Sub Pixels

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

I was looking around reading about sub pixel rendering and found this topic: http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=1882.0 and some others about sub pixel animation and all that. However the topic's picture that i linked are broken So I am wondering, are sub pixels just anti-aliasing, is it something different, or is it a special type of anti-aliasing that conforms to the red green blue colors of the sub pixels in out monitors? I know in some text there is sub pixel rendering that uses what i would say oddly hued colors for the aaing.

[Grimsane]

its using colours, usually halfway between the colour of the pixels the motion is flowing in, it's a method of implying more resolution of motion than is possible with single pixels.



there is an example I put together, need further elaboration?

[API-Beast]

Usually with sub pixels not anti aliased colors are ment but actually the smaller pixels one pixel consists of on LCD displays. For every component of a color (Red, Green, Blue) there is one subpixel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering

Here is one really simple example of subpixel animation:

This aliased circle is moving 10 pixels (5 forward, 5 backward)... but actually has 30 animation frames, in each frame it's moving one sub-pixel. Note that the effect is much more smooth if the circle would have sub pixel anti aliasing.

As comparison, left the sub pixel animation, right the normal animation:


Well, its usefulness is rather restricted, it bloats the color count, doesn't work when scaled in, and that you have to move something less than one pixel is quite rare. It's more something you bother with just for fun.

PS: somebody still has those pictures from that thread? 

[Helm]

Here's a good example I made later today

[API-Beast]

Looks fancy... but has pretty little to do with sub-pixels This would probably look proper if it were using technical (R,G,B) sub pixels but this way it looks like the two lines are dancing around a black pole in the middle rather then moving left/right in 2D space. 

[ptoing]

When we speak about sub pixel animation we usually do not mean real sub pixels. Those are pretty useless for anything other than white on black stuff (or vice versa).

A better name would be animated tween aa or something, I dunno. But when people here say sub pixel animation that is usually what is meant.

[Stab]

So, basically, there's "real" sub-pixel animation that abuses the orientation of the 3 coloured diodes that actually make up each pixel in order to literally break a single pixel down to thirds, visually...

...And there's another "real" sub-pixel animation that abuses peoples' natural visual understanding of the world to make the viewer believe that an object or part of an object is occupying a space between the pixels, rather than occupying two separate pixels themselves.

I'd imagine the RGB-abuse technically-sub-pixel animation would be practically impossible to use practically, unless the many different types of visual displays are reasonably consistent in their methods of displaying. Abusing people's visual understandings, on the other hand, should be fairly universal and result in more reliable results. Reliably.

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Thanks for all the answers guys I guess what I was mainly wondering was whether or not pixel art sub-pixels are the real sub-pixels or just changing color as I've heard before. Also is there a real "way" to come up with the colors you would use as real sub-pixel animation because I think it would be interesting to put sub-pixels into use in pixel art.

[Grimsane]

oh yeah, site went down before I edited my post, was going to additionally ask do you mean actual sub pixels, and made these examples

<breakdown of a pixel on a TFT screen (full RGB would be white)

<theoretically utilizing sub pixels to move at finer than pixel amounts, only the top left, the bottom is at 3x zoom to breakup what is theoretically happening, to be honest it isn't very noticeable at all, and in pixel art and animation it's all about effective colour usage to imply the pixels are moving between each other.

*just read the thread response, I honestly think that 1bit sub pixel-less circle is as effective and smoother to my eyes, the one on the left just reads the same but with awful colour aliasing at the penumbra, helm's example is rather smooth and really fine amounts of motion is achieved within 2 pixel lines, also the only real practical use of sub-pixels on font is entirely scale relative and has a lot more going into it than simply using RBG values per pixel and is calculated and used as a form of anti aliasing

just zoom in on this to see exactly what I mean

if you had some fancy software you could turn a 1 bit animation at a higher resolution into a half resolution animation using sub-pixel anti-aliasing to effectively reproduce the same level of detail. but yes as everyone has said it's not what people mean at all when they say Sub pixel animation in relation to pixel art

*bit further away from my monitor, that circle slide does look smoother, but if it was greyscaled it'd arguably look as smooth

[ptoing]

Also, not all displays might be RGB, there are also BGR ones, which will fuck your stuff up pretty bad. On the original DS and the DS lite one of the displays is BGR for example.