Pixelation

General => General Discussion => Topic started by: x-death on December 18, 2010, 01:12:44 am

Title: A Dithering Thread
Post by: x-death on December 18, 2010, 01:12:44 am
hello, this is a thread on dithering. now dithering is seen in many stylish ways these days usually by the greatest of artists.

but i'm getting back into pixelart and i'm hoping to learn how to draw by hand soon also. but i'm practising dithering but i know i've seen tutorials on how to dither but with more of a stylish twist to it. i can't seem to find them now, and i wanted to know if you guys knew of any tutorials which could teach me to dither more stylish.

or perhaps you could do one yourself i don't know, but i'd love to hear more on this. either way below i've provided a link i found earlier.

link: Click Here (http://www.exotica.org.uk/mirrors/gfxzone/articles/goblin_pixelling_tutorial-article.html)
Title: Re: A Dithering Thread
Post by: Ai on December 18, 2010, 09:15:46 am
It's a matter of practice -- you fit various shapes agreeable to one another in a space such as to distribute color error. Wash, rinse, repeat until you get it down. Same idea as any other kind of dithering, really. Just more interesting.
Title: Re: A Dithering Thread
Post by: Elk on December 18, 2010, 09:41:04 am
Dithering, in my opinion, is just setting single accents to create the impression of a smooth (when desired) gradient which appears in different patterns
Title: Re: A Dithering Thread
Post by: Arne on December 21, 2010, 02:21:43 am
I use dithering even in 24 bit mode, if I feel that I need the variation of texture. Also, in some cases I index my images to a palette of unknown character, and in that case some of the dithering will remain, and prevent banding.

(I did these really quickly for a video 1 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug--jgwg0aU), 2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZAJkTBhktk) showing one of my many pixeling techniques.)

(http://androidarts.com/appendage/rocks.png)
Title: Re: A Dithering Thread
Post by: Helm on December 21, 2010, 02:16:25 pm
Arne, no offense meant but the end result looks slightly jpg'ed somehow. Your workflow and the end result scream to me : "pixel it straight up, you don't need dirty tools" not out of any purist reason but because the end result would look so much better. You're making some hybrid techniques that are interesting, but in the end result, there's no concern paid to pixel clusters, line continuity or busy versus plain texture. The end result looks jpg'ed and it makes me cry  :'(
Title: Re: A Dithering Thread
Post by: Arne on December 23, 2010, 12:15:55 am
Actually, that's as good as I could expect, given the restraints that I was under. I didn't want to reshoot the video because I could've done better in a take 2 or 3. The idea with the video was to show a few techniques on some easy subject that anyone could handle. An experimental canvas of sorts, rather than a highly figurative subject needy of a lot of construction and refinement. I'm saving that for another video. Not sure how I'll be able to keep that one as short though. I can spend a lot of time on refinement and revisits and it makes the video boring uninformative easily. Sometimes I spend an hour just moving eyes, lips or fingers around...

Somehow I always fail to pay attention to relations of forms and line flow when I pixel. It somehow puts me in a different mode then when I paint. Normally I sketch, draw and/or paint large (http://androidarts.com/cc/fossils2_web_version.jpg), then scale down and make pixel-clarity adjustments until I feel that I'm getting diminishing returns. Throwing in chunks of dither there and there is a nice way to vary the texture

Anyways, I can't say that the dither bothers me too much in this case. I think the cold/warm interlace in the dither creates an interesting duality and color dimension. It's one of the strengths of dither that I perhaps forgot to mention. When painting, you can do a similar thing using fine grain textures with warm overlaying cold or something like that.

The hard light/shadow adjacency and lack of volume suggesting... global structural coherence bothers me far more, but not enough to warrant making it a 3 part video. I felt I had grazed off what I wanted.

Of course, if you have rotation in the game engine, dithering might cause an annoying flickering effect, so I wouldn't use it on game characters as much. It could look neat spicing up the rusty parts of vehicles though. Brown over gray.

Title: Re: A Dithering Thread
Post by: Geti on December 23, 2010, 11:34:01 am
I think the problem with some of those rocks is that the end result of the "painting" phase wasn't artefact-cleaned after sharpening so crazy things happened.

I started on an edit but I shouldn't procrastinate what I'm working on any more and I got frustrated quickly with the light source issues O_o in case anyone's interested, I've included it:
(http://i.imgur.com/yRoUd.png)
The index section should highlight areas where my clusters still suck.

Oh, by the way I did another rock from scratch after wating those videos, Arne. The overall shape sucks but I'm happy with the texture for ~20 minutes, though there's so much I'd patch up if I took another pass (heaps of banding and artefact issues <_<)
(http://i.imgur.com/xkpDQ.png)
it's unsuitable for use as Cortex Command terrainDebris by the looks of things; very likely just because it's at a different viewing angle.

Semi-relevant for all the 50% dithering.