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A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

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Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#121

Post by mxfh »

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…

When it comes to cel animation I recommend watching Chuck Jones: Extremes and in Betweens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrD0aog7Kts

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#122

Post by marvy »

technomancy wrote: post #118
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…

2025 startup idea: an app that seeds your inbox with dubious pharmaceutical offerings and impassioned pleas from exiled Nigerian princes.

Are you predicting an end to spam in 10 years?

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#123

Post by pandaman »

wodenokoto wrote: post #99
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…

Maybe in the states. PAL and NTSC versions of games looks very different. Living in Europe, I could hardly recognize my favorite games when I saw them in American movies, or tv-show. i wonder how the Japanese PAL would render it, because despite being PAL it's still different from Europe.

Was there ever Japanese PAL? If so I cannot find any references to it. The PAL games indeed look different from the NTSC because they are different games. Other than the obvious difference in the video configuration there are usually content differences due to local laws, different marketing policies and technical limitations (e.g. an NTSC games in general did not have to support as many languages as PAL ones).

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#124

Post by recursive »

TylerE wrote: post #120
JohnTHaller wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vinyl in actual use has a much narrower range than CDs or MP3s. One things that is common, though, is for Vinyl to be mastered differently than the digital final result. So, it is entirely possible for the CD/MP3 release of a given song to have a much narrower dynamic range than a Vinyl release of a given song despite being released on demonstrably inferior technology.

That is simply NOT TRUE. Vinyl has been demonstrated to be able to cut and playback frequencies of up to 70khz, and many commercially released records from as far back as the 70s had data up to the mid 40khz range (and in fact this is required for quadraphonic playback).

Even if it's theoretically capable of doing that, I think the average cd player produces a better frequency range than the average record player. In any case, I thought the parent was talking about dynamic range, not frequency range.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#125

Post by fgsfdsfgsfds »

egypturnash wrote: post #116
fgsfdsfgsfds wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fundamental difference between Japanese and Western animation is their approach to motion. Western animation emphasized fluid motion, attempting to stick to the maximum framerate (24 FPS) allowed by the film medium as much as possible. This could produce striking results, but tended to limit artists to more simpler, slower, more deliberate stretch and squash movements that would make sense when interpolated across…

Ex-animator from the US here. Most Western animation has historically been done at 12fps ("on twos"); you go to 24fps for very fast motion or stuff you want to be super-smooth. This holds even in big-budget 2D theatrical features[1]. You will also find no small amount of super-stylized motion - dig up "The Dover Boys" (dir. Chuck Jones), commonly cited as the first cartoon to experiment with the smears, multiple imag…

Thank you for sharing your experience. Pencil mileage is a great way to sum up the difference between the two traditions. Sorry for sounding so down on Western animation; it's true that I'm more used to the look of Eastern animation, having invested much more time invested in it (hence my mistake about Western films animating on ones vs. twos; it's been a while since I watched one of the classic Western animated films, oops), but I don't want to discount the work of Western animators. I have my biases, but there are gems in both traditions, and of course I'm saddened by way Western 2D animation has fallen by the wayside in mainstream Western (or at least American) culture since the dawn of 3D animation.

As for games, I wanted to add a comment to my post about how I was mostly thinking about mid 80s-early 90s games, but Hacker News seems to have some restrictions keeping new users and throwaways from editing posts. Many European games from this time stood out to me as compromising gameplay at the expense of their animation. In contrast, many of the 90s and early 2000s Western mascot platformer games, as you mentioned, did great jobs of working charismatic, fluid animation into the medium. Crash Bandicoot in particular is notable for being one of the few games to use per-vertex animation; for each key frame of animation, the vertices that made up Crash were placed manually, giving the artists an unprecedented degree of control.

Since then, sadly, most Western AAA devs have tended overwhelmingly towards more "realistic" art styles that make heavy use of inverse kinematics-driven procedural animation for gameplay, and motion capture for cutscenes, leaving the animators much less room for expression.

Regardless, my intent was not to comment on Western animation as a whole, but (bringing it all back to the original commenter's remark about mobile games being sparsely animated) simply state that sparse animation doesn't have to be a bad thing, and in fact, there's an entire school of animation built around it.

Anyway, thanks again for replying, and I'll be sure to check your suggestions out.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#126

Post by wodenokoto »

pandaman wrote: post #123
wodenokoto wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in the states. PAL and NTSC versions of games looks very different. Living in Europe, I could hardly recognize my favorite games when I saw them in American movies, or tv-show. i wonder how the Japanese PAL would render it, because despite being PAL it's still different from Europe.

Was there ever Japanese PAL? If so I cannot find any references to it. The PAL games indeed look different from the NTSC because they are different games. Other than the obvious difference in the video configuration there are usually content differences due to local laws, different marketing policies and technical limitations (e.g. an NTSC games in general did not have to support as many languages as PAL ones).

I was wrong, Japan used a variation of NTSC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC-J

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#127

Post by robotresearcher »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #111
robotresearcher wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I thought people prefer the sound of vinyl because it's analog and has a much wider range that digital music. (Not because it's distorted)

Vinyl sounds nice to many people. It has likeable, some say 'musical', distortion.

A turntable with a nice amp and speakers is a novel treat to people who have grown up with low-bitrate mp3s and ear buds. Sounds different. And having to work a bit harder and paying attention means you tend to get more out of it.

Of course, a well-mastered CD and a nice pair of headphones also sounds great and might be a more accurate reproduction of what they heard in the studio.

I just like music every way :)

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#128

Post by enneff »

TylerE wrote: post #112
jay_kyburz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought people prefer the sound of vinyl because it's analog and has a much wider range that digital music. (Not because it's distorted)

Exactly. And also that it can't be loudness-warred to death.

"Loudness wars" has everything to do with mastering and very little to do with the actual medium. Yes, the onset of the loudness wars coincided with the rise of digital distribution, but you can master a record to be just as loud as a CD. On the other hand, you can't master a record to have as much dynamic range as a CD. That's why classical music enthusiasts tend to prefer CDs.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#129

Post by pron »

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…

> ... is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

I think the reason is that the effort these limitations assign to us -- the imagination we need to activate in order to overcome them -- is what attaches us to them.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#130

Post by JohnTHaller »

colechristensen wrote: post #117
JohnTHaller wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vinyl in actual use has a much narrower range than CDs or MP3s. One things that is common, though, is for Vinyl to be mastered differently than the digital final result. So, it is entirely possible for the CD/MP3 release of a given song to have a much narrower dynamic range than a Vinyl release of a given song despite being released on demonstrably inferior technology.

Said differently, the limitations of a medium can lead to better decisions. What can be done with a limited toolset is often better than what can be done with an unlimited toolset.

In this specific case, it's not a result of the toolset, but a result of the consumer. The vinyl enthusiast is buying something they are a fan of at a higher price and expecting a quality product. The typical MP3 customer is buying it based on a 15 second sample. So, the 'loudness wars' still apply to many digital products, sadly.
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