About Pixel Art

TAN

After reading this piece I have a firm belief that I now know the difference between an artist's way of viewing and doing things and an engineer's/developer's . Of course I 'll keep my thoughts to myself but I thought about sharing it here, after all why not.


http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BlakeReynolds/20150512/243212/Pixel_Artist_Renounces_Pixel_Art.php

lotet

interesting read, kind of sad how he "gives up" pixel art.
I get why, but its still sad.
some great points, and a lot of cool pixel art, and nice examples though.

RN

Great article, than you for sharing

Shadowstep

I read this counter-article to that one just a few moments ago, why one studio will not renounce pixel art.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BrandonSheffield/20150514/243457/Why_Necrosoft_Games_will_not_renounce_pixel_art.php

xrg

A fun read, but I disagree with his overall assertion that people reject pixel art because they don't understand it or anything.

His game, at least in the screenshot, has quite a few issues that make it not really hit that appealing look he's showing in the other examples.
-- Text isn't legible; eg pink text on pink background.
-- Non-harmonious colors; eg difficult to tell what is UI, and what is game.
-- Really bad contrast/values; eg character portrait doesn't pass squint test, cliffs are barely visible.

Contrast it with the FFTA screenshot example he posted:
-- Text is legible.
-- Characters/interactive elements are slightly more saturated to separate them from the background.
-- Adequate value range so everything reads properly even at a glance.

He's got some great appealing character design, but shame you can't really see any of it due to bad palette choices. I think those challenges that pixel art communities do where they pick really horrible color combinations to try to emulate old tech causes artists to pick up bad color habits or something.

Anyway, like I said, fun read, but I think he's off base.

Blaisoid

Also, he wrote a strange paragraph about people calling it retro because of pixel art.

http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/blog/243212/01sc93K.png

Choice of font, text gradient and shadow behind it, and overall UI design do feel quite oldschool here, it's certainly not just pixel art.

I've seen examples of pixel art done in original styles that can't be easily confused with 90's games but this is not one of them IMO.

Kwramm

I don't quite get how the animation part is related to pixel art. So you got a 3D animator who couldn't make it look quite as dynamic as the 2D version... that says more about the animator than pixel art.

I wish he had organized his thoughts a bit more and written a more coherent piece.

eld

It's a bit of a rant.

Consumers always have weird ideas of what they like and don't like about game art, that's never going to change.

So pixel art is not going away anytime soon, nor does it have to.

Mr.Moose

Fun article, but it did feel like a rant.
I enjoyed reading the counter article too ! Thanks for the share!

RN

I think the major point in the original article is that the target audience in the mobile market is not used to pixel art aesthetics. They expect smooth graphics in their app store games.
If Dinofarm is to develop mobile games, they will drop the pixel art in favour of the aesthetics that the target audience is more familiar with ("embrace the medium").

Justin Meisse

A big portion of the market has no naustalgia for pixel art, when they think to their childhoods it's chunky 3D or WWII shooters. It's terrible! kids suck, get off my lawn!

Shrike

xrg wrote: »

A fun read, but I disagree with his overall assertion that people reject pixel art because they don't understand it or anything.

His game, at least in the screenshot, has quite a few issues that make it not really hit that appealing look he's showing in the other examples.
-- Text isn't legible; eg pink text on pink background.
-- Non-harmonious colors; eg difficult to tell what is UI, and what is game.
-- Really bad contrast/values; eg character portrait doesn't pass squint test, cliffs are barely visible.

Contrast it with the FFTA screenshot example he posted:
-- Text is legible.
-- Characters/interactive elements are slightly more saturated to separate them from the background.
-- Adequate value range so everything reads properly even at a glance.

He's got some great appealing character design, but shame you can't really see any of it due to bad palette choices. I think those challenges that pixel art communities do where they pick really horrible color combinations to try to emulate old tech causes artists to pick up bad color habits or something.

Anyway, like I said, fun read, but I think he's off base.

exactly my thinking


Its hard to deny however that bunch of people reject pixel art just because it is pixel art, no matter how good it is executed. I read comments like that all the time
at games with impeccable artstyle, but maybe just a vocal minority.

Muzzoid

IMO the main reason why pixel art has been so persistent is it is an order of magnitude easier to make than high resolution animation.

Blond

Well, they can always give it a go or revive within 3D space just like Minecraft or FEZ?

Arent these voxel art?

However, I like this guy and his article!

He reminds me when I'm pesting agasint CG animation feature films when I prefer the art of traditionnal 2D movies.

I understands hisfrustration and he is partially right. New technology brings new challenges but solves the past one while still losing the charm that thechnology limitation gave them.

Because yes, technological limitations pushes artists to rely solely on skills and not on tools (er?).

People are going to bash me for saying this, but I think renaissance paintings are far more impressive than any of the photoshop artworks I've seen in my life. And as much astounding zbrush scenes I've seen on zbrush central, real life sculpts impresses me more due to the technical limitation scluptors had while doing them ( No ctrl-z).

Same could be said for pixel art, limited amount of color variation, no fancy brush, no layer blending, it's pure drawing.

For normal people, the result seems meh but I think artists should always takes these guys as references cuz they are true examples of dedications to their art.

As cheesy as it sounds, thats what I think.

eld

Blond wrote: »

Well, they can always give it a go or revive within 3D space just like Minecraft or FEZ?

Arent these voxel art?

Minecraft is programming-art, and it works because generally the public doesn't care much at all about much other than gameplay and when they do they mod it with "texels always smaller than pixels no matter how close you are"

Fez is also just pixel art under the same criticism like the article authors own project from people not fond of pixel art, nothing changed here. the 3d didn't change much of that aspect. In fez it all just comes together nicely,

In the authors project we have a bunch of nice pixel art pieces coming together horribly and hard to read.





People have reasons to reject every kind of art style, and like the most horrible looking ones, it's chaotic and not important enough to angst about.

almighty_gir

I feel like his entire argument on why pixel art "is better" is actually more a case of:

Good art looks better.

And i feel like that's true regardless of the style, if the art is good it will look good. the animation he chose to compare in SF4 is very very boring, i'll agree. But that to me is just a case of bad art looks bad.

pior

Yeah - and there are *many* more things going on here ... The animators working on SF4 pretty much had to trace animation frames from previous games with their rigs, and that obviously causes stiffness, since the source material (here, a SFIII sprite) can be so exaggerated and in many ways incompatible with a 3D treatment designed to *not* use squash and stretch.

It's actually pretty obvious when looking Cammy - there was no advanced source sprite for her model to stick to (she appeared in SuperSFII and the Alpha series, but not in SF3), and it resulted in an extremely fluid SF4 character, fully embracing the 3D medium. Unfortunately, SF4 Chun and many other characters originating from 3S (Elena, Hugo) are heavily suffering from their legacy, so to speak.

On a side note, Chun actually moves better in TvsC than in SF4 thanks to the animators introducing the 3D pop-through style that has been featured in a few other Capcom games, to great effect. (SF4 has less or even none of that, meaning that all the animations feel more "rubbery" than their sprite counterparts)

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btjAfos_Q00[/ame]

Steve Schulze

It's interesting he called out King of Fighters 13 as being "amongst the best 2d animation in a video game" given that game used rasterised 3d models. They've obviously been reworked fairly significantly in 2d, but it doesn't seem like it's the best support for his hypothesis.

Justin Meisse

I can see how it's frustrating making mobile games where shitty vector art or hastily pre-rendered sprites are the most popular art form.

I haven't played Auro yet but it looks really good and I've sunk countless hours into 100 Rogues.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWw37ouzBe4[/ame]

Zwebbie

I like what some of the people in the Gamasutra comments thread said about the resolution of his own work being too high; I think that rings true for me as well. Blake talks about the use of illusion in Mighty Final Fight, but he employs very little of it himself. Auro has a high enough resolution to display anything, but not enough to display it sharply. He's not using pixel art as an aesthetic, only as a technique. I'd argue the same for the King of Fighters XIII example; it wouldn't lose any of its charm if it were crisp and HD, whereas the Zelda example would lose that specific charm it has.

Do you think that holds true for 3D models? I think the 500-1000 poly character range might look like a deliberate stylistic choice, whereas a couple of thousands would look like a failure at high resolution, but I'm struggling to come up with really good examples.

Steve Schulze

The characters in Grim Fandango might be a good example - they angularity and simple texturing are part of the aesthetic and wouldn't be improved greatly with more polys or textures.

Zwebbie

It might be, but if someone were to make a Grim Fandango-esque game in 2015 using 1998 texture limitations, I think asking them about that would be fairly legitimate. Think of it like this perhaps: if someone were to make a game looking like Doom or Quake, nobody would have a problem with the low amount of polygons; that's what makes these games look charming. If someone were to make a game looking llike Doom 3 or Quake 4 however, the edginess suddenly looks ugly. There's a reason Polycount's Low Poly Thread goes up to a 1000 polygons, even though a 10,000 polygon character would technically be 'lowpoly' compared to next gen 100,000+ models. There is a difference between having to suggest what isn't there and having everything there, but with low detail, and we appreciate the former much more; and I think we'd like Auro better if it were more pixelated. Does that make sense?

.nL

I love reading articles on Gamasutra posted by the Dinofarm team. I rarely agree with them, but they're smart people, and their perspectives always lead to good discussions, and an effort to figure out games on a much 'lower' level.

I agree that his article would have been much better and felt like less of a rant if he'd replaced the idea of pixel art with the idea of good art, and kept everything else the same.

Gungriffon Geona

This sort of thing kinda goes into why people still really love how certain early 3D games look. Einhander, Megaman Legends 1 and 2, that one Wile E. Coyote game for the playstation. All these games use a lot of managed color tones, and in the case of the latter 2 examples, flat shading to achieve a style that goes beyond the medium and makes them look more like a cartoon. In the former, Einhander's entire style is build upon the blockiness at play, creating an aesthetic that works with the limits, rather than against them. And while other games, such as Twisted Metal 1-4 or the early Tony Hawk games could manage to look good at the time, they don't really look very good now. they put a lot of emphasis on the idea of 'we can make things more real now!' Never mind the blurry faces and poor attempts at making round shapes, or low-res photo-sourced textures. People tend to only care about those for how they play.

I feel like they could have really stood to stretch the models even slightly in Street Fighter IV to make the animations atleast a bit better. It's such a weird thing that it's simply not there, but at the same time... I guess that sort of thing wasn't supported by the engine? Or maybe they just didn't care? Crunch time???
Point is, they could have gone just a bit further and it still looked good.

Pixel art allows for some pretty extreme freedom with what you can do with it, but it's also extremely hard to do right. I still have trouble with it whenever I play aroiund with pixeling, but it's also merely a hobby for me at the moment. 3D is straight up easier, but alot of artists just don't go that extra step with it.