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Hi pixel art thread When I was 15 I was really into making pixel art, but I just traced things like concept art from strategy guides lmao. This is all that I have left from that era of my life, i had to log into a photobucket account from 2003 to find these    Almost 2 decades later I got into actual traditional drawing but recently I'm wanting to do pixel art stuff again. So I've been sketching a low-effort little 64x64 creature every day for a while now:  And I've done some avatar-sized landscape pixel art painting... things.   4x size:  (I legitimately question whether these count as "pixel art" because I drew them in procreate with a stylus. They were drawn with 1px brushes and at 180x180, but I had the advantage of blending modes, layering, pressure-sensitive opacity, etc  )Anyway I have a question and I'm not sure if this is the best thread for it but I don't know where else would be better; as a project for myself and to get used to what it takes to create the art for a videogame, I'd like to find a game with 2d static tiles (like a Roguelike maybe, no animations) that has easy integration of custom tilesets and create a custom tileset for it. I've been leaning toward ToME for a bunch of reasons: It allows tiles any size up to 120x120 and I like larger sizes, it has kind of bad base art that I don't like the style of, and I've played it a lot. But the scale of it is absurd; there are nearly 12,000 sprites (modular pieces) for the player character tile, 3000 terrain tiles, and ~1500 monster/npc/object tiles. Are there any other games that anyone in here can think of with easily-moddable 2d art that an amateur can take on by themself? deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Aug 25, 2021 |
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Aug 25, 2021 23:48
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Does anyone have any tutorials, informational videos or tips for establishing a sense of scale in e.g. a 3/4 view or top down (or even gods-eye true top down satellite view) 32x32 tileset? I've been trying to roughly approximate real-world sizes to a pixel equivalent but it's just clear that that won't work without using lots of multi-tile sprites that just barely utilize a second tile's available space, and that feels weird to me and makes the tileset unwieldy to use. I'm still a very amateur pixel artist but this is where my brain is stuck right now. e: I am keeping the perspective as simple as possible because the goal of this is to be used as e.g. assets for building TTG maps, rather than strictly video games. Readability needs to be a priority, but it's also important for :reasons: that I stick to a consistent tile size instead of allowing independently-sized doodads or whatever. So I've been experimenting with both a 3/4 type view and true top down. Here's a rough sketch of some things from this morning:  The only games I can think of as inspiration for true top down are Songs of Syx (where it's great, but handled through normal maps and shaders) and GTA1/2 (which only handle vehicles and pedestrians this way). I realize that the difficulty of this is probably why not many games do it. Do I just need to waaaay up the scaling maybe and make one 32x32 tile far less real-world equivalent space than it is now? (Like 1 tile = one square foot)? e: I guess I answered my own question, a 3x2 table is much more dinstinctly a table than a 1x1 table, and this would make more sense too in the context of using it as a TTRPG map generator, and would allow sticking more doodads on it 
deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Jun 7, 2022 |
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Jun 7, 2022 18:20
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worm girl posted:For readability in a TTG, true top-down is going to work better than 3/4. 3/4 is super cheaty and doesn't actually make spatial sense in a lot of cases because it's really just relying on fooling the eye into reading a 2d space as a 3d one. Thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for. For the game I'm working on personally I decided to stick to hand-drawn sprites instead of pixel art, but today I reflected on my pixel art from over the last year and here's a collection of it in no particular order, I think some of it is pretty good (The 6 smaller spaceships were all brush shaded but everything else here is true pixel art)    It's kind of a huge pain to do any of that in Procreate though and I'm so used to it that I have a hard time switching to anything else, I tried Pixel Studio but it feels bizarre to me drawing without being able to pinch-rotate the canvas and stuff 
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Jul 9, 2022 18:46
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I finally found an ipad app with a pixel perfect drawing mode so I can start turning all these inconsistent sketches I've made over the years into the jrpg characters/enemies I envisioned them as  They're going to need some work (the colors especially) but I'm just trying to get first drafts out of the way 
deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Mar 2, 2023 |
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Mar 1, 2023 04:04
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bessantj posted:I really like the fly like monster in the middle of the top row. Thanks! They're a Bumblebehemoth  KRILLIN IN THE NAME posted:Love the parrot pirate captain but I keep thinking to myself "there should be a tiny human on the shoulder" I love this idea and I'm going to try and work it in next time I work on the parrot Current progress:  But also spent some time making a tileset for space exploration: https://i.imgur.com/XH4E4Yj.mp4 and planet exploration: 
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Mar 6, 2023 00:05
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Planet closeups have been kind of awkward to do at these sizes: Large enough that there's tons of empty space to fill up, small enough that it's hard to show much actual detail while maintaining a fairly limited palette. I'm going for a more cartoon-y illustrated stylized style where you can actually see the things on the surface which doesn't help (and also trying to avoid barren, lifeless worlds). But it's been fun! If anyone has any tips for making the large empty spots (particularly on e.g. the third one) feel "busy" or lived-in or whatever without looking like 'noise' I'd love to hear them   And also:    e: I guess the answer is dithering but I went way too heavy on most of these:      
deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Mar 10, 2023 |
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Mar 10, 2023 01:08
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Thanks  I'm using Pixaki for iPad which I am not entirely in love with (it tries to save everything primarily to iCloud which has more than once resulted in lost files or caused problems loading files when my ipad couldn't connect to icloud, it doesn't actually save images until you return to the main gallery, stuff like that) but it's the first dedicated pixel art app I've found that's designed to be used on a tablet with a stylus, and not having to use a mouse has completely revolutionized pixel art for me. The designs are almost all from sketches or (very amateur) drawings I've made on my ipad for the last ~4 years while learning to draw... And, admittedly, a lot of AI generated sketches that are based on feeding my own drawings into an AI and having it attempt to recreate my style. Which feels a little bit like cheating and I think will get very mixed reactions from the public but I seed it with my own art so I feel okay about it. I couldn't produce the volume of characters I need for this as a solo dev without it.To be fair I think stylus drawing would not work so well if I wasn't going for such a large resolution - The smallest canvas I start with is 128x128 which gives me plenty of room to draw, doing smaller sprites would require the precision of a mouse (or using the stylus like a mouse) For the game I am working on, I literally need several hundred different arbitrary creatures from throughout the cosmos, because one of the main mechanics is the player having telepathic conversations with random beings. So this week I am doubling down on pumping out as many basic designs as I can stomach. These are from yesterday + today:            
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Mar 18, 2023 02:09
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I love the use of the limited palette! Some first pass shading/detail work this morning:  2x:  (one of them has a very unintentional crotch bulge I will fix when my ipad is charged  )Note to self that I need to get more dynamic with hand positioning. These aren't exactly battle pose sprites but I mostly keep sticking to a few distinct poses (hand on hip, hands at side, hands distanced from side) and since these are supposed to be weird aliens from throughout the universe, a lot of them should stand in weird unusual ways. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Mar 19, 2023 |
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Mar 19, 2023 00:23
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I'm now up to 120 with at least basic shading in 20 days  I still have a couple dozen unshaded and... uhh, a couple hundred more sketches to work with. But I have a fun monthly ritual of being unable to refill my meds for a few days because of national shortages and that's about to start to they're going to have to wait until next week probably.
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Mar 20, 2023 22:51
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Not the most productive few days but:    Pixel art hands are tough I spent a lot of time learning how to traditionally draw hands but it all kind of goes out the window here because there's just not enough space for the subtle bends I'm used to drawing.
deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Mar 23, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 01:06
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That definitely helps, I guess these are pretty much all going to require a second pass doing the small details the old fashioned way - pixel art with a stylus makes most of the job easy, but the fine details are still a pain They could all use a bit more in the interesting small details department anyway, they feel a little flat currently. e: like so: 
deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Mar 24, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 22:59
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feedmyleg posted:Personally, I love the flat look. Makes it have a Ralph Bakshi vibe. I've been thinking about this a lot, largely because it's a whole lot less effort  And if I design things with that in mind, I can fit some details in while retaining the flat shading. I was looking through some Ralph Bakshi characters and noticed a lot of them have visible fingernails and I can do things like this: The hands look like hands in a way that I don't think would work as well without the flat shading, I think it would just get too complicated with any more than two shades per color. You've given me a lot to think about here 
deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 02:50
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 22:16 |
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tango alpha delta posted:Your artwork is cool. Would you be able to draw like this in ProCreate? Thanks! You can make a single-pixel brush in procreate (just create a 1x1 canvas, save it, create a new brush, load that 1x1 canvas as your brush shape, set the size to 1%) but it doesn't have a pixel perfect drawing mode, so unless you patiently draw one pixel at a time (which can be a pain in Procreate) you'll end up with lines that look like the top one here:  I switched to Pixaki for pixel art since it has pixel perfect mode but I end up exporting to Procreate for some of the shading/coloring because I'm comfortable with using things like clipping mask layers in it. You can do the same thing in Pixaki in different ways (e.g. just making selections) but I have the muscle memory for procreate. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Apr 9, 2023 |
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Apr 9, 2023 06:46
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