Pixel-Art Megathread: It's not programmer art it's *retro*

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Pixel-Art Megathread: It's not programmer art it's *retro*

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exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Chipp Zanuff posted:

I'm not entirely sure what you mean? Is it that they're the same brightness through each stage of colour? If so, im in sort of a quandary because i had to ensure the 2nd darkest purple was darker than the 3rd darkest metal colour (Last column) and im also trying to reduce the amount of colours i use, on advice from the Pixeljoint forums. Should i try to make certain colour ramps darker than others? I'll keep playing around with the colours.

Very late in replying, but yeah that's what I meant. The colours in your latest revisions look good. For a universal palette especially you need colour ramps to be able to cross-over, which is no good if every ramp appears to have the same value. Ideally if there's a gap you should just be able to sub in a grey or something.

Your current palette with all desaturated shades and saturated, fairly dark, lighter colours is interesting. Suits that kind of nu-school bubblegum style.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2014 15:18

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 06:15

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

blargh

# ¿ Apr 19, 2014 13:45

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Internet Janitor posted:

I'm not familiar with the term. From what I'm reading it seems to refer more to the way images are made and shared than a style. Do you just mean that I'm working with really large images as pixel art goes?

Oekaki is a scribbly style that got its name from a Japanese (collaborative?) drawing site. Your stuff isn't that, the question is just whether pixel art is the right medium for it*

*and who cares about that

# ¿ May 14, 2014 07:08

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Scut posted:

So who's all up for the compixellated challenge?

Maybe we should dip into past weeks' challenges within the thread.

I've got a list of about 370 pixeljoint weeklies too

exmarx fucked around with this message at 07:44 on May 23, 2014

# ¿ May 23, 2014 07:42

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

If everything has the same delay all sense of impact gets lost

+ removed a frame on the downswing

# ¿ May 31, 2014 13:54

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

PublicOpinion posted:

Sketched some monster ideas for my thing, started making a sprite for one of them:

Compare these two: the concept painting has a clear silhouette and nice strong contrast, the sprites not so much.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2014 07:06

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2014 13:03

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

This one

Chipp Zanuff posted:

Here's another rough edit, i was worried about the gliding you mentioned Red Mike so i tried making him step forwards:

has a better sense of impact than this one

Chipp Zanuff posted:

Hopefully this edit solves the issue of gliding and the unnatural movement:

imo.

The lunge looks really laboured in the latest rendition, like he's reaching out to stroke the enemy.

yet another edit:

# ¿ Jun 23, 2014 05:21

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Chipp Zanuff posted:

This one is much better, but the spear kind of looks like spaghetti for a few frames; like he steps back then it bends more.

edit:

I changed the delay in a couple of places: the pull back is faster (0.06?) and the frame where the spear is fully extended at 0.20. I think that makes it look more impactful, but you might not be able to work with different speeds like that?

Cut out a frame in the hop back, second to last frame has him with feet together to step back slightly in the last frame, which I think stops some of the glide.

One last thing that I only noticed when zoomed in, shouldn't the leg closest to the viewer be the one that steps forward as he stabs? Pretty sure the opposite arm and leg should move together (& might be contributing to the glide atm)

# ¿ Jun 27, 2014 12:53

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

In addition the actual perspective lines look bad even when correct. That's the reason your Earthbound example uses 45�, they're perfectly clean. A simple topdown with good pixelling is always gonna beat forced accuracy every time anyway.

RabidGolfCart posted:

Best observed while listening to glitch hop.
I made it for PJ's weekly challenge.

voted for this one, best palette of the bunch

# ¿ Jul 15, 2014 16:29

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Scut posted:

Yeah I gave it a sharper outline because I wanted it to appear more offset from the body, but it breaks the style format to some degree. I think the ice cream logo makes it pop out as well, and that's because I wanted it to look like a painted-on graphic on his armour. Hard to get subtle effects when you are working in such small numbers of pixels.

You could go flatter

# ¿ Sep 27, 2014 09:19

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Scrub Lover posted:

well the op has very strict rules about what is considered 'true' pixel art, just sayin

The guy who wrote the (imo) definitive outline of what makes 'pure' pixelart is cure, and he even works from colour-reduced drawings he's done, e.g. (nws-ish) this, from a mural

the pixel-purity thing is largely a personal challenge, but it also gives good fundamentals for working with pixel art's little quirks. Much easier to get good lines by hand/with larger images regardless.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2014 09:37

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2014 09:35

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Some type of face

# ¿ Dec 20, 2014 13:36

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Jewel posted:

I really really love that, wow! The last image doesn't have as much charm as the others but that's a really versatile font and I wish I had something to use it with.

Edit: Something about the Bold Italic A is a bit off, like it has an errant pixel on the top. The right slope seems all stepped. Don't see any other issues though!

Yeah I'm unsatisfied with a fair few of the bold caps. The bold variants were more or less made by duplicating 1px to the left, so the italic especially is real banded. Might just make the right stroke of the A perfectly vertical.

I did it over the course of this evening, so I'll sleep on it and have another look at it all tomorrow

# ¿ Dec 20, 2014 15:06

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

some of the kerning is janky, but only ever by 1 pixel so y'all can deal with that yoselves. Other than than that, use multiples of 16px and everything should be groovy. Entirely possible it won't work for anybody else since I just had to make the fonts stack properly into a family and I may have hosed everything up

oh and i changed the name because eightbitica is terrible

# ¿ Dec 21, 2014 12:53

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

it's that pixelation-secret-santa time of the year again :toot:

# ¿ Dec 25, 2014 15:11

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

14 colours

and I just figured out why they were so dark and saturated online � web safe issue i think, which hasn't happened to me before.

It's meant to look more like this

rather than

# ¿ Dec 26, 2014 23:52

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Doing faces in different palettes

# ¿ Dec 31, 2014 14:03

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=14166.0
:swoon:

Arachne is so good

Scut posted:

You should make these to fit as SA avatars at 2x scale. Great work.

hmm, they crop a little awkwardly

# ¿ Jan 1, 2015 13:57

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

JonSnowGetsCaesared posted:

Cool

# ¿ Feb 14, 2015 06:59

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

the chaos engine posted:

Allowing myself exactly two hours a day to make something for #7DRL, thought it came out kinda neat:

That's really cool, I don't think I've seen anything like it before.

MikeJF posted:

On this topic, are there palette-design/selection tools/aids/resources out there y'all might know about I don't?

I normally just have a saturated blue + a desaturated but widely hue-shifted ramp :mrgw:

# ¿ Mar 10, 2015 08:45

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

I think it makes sense.

the green guy's animation is pretty good, much more impactful than this one:

where it looks like he's leaning back before firing, rather than being pushed back.

and imo this one shouldn't lift the staff while he crouches, it's an awkward movement that goes counter to what you'd expect:

something like this might be better

# ¿ Apr 25, 2015 10:14

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

MockingQuantum posted:

I've been checking this thread from time to time at work, when I've got a game dev itch and can't be on #sagamedev, and let me say, I'm always impressed by the sickening amount of talent there is on SA. I've been thinking about trying my hand at pixel art, but I've never really been any good at any kind of visual arts. Am I better off starting with a more "traditional" foundation? Like a drawing class or something?

Also, any recommendations for a halfway-decent iOS app that I can gently caress around in until I decide how badly I want to pursue learning pixel art?

Pixel art is easier because you don't need to have great technical skill (like a steady hand etc), but it won't let you draw any better than you can in other media, or get away with not knowing any of the other fundamentals.

# ¿ May 3, 2015 10:54

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Babe Magnet posted:

Starbound mod, because I have stockholm syndrome.

I actually have a lot I could post from my progress. Bunch of weapons and armors and stuff. Here, have some furniture items:

The marbles are very low contrast, and I don't get why these are two separate ramps:

exmarx fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Jul 2, 2015

# ¿ Jul 2, 2015 14:35

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

fun with dither patterns :sun:

Xibanya posted:

Agreed with what others have said. In terms of rendering, you're falling into the same traps everybody does:

� colour ramps that are basically just +black and +white, instead of variance in hue & saturation throughout. This is what causes the colour disunity you were talking about; the boots & skirt are yellow, yellow, yellow; the other clothing is purple, purple, purple etc. It makes things feel dead & paint by numbers.

� too little contrast! the temptation is always to do tons of minute increments between shades, but this just makes everything lose definition and look flat � really important for sprites in particular

� colour management! Not just for ~pixel purist~ reasons � it just helps you keep control of everything, say if you wanted to change the colour of the tights to green or something. You've got a ton of duplicate colours in there, possibly because you used a tool with automatic anti-aliasing/partial transparency somewhere.

good job avoiding dither though; it's murder to animate & often gets overused

here's a 14 colour version applying that stuff:

exmarx fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Jul 11, 2015

# ¿ Jul 10, 2015 17:56

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Scut posted:

Did you draw these manually or is this like a unicode thing? I love it! I wish something like this was a standard in apps like pyxel edit.

Manually. It was half anti-aliasing exploration and half arty disintegration of type. I cheated a whole bunch by flipping tiles too :ssh:

Xibanya posted:

Holy crap that looks AMAZING! What you did really made the sprite pop, I will definitely try to apply what you've said going forward. Ooo now looking up tutorials on color ramps. I'm so glad you were able to put into words why the sprites just seemed kinda blah. I will now go and un-blah them!

As I said, it's all stuff that literally everybody does when starting out. Check out these links if you haven't already (second one's more theory-based), pay special attention to anything that mentions "clusters", which are imo the most important things in creating solid pixel art.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2015 19:33

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

It turns out one of those deep dream filters can upscale pixel art quite well. It's pretty good at interpreting super lowres shapes, but dither is kinda iffy:

turn noise reduction to high & scale to 2x

# ¿ Jul 31, 2015 09:45

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Coldrice posted:

Hard to distinguish between sprites & the ground in this one

# ¿ Oct 11, 2015 05:41

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:

Thanks! How would you go about setting that up? Back in the day, systems could only display a subset of colors at a time, but they should still choose a lot of different colors, no? Maybe CGA had 16 preset, but video game consoles could do more.

Of the old systems I like the C64 palette the best. The only problem with DawnBringer's palette is it's so overused. I think working with bad palettes (see above) can be good too, it's like training with weighted clothing :p

# ¿ Nov 19, 2015 00:42

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

doing the pixel dailies thing

# ¿ Dec 5, 2015 15:13

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Internet Janitor posted:

That portrait is great

# ¿ Dec 12, 2015 02:11

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2015 08:47

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Pixelation secret santa thing

# ¿ Dec 25, 2015 12:58

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Apple Jax posted:

Anyone ever make Commodore 64 pixel art? Or know of a good tutorial?

I'm working on a project that needs to look like C64 graphics. I've googled and of course found some old game screenshots but if someone's got a good guide that would be awesome.

The color palette is going to be a bitch

C64 palette owns. Actual colour values differed between each machine, the ones on that wiki page are really bad & garish. I normally use ptoing's version, which is a slight edit of the pepto palette

You say it needs to "look like" C64, which I assume means you don't need to keep to the strict rules around sprites etc? If so, I'd just work in widepixel and maybe try to limit tiles to 3 or 4 colours max. You can work with a 2:1 aspect ratio in photoshop:

I haven't done C64 stuff in years lol

# ¿ Jan 24, 2016 03:18

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 12:52

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

http://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=19594.0

Glossary of pixel art terms

# ¿ Mar 19, 2016 06:07

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

I made a couple of fonts

the chaos engine posted:

Been loving w some 1 bit pixels for the heck of it. Tricky but really fun to mess around with, can recommend.

Great work, and the off-white is a nice touch

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 14:33

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

remade 1 of my pieces from like 9 years ago

this one's the re make

# ¿ Jul 31, 2017 05:20

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 06:15

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Thanks! It's 14 colours, from the default MSPaint palette

I like your toilet robot

# ¿ Aug 1, 2017 03:01

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Pixel-Art Megathread: It's not programmer art it's *retro*

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