it by creating a mask for the highlights and changing the opacity?

[Jekyll Grim Payne]

I tried to set up lighting in Blender but that never goes well for me.

That looks great. Is it as simple as just painting over it with the paintbrush tool? Or do you do it by creating a mask for the highlights and changing the opacity?

Try setting up the light source as the sun rather than a specific light source. A few extra light sources could be used to add more focused highlights (don't forget to play with the metallic/specular values of your material).

This here was mostly a paintbright and a saturation, brightness & contrast adjustment (adjustment layers are great for the latter). Here's how this was set up:


You might need to play with blending modes. Usually Overlay works best, but Normal or Additive or Lighten might be suitable in other cases.

I've also made some small generic guides on spriting: viewtopic.php?t=78240 (this one also contains a couple of links to miniguides on highlights and muzzle flashes)