About Pixel Art
polycounter lvl 12
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
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BlakeReynolds/20150512/243212/Pixel_Artist_Renounces_Pixel_Art.php
Replies
I get why, but its still sad.
some great points, and a lot of cool pixel art, and nice examples though.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BrandonSheffield/20150514/243457/Why_Necrosoft_Games_will_not_renounce_pixel_art.php
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.
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.
I wish he had organized his thoughts a bit more and written a more coherent piece.
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.
I enjoyed reading the counter article too
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
I haven't played Auro yet but it looks really good and I've sunk countless hours into 100 Rogues.
[ame]
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.
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.
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.