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Im trying to figure it out, cause a lot of my characters appearances and powers take a lot of inspiration from characters from just about everywhere. From video games, to comics, to anime. But im worried that they may have taken too much inspiration. So where do you draw the line?

Inspiration is when a faint basis of the original works are present within the setting and characters.

Say you have a guy named Donny Dipshit, he was found as a child while his parents where hiking up a mountain during their vacation. They decide to bring him back with them to there rural town in Texas. They raise him to be an honorable man, and when his powers start manifesting (in this case invisibility and/or fast speeds) they push him towards utilizing them for good.

Right there is a character who has taken inspiration from superman: he is a child from an unknown place found by parents from a rural town and raised to be a good man. However he has a different origin, method of being discovered, different types of parents (i.e they could be rich ranchers as opposed to humble farmers) and an overall different set of powers.

A rip off would be just straight up copying a plot, setting or character and renaming them for your own use.

Say there was a boy named Johnny Jackass. His parents died at a young age and was taken in by his aunt Jen and uncle Gray. He is generally a nerd, weak and scrawny and picked on through most of school (albeit with a great intellect). He is in love with Sherry Payne, a popular girl who takes little to no notice of him. On a field trip to a science lab his is bitten by a radioactive ant, and while the effects don't manifest immediately he soon finds himself much stronger with the ability to climb walls and lift thing ten times his size. With his powers he soon takes it upon himself to fight crime as "Action Ant".

That right there is a rip off, while the names and animal-base for the story are different nearly all the plot element and origins are exactly the same as Spider-Man.

Basically inspiration is when you can see the basis character in your original one without it making splashes in their development, whereas a rip off is when you can see only the basis character and not the original one you are trying to create.

My friends and I run a little hobby writing club to critique each other's work, and easily the most common criticism that comes up is over questions of originality. The line between inspiration and ripping off is especially thin for people who are inspired to get into writing/drawing by being fans of someone else's work, because their instincts tell them to replicate the things they enjoy. Here's two things to consider that might help you:

1) Start writing and see where it takes you; what might start out as a rip-off character can turn into something very original as you explore his characteristics and qualities. For example, Batman started out as carbon copy of Zorro (seriously, it was a shameless rip-off), but over the decades has since grown into one of the most iconic characters in the world (while Zorro, despite some attempted revivals, has been left on the ash heap of pop culture). Originality sometimes takes time to grow, and many characters we think are very unique actually started as derivatives of things that were popular at the time.

2) Originality isn't always something to strive for, as shocking as that might sound to some. What's far more important is portraying things in a different or creative way. For example, Clint Eastwood's famous character The Man With No Name is a beat-for-beat copy of Toshiro Mifune's samurai character Sanjuro (in fact the filmmaker Sergio Leone got sued for plagiarism and lost), but the ways The Man With No Name re-contextualized the Western genre (taking the boring 'good guy always wins' John Wayne style and turning it into a dark, violent, morally ambiguous genre) revolutionized cinematic culture and turned Clint Eastwood into one of the greatest stars of all time. So the movie that plagiarized became more important to film history than the original work that got ripped-off, all because of style and context.

So those are just some different perspectives to take on the problem of "ripping-off" other people's work. It's a fine line and as much as it helps to talk it out, at the end of the day you have to figure it out for yourself. And always remember what Picasso said on the matter.

As Arcane already pointed out, as the saying goes: "Good artists copy, great artists steal"

The key here is that if you make something that just copies straight from one source, you're just ripping off someone else's work. But if you take aspects from different artists and put them together you start to come up with something that is more unique to you.

In your own personal work, I wouldn't worry too much about being "original" because you're just going to drive yourself crazy. There was a period of time where I didn't make any art because I felt like nothing I made was original enough. It was honestly a pretty bad time in my life. But thinking like that is just crazy. We don't make original ideas happen by just sitting around and waiting for one to pop in our head, we do it by imitating whatever inspires us and then our minds start to fill in the blanks. The funny thing about humans is that we are truly unique but only in very subtle ways. If you tried to imitate Jack Kirby's art, you're not going to end up with Jack Kirby's art. You're going to end up with art that looks similar to Jack Kirby's but is still obviously your own. If you gave two artists the same exact thing to draw or paint, you are going to get two different results. So learn what little differences appear in your own art and embrace them. You only find yourself by imitating the things around you.

The truth is there is no real distinction between inspiration and ripping off. As artists we dance around that line constantly. What could be a rip off to one viewer could very easily be inspiration to another.

TL;DR, for when it obviously takes bits of said material, and use it in a different way that it "has a feel" of it.

e.g. the Original Borderlands was inspired by Fallout 3 with its apocalyptic setting and hording capabilities, but it's bits went so off that it's not just a parody, it's basically a entirely new thing itself.

I think Crimson touched on the most important part of originality when doing creative work: what you think, as the artist, is the most important factor in deciding if something is original or not. At the end of the day, artists and creators work for the satisfaction of having made something. If you don't feel satisfied by something you've created because you think it's unoriginal, that's entirely up to you. Some people draw their ideas almost exclusively from what they see around them, and others are much more free-spirited and seem to get them randomly. Nobody is held to the same standard of originality, so just make what you want to make.