I was also wondering, what do you do when a line is at a *bad* angle? For example, it it has slope 2/5, do you draw it by alternating rows of three pixels followed by rows of two pixels?
Pretty much. It depends what the situation is; if its an outline, an inner line, how many colours are available for anti-aliasing, that sort of thing.
The worse case is pure binary - you have only 2 colours, in which case alternating between 2/1 and 3/1 steps is the only option you have to make a line that matches the 5/2 gradient.
That looks pretty jagged though. Generally you try to avoid lines that lead to untidy alternating steps like that; 1/1, 2/1, 3/1, etc, or use a curve instead of a straight a line. In other words, be selective about how you render the subject such that you work only in pixel-friendly line gradients.
Hi all,
I'm a noob at pixel art looking to learn some drawing techniques through this forum. All the tutorials say that pixel art edges should be drawn one-pixel width. My question, are there any tools that automatically convert splines (Bezier curves or other splines) into single pixel width curves? If not, do you follow some sort of algorithm when thinning curves or is it more by intuition?
Piff
I don't know of any really reliable tools for that job. I would say the general method on non-jagged lines could probably be formalised into an algorithm. It depends on what exactly the line is supposed to be representing, though, in a way. If its just a spline for spline's sake, I'd say an algorithm could produce a nice smooth pixel-art-style line.
But if its a spline thats supposed to be representing the outer edge of a human arm in perspective at resolution XY, well there's subjective judgements the artist makes that might contradict the general pattern of a smooth line in order to accentuate or clarify a particular element of the form.
Ultimately lines become subordinant to pixel clusters; sometimes the smoothest outline interferes with the clarity of the pixel clusters that are defining the form via light and shadow, so you have to mess the line slightly to get the clusters behaving how you want.
I'm kind of rambling now. I guess I'm basically saying, yes you could have a tool that could import say, a spline representation of a human figure, and convert it into a smooth outline, but depending on the resolution chances are the artist is still going to have to noodle the resultant lines a bit for the betterment of the piece.
That's my guess.
