Fussy Ambassador Lollie (FoxSoft) for PC-98, 1987
640×400, 16 colors from a 12-bit color range, Australian winters are a farce. 💪🦊💦
I've posted a complete write-up + WIP shots for this piece on my site, here!
I ended up using every tool in my toolkit to finish this piece, so here's a look at all the separate elements that I composited together! Breakdown under the cut.
In order:
- Clip Studio Paint for the sketch. At this point, I only had vague ideas about what the UI should look like, and I'd always planned on doing the background in…
- Blender, for modelling the storefronts. I also used this as reference to help keep Lollie's head looking correct in perspective, front-on plus low angle cam is awkward. Please also enjoy the junky cube model standing in for his body.
- The trees were assets bought from SketchFab, here. Blender's Grease Pencil and Line Art modifier were used to automatically generate lineart for the front tree. There's a handy tutorial explaining this technique over here!
- After Effects and the Knoll Light Factory plug-in (RIP, thanks Maxon) were used to design the lens flare. This allowed me to split the lens flare into separate elements, which was crucial for the next step.
- Photoshop's Save For Web feature, as old as it is, is excellent for crunching images down and applying different forms of dither. This was used to process the trees and 5 of the 6 the lens flare elements. (The hexagon flares were redrawn manually in…)
- Aseprite is where it all came together. Lollie and the storefront renders were drawn over the top pixel-by-pixel, shaded manually. The trees received minimal touch-ups. The lens flare had to be stacked and recolored layer by layer, so that I could simulate additive color-blending without breaking out of the 16-color palette.
- The UI was pixeled up from scratch in Aseprite. This includes all of the text! Aseprite's text tools are virtually non-existent, so I made each letter on the spot.
