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Depixelizing Pixel Art

research.microsoft.com

51–60 of 164 posts

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#51

Boo is the best example of 'ours'. Looks amazing.

yeah, it seems to handle patches of complex colouring badly (especially where two tones of the same colour were used to good effect in the icon, but scaled up as messy blobs), but boo and the invaders were very impressive.

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#53

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…

A problem with this algorithm is that it's pretty slow. It would be hard to use it for real time scaling. Even if it's too slow for realtime on today's hardware, I'd love to see some prerendered sample videos.

Here's a video: https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart...

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#54
post #29

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…

>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.

The same was true for even longer (IIRC) on the Mac. You could enable it with a hidden preference, but lack of app support, compatibility with existing stuff and lack of hidpi displays at the time made it take the back seat. And vector drawed apps only go that far, you need pixel assets at some point or another.

The 2x scale was just the solution finally used by Apple because of the same kind of issues as you describe for Windows.

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#55

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…

A problem with this algorithm is that it's pretty slow. It would be hard to use it for real time scaling. Even if it's too slow for realtime on today's hardware, I'd love to see some prerendered sample videos.

[deleted]

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#56

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.

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.

The classic apps actually work perfectly at their original resolution, or higher in places if they used Apple APIs for things like text.

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#57
post #36
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/

As you say: It depends. E.g. the sword looks better with hq4x, because the result isn't rounded.

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#59
post #36
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/

No, hq4x is still better on almost all of them. Microsoft's makes everything too round and blobby. It pretty much only works really well when everything is round, like in Boo. But look at what it does to the Golden Axe characters' faces.
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