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Depixelizing Pixel Art

research.microsoft.com

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Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#32

Post by rkuykendall-com »

jonathanj wrote: post #21
rkuykendall-com wrote: post #15

Does anyone know where I can find an implementation of this? I can't even figure out what to call it. They just refer to it as "our method."

Here's a pure Python implementation: https://github.com/jerith/depixel

Thanks!

See? Even he doesn't know what to call it!

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#34

Post by bluedino »

rkuykendall-com wrote: post #24
jrockway wrote: post #14

I wish they would use this in Windows 8. As far as I can tell, their scaling algorithm for 4k displays is: scale up 2x using nearest neighbor, then randomly drop pixels to get back to 125% or 150%. The result is horrifyingly bad. Not just kind of bad, but unusably bad. (Adding insult to injury, they ClearType the text before scaling.)

Do you know if MS is working on Mac-Style resolution independence for W9? I'm currently running a Retina MBP, at 2x res I think, and it works _perfectly_. The first few months some apps didn't work well, but the community adapted very quickly.

It works perfect on the Mac but I wonder if that would be the case if you could still run old 'classic' apps.

You'd think Microsoft of all companies would work in compatibilty fixes for at least the major apps. Like how they worked in so many fixes to make them compatible from 98-XP and such.

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#35

Post by zeidrich »

This is a pretty old paper, but I hadn't seen the live demo. That's pretty cool.

A problem with this algorithm is that it's pretty slow. It would be hard to use it for real time scaling.

I think that it's pretty cool though for any precalculated conversion to vector format. It would also be pretty cool if there were software that allowed you to create a pixel art image with a live preview in this format and the ability to export into a vector format.

One of the benefits of pixel art IMO is that it's got a pretty distinct style and its simplicity and restrictions means it's easy to be aware of composition where if you are given an unrestricted canvas that freedom can make it hard to know where to start. If you are given a 8x8 pixel grid to indicate "happy" there's only so many ways to do it, a symbolic heart, a little smiley face, etc. Given a whole sheet of paper you'll have more difficulty.

With the high res displays, there's more to consider than just the upscaling of old programs, the fact is people (especially indie game devs) still want to work with pixel art, and the number of titles with the term "8-bit" in their name that have come out recently. Part of that's because it's in vogue now, but a big part of it is simply that a poor artist can make a passable 24x24 sprite.

But it's still a shame that on high res displays they end up looking like a blocky mess. If you had a program that let you author your sprites under the same conditions, but let you preview an upscaled version and left you with a vector image (or high res texture with mip maps) you can make use of the fidelity while maintaining the simplicity. I think that would be cool.

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#36

Post by lloeki »

frik wrote: post #17

hq4x looks better (IMHO), sadly the website is offline (default blank wordpress site): http://hiend3d.com/hq4x.html backup on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20120630044334/http://www.hiend3... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hqx Source: https://code.google.com/p/hqx/source/browse/trunk/src/hq4x.c

Only if you look at the first ones. All of Boo, Dolphin, all of SoM, Invaders, Golden Axe, Windows assets and Lost Vikings look great and have vastly reduced artifacts compared to hqx. Also, according to the paper abstract[0], it outputs vector, not scaled up bitmap.

[0]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#38

Post by DougBTX »

bri3d wrote: post #29
rkuykendall-com wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know if MS is working on Mac-Style resolution independence for W9? I'm currently running a Retina MBP, at 2x res I think, and it works _perfectly_. The first few months some apps didn't work well, but the community adapted very quickly.

Windows has had support for resolution independence where DPI is configurable across a continuum (rather than only available as 1x or 2x scale like on the Mac) for quite some time - the issue is that with a huge legacy application base, a giant morass of drawing technologies, and no shipped "HiDPI" or "Retina" Windows hardware until recently, there's been no real incentive for app developers to support it. In Windows…

> (rather than only available as 1x or 2x scale like on the Mac)

It isn't continuous, but there are more than two scaling levels on OS X:

https://blog.qt.digia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/qtRetin...

More details: https://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/04/25/retina-display-sup...

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#39

Post by 10098 »

But the blocky versions actually look better than vectorized ones. Most of the vectorized sprites look hideous with the exception of Boo and dolphin.

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#40

Post by ahassan »

zeidrich wrote: post #35

This is a pretty old paper, but I hadn't seen the live demo. That's pretty cool. A problem with this algorithm is that it's pretty slow. It would be hard to use it for real time scaling. I think that it's pretty cool though for any precalculated conversion to vector format. It would also be pretty cool if there were software that allowed you to create a pixel art image with a live preview in this format and the abili…

Well SuperEagle seems even slower for me, and I know for a fact that I can emulate with SuperEagle scaling on and it works fine (>30 FPS). So I don't think their algorithm is out of the question.
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