AuthorTopic: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!  (Read 80617 times)

Offline RAV

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #30 on: December 27, 2013, 03:34:22 pm
The virtual screen is within a physical host screen, and thus a virtual pixel can consist of many more physical pixels. So what I mean is, we now have this interesting constellation of understanding, two kinds of 45°, and my interpretation of 45° does not exclude yours, because the virtual level pixel 45° is actually made out of 90° physical level pixels. But on increasingly HD displays, the physical pixel becomes increasingly meaningless to pixel art, what remains relevant is only virtual. So what you see below now will appear tiny on screens tomorrow.

Compared to what you discuss, what my engine does is this, cutting pixels in half:


It might sound absurd to bring this up, but the reason I mention this is because the virtual pixel is handled in artistic understanding and workflow the same a real pixel, you even very much depend on that today, and I believe what I propose has quite a good effect without infringing on the basic principle of pixel art as layed out here.
« Last Edit: December 27, 2013, 04:31:56 pm by RAV »

Offline Ai

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #31 on: December 27, 2013, 09:11:53 pm
^ Your voxel videos are interesting, but I have no idea what you propose at all.

As far as I can tell, the point of eschewing dither and AA is to avoid being mesmerized by technique, and make pixel art that is actually well constructed rather than pixel art that merely looks good. How you conceptualize pixels doesn't appear to effect that -- isolated voxels have a very similar visual effect to isolated pixels.
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Offline RAV

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #32 on: December 27, 2013, 09:30:04 pm
The point is that it has been brought up in debate that for practical intends and purposes, there is a balance to strike between "well constructed" and "looks the way I need". There are occasions isolated pixels are necessary, though this training here is supposed to make them a rare and conscious effort. Now the problem is that of all cases of isolated pixels needed, the 45° case is the most needed; it is not truly isolated, but not truly well constructed either.

To handle that case so it satisfies both, we need to rethink what a pixel is about really, its history and future, that it is not this fixed thing set in stone, demonstrated in my examples. Thus, arriving at the virtual half-pixel is to bridge that gap of 45°, and give this theory a practical polish.

However, in the end this is just my way of handling it, that I thought would warrant mentioning related here.
« Last Edit: December 27, 2013, 09:55:49 pm by RAV »

Offline 0xDB

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #33 on: December 28, 2013, 08:24:49 am
I feel like I am doing it wrong:

The goal here was to polyomino-fy a small part of my avatar to get a feeling for clusters. It seems impossible (for me at least) to achieve the same level of detail/crispness without any 45-degree-connected pixel aggregations. The result appears blurry, mushed and dirty to me and I am incapable of reproducing the original shapes and angles in those limitations. The mushiness could be a problem with the palette and not as much caused by the polyominoes alone but the angles are an effect I attribute directly to the strict adherence to 90-degree-connections.

Offline Helm

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #34 on: December 28, 2013, 09:39:49 am
The problems you're having have to do with that you're constantly trying to *reduce* clusters,where sometimes you have to expand them, let them become more robust, have a stronger shape that reads better at 1x.

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #35 on: December 28, 2013, 01:00:47 pm
I think I am beginning to see. Using your edit as a reference enabled me to make a second polyominofication which resembles the original much closer and it appears crisp too. Eliminating each and every 45 degree connection between any two same-colored pixels was just as tricky as trying to preserve the AA (which I am starting to think is something I should get rid of altogether as there is no such thing as AA in reality, just surfaces which can curve towards or away from the viewer/light at more or less steep angles, making smooth or sharp gradients).

Offline RAV

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #36 on: December 28, 2013, 03:59:01 pm
Though I should have made it clearer maybe that my technique is not meant to fight the polyomino approach, it is not necessarily meant to encourage what you mean by 45°.

What it will most likely be used for, by way sculpting gives incentive, is making polyominoes, and then having them smoothed into any finer resolution on scaling, maintaining 90° integrity on finest (hardly visible) level -- that is what I mean with 45°: when it is scaled up rough, it's not quite as rough, but it's still polyominoes. On physical x1 both look the same.

That would be like taking Dennis' last result, scaling it up a lot (not zoom, actual), and then using the finest pencil size to add or cut the corners of those pixel-squares, just that a tool would do that automatically on runtime for any scale on the fly.

It is a kind of polish, optionally. Whether this is still within the nostalgic aesthetic you're looking for, if you prefer it rough in any case, or its own kind of "tiled" aesthetic, is another question. Maybe it's already a distinct style that just complies to this cluster theory on the lowest level. However, for my voxel case especially, I regard it more important, because the extra dimension can interfere more on perspective, and "scaling" is naturally dynamic in fps as well. So I mention this from the outlook of how cluster study translates.
« Last Edit: December 28, 2013, 04:45:08 pm by RAV »

Offline Cyangmou

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #37 on: December 28, 2013, 05:29:16 pm
@RAV

I honestly dunno why you posted that kind of stuff in this thread here.
Your approach seems to me work more like certain algorythms to unpixel pixel art and adding "polish" to something. I don't like that kind of "polish" and I don't think it's needed nor does it make the impression better.

That the pixel changed over time and that it's rather a certain aesthetic nowadays instead of state of the art technique is also common knowledge.

As Helm already stated in the thread there are things pixel art is very well suited for and there are things for which pixel art isn't the best medium.

Quote
That's all I'm interested in, as a method of learning, for people to consider the pros and cons before they start, even if they deviate after they start.

After all a lot of the stuff I experimented with isn't "the best approach to pixel art" since another medium will be much more effective, but I am mainly doing that stuff to find out some limits of the medium.
The whole idea of the cluster approach is just to bring out the aspects for which pixel art is considered great while neglecting a lot of other aspects.

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@Dennis:
Great link to the polyminos

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The simple ruleset we are using here makes it quite easy to end up with clean and up-to-date pixel art.

One question for all the technique interested people here:

I just float the statement that AA is working against the ruleset
what's the general opinion on that?

Do you even believe that AA is necessary with modern hardware and pixel art graphics?
modern flatscreens are really sharp and there is no blurring effect, so AA also don't has the same effect as on an old crt monitor (same as gradients and bands led us to the whole cluster approach).
AA anyways don't works efficiently with barely any single pixel.
So is it better just to cut it out completely or does a common 2-4 wide AA buffer cluster serves it purpose?

The aesthetic without AA has more jagged lines, but the pixels are clearer visible as well.
With minimizing the colors and emphasizing the clusters we will end up with a simpler picture anyways and we don't even try to hide that it's made out of limited colors.

So basically using a buffer cluster should be the same decision as if we'd use a highlight.
« Last Edit: December 28, 2013, 05:33:27 pm by Cyangmou »
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Offline RAV

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #38 on: December 28, 2013, 06:04:42 pm
The topic of the thread is Cluster study, not Pixel Study. So I took the liberty to interpret it in universal appliance. It's relevant to more than pixel, from cross-stitch to Pearler bead, to Rubicks to Tetris to Lego to Voxel; most techniques cross-pollinate, because there is a common logic to them. My participation here was not meant for ranking one aspect over the other, but contributing to the wealth of the topic. What I do is not a replacement to pixel art but an opportunity for a pixel artist to naturally translate his skill in the theory here into yet another field of craft, made more familiar when it otherwise might be too alien. And my explanations were a narrative towards that, why I do what I do, the differences and extensions born out of challenges I am facing in my case of application, that I thought would be interesting to you, and in that exchange of expertise I was curious to hear constructive opinions on that related matter from experienced artists. But I guess I'll just stop bothering.

« Last Edit: December 28, 2013, 06:07:09 pm by RAV »

Offline Helm

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #39 on: December 28, 2013, 09:31:30 pm
re: translating this theory in other crafts, sure perhaps that's a useful thing to do but we've only started to get a grasp of pixel theory *as* pixel theory per se.


Cyangmou and Dennis are moving towards the same issue with AA under this ruleset.

My answer is: ....I do not know, yet. I agree that AA has changed as a necessary and valuable part of pixel technique as screens have gotten sharper. I've seen a lot of people go for no-AA works that I have found very aesthetically pleasing. And it can be said that a tour de force of super-AA smooth pixel art seems to devolve: it looks like vector art and one has to wonder why it isn't vector art, then.

However in my own work I used to have great trouble letting go of AA, as a lot of skill I've gotten in this art style was related to that. And there is certainly smart AA. And much of a good, mixed color palette is about reusing a main shade as a buffer shade somewhere else.

So through this new idea about minimizing stranded pixels, I finally have a systematic way of figuring out how much AA I really need, if any. I do not have any solid answers to your query, Cyangmou. Perhaps 2point AA (like a small flat cluster) will look to me as gimmicky in a few years as single pixel AA does now. Perhaps 2point will survive because it looks harmonious when it's not aligned with other edges of two-pixel clusters (when it's not banding, so to speak).

And another startling thing about this whole deal: even banding looks less bad when there's no single pixels around, for some reason. Somehow the tetris jumble allows for it more, not sure why.