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Messages - Arne
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11
Pixel Art / Re: Jeggson Voreggs
« on: May 16, 2015, 09:05:32 pm »


Put some of my thoughts into pixels.

12
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Woman (naked)
« on: May 16, 2015, 07:47:26 pm »
Mmm. I think a strong foundation in line art is more useful than one in painting. Perfect line art is a but much to ask, but it's a good idea to check so the figure makes sense before diving into the coloring. Good line art is seldom done by long careful work, rather, I feel that it's something that you must be able to whip out quickly and naturally or it will look stiff and slowly made.

13
Mm, for me, pixel art/optimization is fun and useful when resolution is a bit lower. If I were to guess, the guy was working so large that the medium lost much of it's usefulness, and the work turned into a vector-edge AA and gradient dither chore (e.g. the HUD/GUI).

Small-ish and consistent palettes are sometimes very useful for nudging the artist in good or surprising directions. Judging by a lot of the beginner pixel art I see, it is indeed easier to mess up by adding colors (or detail) than removing. And didn't this place use to have Bruce Lee in the banner? Remember what he said about hacking away - he was clearly talking about colors and pixels... right? I mean, look at him, he was a master at it and eventually turned into a tiny little two color widepixel figure.

14
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Woman (naked)
« on: May 16, 2015, 04:16:09 pm »
I find it easier to do these kind of large pieces as paintings first, or at least line art. Once you have pixels down, they can be hard (slow) to change, creating resistance to improvements you may have in mind.

Be careful about rendering muscles and bones (unless "deffed" the look you're going for). It's good to know the features are there, but when actually drawing, it's better to just lightly suggest their presence I think.

I don't have a problem with plain frontals in plain light, but then again, I'm a concept artist and used to seeing & drawing things like that.

Bra owl.


15
Pixel Art / Re: Sonic Items
« on: May 16, 2015, 03:30:02 pm »


I think the item machines should be about presenting the items, not the machines, in terms of pixel area used. Light blue racing/jogging overall stripes in BG. Button on top to more clearly suggest method of interaction.

Ignore my spikes, I got carried away with nonsense.

I didn't change palette, but I think the ramps are a bit plain in the mono-hue sense. Perhaps it fits the era though.


16
Pixel Art / Re: Workbench icons
« on: January 31, 2015, 02:36:35 pm »
With Trashcan I wanted to pay homage to the tapered version (1.3) which unfortunately meant a lot of slight-angle problems to deal with (I didn't because I rushed it).

As I may have mentioned, System 7 was at the back of my mind doing some of the icons, and now it's at the front of my mind.



What kind of palette would a Mac-Amiga hybrid from around ´92 have? Chunky pixels were becoming popular, 8 bits per pixel, i.e. 256 colors. Now, the palette might be dynamic, but it's best to keep a few OS static colors around. I think early Windows did. This gives me 240 colors. I've been holding off doing a 256 color palette (again) because it's a rather difficult task. This time I started out by indexing 256 64x64px photos, then I arranged the colors into ramps manually, realized I didn't like the ramps so I made ramps from scratch instead.



The two main sets were made with the following philosophy: Instead of doing 16-length ramps I wanted to focus more on hue and saturation coverage, which meant shorter ramps (larger value steps). I know that both dark and bright colors can often be merged, so my ramp lengths are interlaced short and long. I imagine that the blocks can be rolled up hue-to-hue-end and tapered/pinched towards the black and white ends. I chose to do a gray block and a normally saturated one, and then I added the 6 full sat colors and a few strips of high sat graphical ones. I had a few indices left and know that earth tones can be a bit sensitive in platforming games (lots of brown rock/mud terrain) so I padded with poop colors which seemed to be missing. Skintone coverage seems alright. A quarter of my source images were porn *snicker* (easiest way to get human skintone coverage tbh). I've pondered freeing up some colors (Ptoing suggested some of the near blacks) to soften/lengthen the sky gradients. Skies are sort of unique in that they are not textured and very often feature long smooth gradients. Overall the palette seems to be working but I have not yet done a similarity/dupe test.

Palette target is OS environment, so it should handle photos, games, documents, etc. I think System 7 has a 256 color palette in one of the modes but I have not been able to find it. My fantasy computer will have a blitter-type-GPU with its own VRAM (contains framebuffer/textures/various lists and pointers). In 256 color chunky pixel mode pixel manipulations are a lot easier and faster for a programmer. The idea is that the GPU is able to quickly redaw Bobs (fast enough for convenient immidiate mode) whilst the CPU does other things in its own RAM. No sprites. The CPU mostly only sets up and nudges Bob lists, scanline lists, as well as loading/changing textures in VRAM occasionally via some port. While it's tempting to put VRAM in RAM for direct CPU manipulation I think it will create communication/addressing slowdowns/conflicts.

---

Also a Win 3.1 quickie!

17
General Discussion / Re: ROBOCITY
« on: January 28, 2015, 02:06:28 pm »
Yeah, my palette is pretty crazy and experimental. I rarely use magenta or nonlinear rampsso I wanted to have a go at it. The environment might have some glue light though so there were some thought behind it. Also, I noticed that my PC stuff comes out dark on my Mac so I probably have a calibration issue. Further, I rounded my colors down so 255 is 240. It doesn't matter much on the Amiga of course as the colors are stretched back up, I assume.

Anyways, good points. I abandoned the idea of structure and just went nuts throwing pixels all over the place:



Pretty severe color/value matching issues but maybe someone else want to play around with it, then pass it on? The scene lighting will dictate what light and shadow colors ashould be used on the sprites, or vice versa. The blue guy is indeed too dark atm. I'm thinking the city could have some technogreeble and static inhabitants.

18
General Discussion / Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!
« on: January 28, 2015, 07:29:09 am »
Well, some years ago I gathered a bazillion photos of a variety of things (including naked people :P) and plotted a 3D RGB histogram of color count. Most hits were aligned from the black diagonal to the white, bulging at the center (midpoint) like a grain of rice... perhaps one with fuzzy irregular mold. Certain saturated colors were of course less common as they are less likely to occur in a photo. A palette generated by nested RGB for-loops using big steps produces few hits on the common color regions in my aforementioned histogram. Of course, graphical neon colors are still quite usable, perhaps more effective in many cases. Would be interesting to try other stepping methods though, for say a 64 color pal, and find one that's more to my liking whilst being really simple.

19
General Discussion / Re: Whats the best way to draw a corn cob?
« on: January 27, 2015, 01:15:36 pm »
Ice climber has a corn cob. I think the principle of simplified blocks, grass, roof tiles, etc. applies. Pick a spot for the texture and don't do it all over the surface, at least not high contrast. Applies no matter the color count. In this case the texture is also used to imply shade.


20
General Discussion / Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!
« on: January 27, 2015, 01:03:34 pm »
Even The Amiga's 444 isn't much of a hinderance unless you're doing copper stuff or long 32 color mode ramps. I guess, if the gradient is so smooth you can't see the transitions, it stops being pixel art anyways because there is no pixel definition.  I do recall some instances where a hue shift "one step up" in a ramp has been unwanted though. Some games would offset the copper half a bar every other frame to smoothen out gradients.

As for going lower, it's interesting how such stepping produces colors almost the opposite of what we see on photos where the most common colors stretches from the black corner of the color cube to the white, diagonally through the grays bulging like a grain of rice.

On topic, I've found clustering/orphan elimation a useful thing to fall back on when something feels wrong but I'm somehow blind to it. It's good to have there at the back of the head when the old orges rise to do uneccessary fancy pixel footwork with excessive AA, lining and whatnot.

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