Creative ways to show legs and footwear

[磯七ラスミ]

When you desing a full body character, you want to get the most from it, without wasting something as important as legs, the borders of pants or skirt, maybe it has plot-important boots or its trait could be being low-half naked. How can you accomplish to show your character face at a good size and still showing what it has under his/her belt?

I want to open this thread with a couple of my ideas.

1. Draw your character as a chibi, so it fits the screen, or just a kids VN where characters have naturally big heads and short height. Align your text to be shown at the sides instead of up or down, to enable more space for the full body display, investing your precious landscape horizontality.

2. Show a window (rectangle) with a zoomed picture of the relevant part. This way you have enough space and it could be even your character nape so this option is great for few important components but not the whole under desing.

Your turn.

[Cirrocumulus-Cloud]

All of my characters have one full body sprite facing forward, so if they walk up to the main character from a distance I can show their full body view to give the reader a hint of depth - since the character is standing far away from the protagonist they can easily be shown from head to toe.

[Mammon]

I usually make my characters of knee-height because anime-ratios always come out wrong. Either the legs are anatomically correct and it looks wrong, or it's anime correct and it looks anatomically incorrect. Also, just like the hands they tend to look so misformed, but hand I can't cut off with the screen easily. The legs, those are commonly not part of the sprite. Less work for me.

But, I can see the virtue of making full-body sprites even if you choose not to use the lower half most of the time.

[Katy133]

The character looks down at their feet, either because they've dropped something, or are looking at something important on the ground, etc.

[Cakey]

Just draw character sitting.

[morg]

Maybe through CGs, or create chibis of the characters you can plaster wherever you want in the game (Maybe in the GUI, or at appropriate times mid-game) Or you can use ATL to make the screen pan down the character's full body on a first encounter, it would be a nice effect, especially if you're not planning to use a full body throughout the game.

[Remayre]

I would definitely use CGs for those scenes. Unless it's a chibi, a full body sprite would look a bit awkward up on the screen, unless you make the text box or anything else that might be on the screen disappear for the scene.

Otherwise, I think Morg's suggestion of panning the screen down would be pretty nifty.