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Thread: pixel art tips?

  1. #21
    Senior Member UnknownGuy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by mr_malee
    hmm, this kinda raises another question. Do people like seeing crisp graphics or technical achievement, i'm assuming most developers enjoy the technical side but what about the "players" of our games.
    It is best when players don't focus on any technical achievement and are just focusing on the end results.

  2. #22
    Senior Member DayDream's Avatar
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    People / players don't see the 1pixel that might be off in the animation - and they don't care if the sprite is 16 colours or 16milion colours. The main goal is to give them an engaging atmosphere - make the game look consistent and along the lines of your gameplay - fun and colourful, or dark and spooky...

    The technique used for it is secondary it can be achieve with pixelart, vectors or rendered images... or a nice mix of all three...

    Certain game mechanics and restrictions might make one or the other technique more appealing - along with the skill level of the one using it.

    The Zelda artists didn't choose to go for 16x16 because it's such nice number but because it was the ideal size for the memory of the hardware they were working on.

    With flash most of these restrictions are obsolete - you can use 56x56px tiles or 64x24 if it works in your engine - as long as you make sure you can take it all the way without having to change your art halfway through the project.

    That's when the players notice that something is wrong. A break in the consitency of your art and game design will stand out a lot more then a crisp and pixelperfect sprite.

  3. #23
    Elvis...who tha f**k is Elvis? phreax's Avatar
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    I agree with DayDream. It's not the means and mostly it's not even 1 sprite that defines the game but the whole graphic interface.

    For the older games they also chose that size because it's quadratic and you can use bitwise operators to manipulate and calculate map elements. 56x56 is not as clean a number as 64x64, 32x32 or 16x16.

    I really don't have any preferences regarding how you get to the look you want. Use 3D, 2d vector or bitmap depending on what you want it to look like!
    The reason I use pixel art alot is because it's kind of a hobby fitting the small squares together! Also From pixelart you always get clean edges which means no semi-transparency. For most games that part doesn't matter much anymore unless you want to do something really CPU intensive!
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  4. #24
    M.D. mr_malee's Avatar
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    yeah, i think i will go with a 32x32 size, bitwise operators will come in quite handy with all the tile access i'll need.

    cheers guys

    hopefully i'll get some free time at work to start some gfx and show you guys. Maybe get some early pointers. My weekends are spent trying to get laid these days so not much time for pixel art power sessions. with a face like a tennis ball its a struggle i'm slowly dealing with.
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  5. #25
    Feeling adventurous? T1ger's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by mr_malee
    hopefully i'll get some free time at work to start some gfx and show you guys. Maybe get some early pointers. My weekends are spent trying to get laid these days so not much time for pixel art power sessions. with a face like a tennis ball its a struggle i'm slowly dealing with.
    So that avatar IS a real picture of you:P

    But wow! Red Alert 3D in flash! (or "3D"..)
    That was pretty cool, and yeah, it would probably look better with terraintexture more suited for iso-3D viewing, as you lost some of the depth-feeling.

    It would be pretty cool to make a full red alert clone like that in flash.. Maybe make it with AS3/F9, and you could get 800x600 resolution.. That would be amasing...

    But back to the topic.. Who says you have to use tiles? With flash 8/9 you can create terrain on the fly.. Maybe a bit more work, but what if you used one plain grass-tile as a foundation, and then randomly added various elements on it, like dust-spots, bushes, and other different stuff. A bit like the supertiles-method. And ofcourse, it doesnt have to be random, it could be created in an editor too.

    This way, I think your maps will get a much more realistic look and feel. Think of it as how buildings were placed in red alert (building was 2x2 tiles, and was locked to a grid), and how they are placed in the newer C&C-games, where the buildings are e.g. 132x98 px, and can be placed anywhere on plain terrain.
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  6. #26
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    If you're gonna have small sprites, you will have to pixel them to look any good. I mean, you can't use 3D and shrink them, rotate them, and so on.
    16x16 or 32x32, at this size it has to be hand pixeled, and if you want to "keep your mouse clicking to a minimum", forget it. Especially for an RTS game, you will have to pixel each unit walking in several directions, and it adds up to a lot of pixel pushing.

  7. #27
    Senior Member DayDream's Avatar
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    ghfhg - there are ways around it. It depends how you render and how much you are willing to pixel. I just did the pixelwork on a whole set of units in 32x32 to 56x56 - 3 directions (left and right faked with a mirror) - cleanup and 4 frame animations. The initial design was done by Blink in Swift3D and rendered in greyscale with an outline - colours are added via an overlaying image. Worked out great.
    It's really a matter of how well you adjust your render options and how much detail you pack in and how much you can dismiss in the pixel version.

    With technical units I would always recommend 3D models - they don't need to be over the top detailed - just enough to make a nice pixel piece. Rotating them will make the modeling worthwhile.

  8. #28
    hippie hater Cimmerian's Avatar
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    Like anim8or?

  9. #29
    Hey Timmy!!! walsher's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by DayDream
    It's really a matter of how well you adjust your render options and how much detail you pack in and how much you can dismiss in the pixel version.
    How would you go about fixing a 3D render to a pixel?

  10. #30
    2KHeroes / Sylvaniah designer luxregina's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by walsher
    How would you go about fixing a 3D render to a pixel?
    This is an exemple : the 3D model is a quick mockup by "the" Daydream - the pixelpushing is done by lux :



    basicly, I take prexisting textures, select areas in the 3D render and work my way through. I realized, as I was working on this, that it was usefull to separate the blocks by groups of layers - not sure if I explain well here - what I mean is that the photoshop layer structure kinda follows the 3D structure in the sense that visual blocks are grouped together in the same order you see them ( front, back, etc ... )

  11. #31
    hippie hater Cimmerian's Avatar
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    Why dont put the textures straigth on the 3d model?

  12. #32
    2KHeroes / Sylvaniah designer luxregina's Avatar
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    because I wouldn't have the same type of controle over the final result, because I didn't made the original model, because I suck at 3D, and because the rest of the graphics are pixel-art, so including a rendered model as-is would show discrepancy

  13. #33
    Hey Timmy!!! walsher's Avatar
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    Thanks for the quick explantion Lux. Definitely makes alot of sense doing it that way. One more question thought. Do you make the 3D object the size of the actual tile size or somewhat bigger then scale down?

  14. #34
    2KHeroes / Sylvaniah designer luxregina's Avatar
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    they were bigger and been scaled down prior to the pixel work

  15. #35
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cimmerian
    Why dont put the textures straigth on the 3d model?
    because 3d renderer´s distord the textures in a way wich doesn´t make it always suitable or tasty for pixel art.

    @luxregina: maybe rendering seperate layers would help with other parts a renderer can provide a trace pattern- like shadows, reflections or the light map.
    I might create a new tutorial on this forum for such including building low poly houses and such alike if I find some freetime anytime soon. Because modeling such things really is very easy.

  16. #36
    Senior Member DayDream's Avatar
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    Here is a sample of some work I just did - besides playing around with some buildings to annoy Lux...

    The basic shapes are cubes and cylinders - arranged in a 3D tool - in my case SILO for quick and easy low-poly 3D creation. Shapes like the cranes are based on cubes with extrusions to add onto them.
    There is very limited detail as the final building has to fit a 56px wide tile.

    In order to match the style of the units done by blinkok I went through swift3D for the render and created two images.



    Those two were taken into the pixel program and put onto of each other to give the outlined look more depth - blinkok will properly know how to do it in one go - I must admit I am not too familiar with swift and played around with the overlay settings to get the desired result.



    To get more contrast for the scaled down version I changed the tonecurve to add more darkness and more light


  17. #37
    Senior Member DayDream's Avatar
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    Next step was reducing it to the ingame size



    Which leaves a lot of stray and AA pixels - I tried a non AA reduction but was not happy with the result.



    To make my job easier I reduce the colours to 32 - the magenta and a shade from black to white - 16 cols might have been sufficient. This took out all the AA to the magenta and I manually cleaned up the rest with a pen tool to get something like this:



    The colouring will be done in the game with an overlaying mask to make it look like this

    Last edited by DayDream; 05-26-2007 at 12:44 AM.

  18. #38
    M.D. mr_malee's Avatar
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    wow, nice work, thanks for sharing the process

    i guess the hardest thing is cleaning up the image and creating the model, the result looks very good.
    lather yourself up with soap - soap arcade

  19. #39
    hippie hater Cimmerian's Avatar
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    DD,wonderfull work, i wish i could do the same
    Question, some explosion generators also output sprites with that same color as backgournd color, its just coincidence or its something like a pattern for sprites?
    Last edited by Cimmerian; 05-26-2007 at 04:06 AM.

  20. #40
    2KHeroes / Sylvaniah designer luxregina's Avatar
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    I did also a step by step (sort of) capture of my technique :



    I thought i could be interesting, as my technique differs a bit from Daydreams : because my batiments are most of the time created on the fly, without a 3D model, I have made myself a library of isometric textures that i'm using within each tileset : that allows me to stay consistant throughout the whole tileset, without fear to loose the sense of colors, or whatever...
    I then use those textures to texture the walls, etc ... the rest is pretty straight forward, and I explained the process in a post above

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