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A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

dinofarmgames.com

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Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#101

Post by biot »

nyolfen wrote: post #68

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distort…

Even if everybody moves to FLAC or other lossless music format, musicians will still likely add in MP3 compression artifact sounds. After all, like with vinyl, it makes the music sound warmer.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#102

Post by angersock »

nyolfen wrote: post #68

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distort…

This is how I feel every time I work on a decent-sized chunk of Javascript...designs so grand they break through mere weak typing and floating-point.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#103

Post by swimfar »

Tyr42 wrote: post #86
zeidrich wrote: post #60

A big thing about pixel art and it's issues today is that what he mentions as pixel art, isn't so. I mean, he argues about the way the devices scale his art up and change aspect ratio etc. But on the other hand, he compares a picture of Yoshi at the end to an algorithmically smoothed version. However, Yoshi was never intended to look like the leftmost image. The thing is, pixels aren't square. In fact, when we played…

For anyone else interested in scaling up pixel art, there are alternative methods to just using nearest neighbour, such as EPX or something. I found this article on Datagenics to be pretty solid: http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december32013/index.html

It's linked to on that page, but here's a good paper on scaling/interpolating pixel art. They use a lot of SNES sprites as examples. Some of these are implemented in emulators so you can play around with them a little.

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

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#104

Post by egypturnash »

soup10 wrote: post #71
zeidrich wrote: post #60

A big thing about pixel art and it's issues today is that what he mentions as pixel art, isn't so. I mean, he argues about the way the devices scale his art up and change aspect ratio etc. But on the other hand, he compares a picture of Yoshi at the end to an algorithmically smoothed version. However, Yoshi was never intended to look like the leftmost image. The thing is, pixels aren't square. In fact, when we played…

I agree with your sentiment, I think the author makes some decent points but is pretty biased towards an aesthetic he prefers and the art tools he's most familiar with. The sf4 example is particularly demonstrating of that, people that do 3d modeling know that it's not as easy to get the arbitrary distortion effects you can do with frame by frame animation, that doesn't make it lower quality animation, it's a trade o…

> people that do 3d modeling know that it's not as easy to get the arbitrary distortion effects you can do with frame by frame animation

So who wants to start writing a 3D package designed around making those kinds of things as easy as possible? With a way to easily drop them into a game and fire it off in realtime?

Maybe not you, but maybe someone reading the comments here just found a side project.

The big tactics 2D cartoonists use to stylize motion are squash and stretch, smears, and multiple images. How can these be represented efficiently in data structures? How can you make it easy for a character to leap into the air and turn into a giant eyeball with arms and legs sticking off of it[1]? And how can you make it easy for a non-techie artist to make it happen? This is probably not a quick weekend hack.

Guilty Gear Xrd does a lot of this; can it be done in a game with a lot more characters running around at once?

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=clampett's+corneal+catastrop...

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#105

Post by JohnBooty »

the_af wrote: post #75
soup10 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment, I think the author makes some decent points but is pretty biased towards an aesthetic he prefers and the art tools he's most familiar with. The sf4 example is particularly demonstrating of that, people that do 3d modeling know that it's not as easy to get the arbitrary distortion effects you can do with frame by frame animation, that doesn't make it lower quality animation, it's a trade o…

How can he be biased, beyond his love of pixel art? He more or less concludes pixel art is not the best choice, and he sides with the public's opinion on this issue . Read the comments. He is not blaming anyone for this "pixel tax". To my eyes, the SF4 Chun Li is infinitely inferior to SF3, and I'm not even an animator. And haven't played either game, so I truly have no preconceptions at all in this case.

I liked SF4's slightly goofy animation because to me, it looked like children's action figures - specifically, the wrestling figures I spent so much time with as a kid: http://www.thecanadianconnection.biz/images/figures/large/Hu...

To me, SF4 looks like those. Except in motion, with lots of special effects. The way I imagined them as a kid. :)

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#106

Post by egypturnash »

Terr_ wrote: post #97
vacri wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Half Life came out, it was amazing. I went back to retry it half a year ago, and it looked awful. And what was a wonderful intro sequence was now unskippable minutes of a slow ride past crude polygons and very low detail environments. It was interesting seeing how my opinions had changed.

I think Deus Ex offers a contrasting example. It's almost as old as Half Life (2000 vs 1998), but I think it ages better because the appeal is different. Story/dialog/writing/role-play don't go out of style as quickly as graphics/gun-play.

Your memory may be playing tricks on you. Check out this series at Rock, Paper Shotgun where a writer who remembers Deus Ex as the Best Game Ever!!!!! plays through it: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/deusexy/

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#107

Post by TylerE »

biot wrote: post #101
nyolfen wrote: post #68

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distort…

Even if everybody moves to FLAC or other lossless music format, musicians will still likely add in MP3 compression artifact sounds. After all, like with vinyl, it makes the music sound warmer .

No it doesn't, that's BS. No one prefers the sound of MP3. Vinyl sounds better not because of some alleged "distortion", either.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#108

Post by egypturnash »

dragontamer wrote: post #66
darkmighty wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But for me some pixel artists miss (for me) a large part of the artistic value of pixel art: restricting complexity of the scene -- not just portraying things in blocks. The blocks aren't important at all, in fact they're pretty ugly if you're not a great pixel artist (hence the natural wish to find better upscaling algorithms). It's often overlooked the CRTs those art were made for were quite blurry and round, allev…

I mentioned BlazBlue specifically because of their combination of 3D Art and 2D Art. The 2D art is as you said: very simplified. http://i.imgur.com/mDlQYar.gif Count the number of colors on Jin Kisaragi. The smooth, defined lines going down "strong", hand-crafted pixel art lines. With massive sprites built for the high-definition era to boot. The 3D art gets a bit intricate and busy, but the 2D Sprites.

The question that immediately springs to my mind is "what did the 3D reference image look like". Rotoscoping (the animator's term for 'tracing reference footage') is an old, old process, almost as old as animation itself. You can do it well, by using the reference footage as a base to get the hard parts of the 3D motion down then putting that away and pushing the drawings, or you can do it poorly, by just tracing it and not really doing much to it otherwise.

I would bet that if you superimposed that BlazBlue animation over the 3D reference, there would be a huge difference - that looks like it's had a lot of human thought put into it.

(And then go look at Arc's latest game, Guilty Gear Xrd. Which is presented entirely 3D with some models that have had a LOT of love applied to them.)

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#109

Post by JohnBooty »

Tyr42 wrote: post #85
dragontamer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you have a point (and I've given you a +1 vote because of it), the fact remains that the "average person" I know thinks that Street Fighter 4 animations were better than Street Fighter 3. The Chun Li discussion happens a lot in my circle of friends, and I'm always in the minority. Very few people appreciate classic pixel art.

So, if we look to the digital art like Pixar, there are a lot of guidelines from traditional animation to make a scene come alive. * Squish and Stretch * Fallow through * Secondary Action These principles really help make dynamic scenes. If you look at the Chun Li animations, you can see that the older one does a better job of using these. I feel like if the HD version took advantage of these, it would look the best…

I can't directly compare the SF3 and SF4 animations: they're just totally different art forms.

That said, as somebody who loves pixel art, I still really love what Capcom did with SF4's art style.

The artists of SF4 definitely took a bold direction; the SF4 games don't really look like any other 3D fighting games. The characters are cartoonish without falling back on the crutch of cel shading; they're realistic without looking like drab psuedo-photo-realism. To me they look like childrens' action figures, fighting it out on the screen.

As the author says, SF4 could have been animated better. Specifically it probably would have benefited from some squash-and-stretch as he suggests.

It's also worth noting that SF3's traditional cel animation, while awesome, also has room for improvement. The animation style isn't very consistent from character to character. In a lot of cases (Chun Li in particular) it's not even consistent between her various moves.

A great critique here: http://www.finalformgames.com/uncategorized/style-study-moti...

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#110

Post by robotresearcher »

TylerE wrote: post #107
biot wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if everybody moves to FLAC or other lossless music format, musicians will still likely add in MP3 compression artifact sounds. After all, like with vinyl, it makes the music sound warmer .

No it doesn't, that's BS. No one prefers the sound of MP3. Vinyl sounds better not because of some alleged "distortion", either.

If the artifacts of vinyl pressing and playback are not distortion, what are they?
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