AuthorTopic: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!  (Read 80649 times)

Offline Cyangmou

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #50 on: December 29, 2013, 12:21:26 pm
Dex I can completely understand you.

It's not up to anyone to judge "that's good art, that's bad art" - everyone has his own taste and his own criterias to judge about certain pieces.
And I think that the whole judging thematic destroys artistic freedom on a very basic level.
If we start to judge something "as community", and even if it's just voting, it's an harsh insection of an "individual" artists freedom.

The only thing we can judge in art and we can measure is realism. The more realistic something gets the more we can compare it with reality and the easier it is to judge about an artists eye (Gottfried Helnwein?).
"oh wow that's like a photo" (craftmanship?)

However if we talk about something abstract and we don't get the ideas of the creator behind a piece (Wassily Kandinsky?)
 there is a chance that we don't understand it and see it as "trash" without even questioning what's behind it (ideas?)


It's all up to oneselfs ideals.
Narrow-minded people are fearing the unknown. A lot of artists we consider as great nowadays brought something new to the table other artists don't understood and it was easier to say it's bullshit than trying to reconstruct a certain thinking process.
The problem is that some great artists aren't even questioning their perspective and they are doing stuff because they learned it that way and always will do it that way.


Now the big overall contradiction with pixel art technique is that it nowhere has anything to do with common "artistic craftmanship". It's not like perspective, color theory or anatomy and all of those techniques we need to make a descriptive piece of art.
We can't even measure it against anything
I suppose it's a much more abstract way of thinking about how to create a piece with pixels and how we use those pixels to get an effect.
And we need experimental pieces to look at to get out something.



Elks dragon would look great with another technique as well, same goes for Panda's falcon. Is it great "pixel art" (with applied pixel techniques we discuss here in this thread) or is it great art made with pixels (artistic craftmanship in the common sense, like crowd-voted on Pixeljoint)

Furthermore and I don't mean this insulting in any way (nor would I have brought it up, but it serves as a great example for "perception" and we are particularly talking about that in this thread as well and it lines up perfectly with the first paragraph)
 
your Secret Santa piece.
http://wayofthepixel.net/upload/ss13/tim_from_Dex.png

If I measure it with my own preferences I'd say the effort you put into it shows off and it's something everyone could get inspired from, the colors are great, the subjects are well chosen and the overall look is also nice.

In terms of common artistic technique the piece fails in nearly all spots where it wants to shine.
the most obvious wrong spots:
In terms of anatomical details are both elbows,
in terms of posture it's how you connected the lower torso with the legs,
in terms of proportion it's the neck,
in terms of drapery it's the piece wrapped around the upper arm
the animal anatomy of the pigeons is quite off to, but that's a side detail

If we will crowd-judge this piece at Pixeljoint It will be percepted well, because a lot of people just see the overall details but can't look through the basis of the image or they lack the in-depth knowledge.
Nonetheless the piece definitely will find its audience as every piece with a certain level of skill does.

But just because the overall perception will be well this won't mean that I will change my opinion about it or I will adjust my knowledge to the average one.
And I could be nice and say "oh wow it's so great how much effort you put into it, how well the colors work and how great the overall impression is" then I also won't lie, I'd just have shifted my usual priorities

Whenever we judge something there is a serious danger that the creator adjusts his own artistic vision to the judges opinion which takes intentionally or unintentionally away from artistic freedom.




In arts we first learn about certain rules (or at least we should gather enough basic knowledge)
and then everyone goes his way and breaks them intentionally to his preferences
Helm was questioning the basic ideas and ideals of pixel art and I think everyone can gain from it, if we are capable of working it out.

The technique (or ruleset) we are discussing here has not a lot to do with our own judgment criterias and we can't apply it 100% to our established techniques yet.
It's an experience to apply different criterias to a piece and to look at it from a completely different perspective.
And from experimenting you can gain experiences and with experiences you can grow.
With my provocant questions  like "leaving out AA completely" I just want to emphasize that everyone who participates in this thread overthinks his ideals as some people already did.

After all my experiences so far, I'd heavily recommend that you don't apply this technique to your old art first,
instead make something completely new which don't necessarily has to be "a part of you" and it should get a lot easier to experiment with a different mindset.


@r4c7:

Yeah you exactly brought up what I stated earlier - for me the key element also is the contrast.
« Last Edit: December 29, 2013, 12:58:20 pm by Cyangmou »
"Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man."

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Offline Arne

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #51 on: December 29, 2013, 03:28:06 pm
I think these kind of "rules" (practicalities?) are nice to have in the debugging/refinement tool belt. Cluster control/noise reduction is definitely on the Top 5 list of things I check for when a piece isn't working for me (in particular because I do so much lowrez game art). I think it's an expression of a similar idea that I encounter when doing concept art (don't do tons of stupid little random details which break up the shapes and obscures the punchline).

I do think pixels long to be something, but in a different sense. It's so easy (for me, and I think others) to fall under the spell of the pixels and let their very nature dictate... certain structural embroideries which does a piece a disservice. I have to yank myself out of it constantly and consider seemingly crazy ideas like asymmetries, omission, illogical relocation, absurd adjacency...
« Last Edit: December 29, 2013, 03:30:43 pm by Arne »

Offline ErekT

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #52 on: December 29, 2013, 10:44:28 pm
Okay, tried retouching another old image. Here are some observations. Not using any single pixels forces avoidance of some mechanical patterns. The most obvious example being dithering. But also certain AA-solutions that I tend to fall back on a lot. It makes for more organic solutions.

Things do get smeary though, and you lose some of that minute-level detail that's also a big strength of pixel art. Feels like it's not something that works well in 100% of cases, at least for me. But I like it, it makes me re-think several not so good habits I wasn't aware I had.

Offline Helm

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #53 on: December 30, 2013, 01:45:19 am
I'm glad the concept is helping your art. If you do this for a while, then later if you allow yourself a few single pixels they'll feel even MORE sharp than they do usually. The idea is to internalize this enough so you don't always reach for the single pixels.

Offline RAV

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #54 on: December 30, 2013, 04:36:13 am
I weigh in once more, because this time it might be more directly relevant to you.

As you should understand by now, my voxel tool revolves around truly Composite Resolution, as integrative workflow on-the-fly.

And as I have layed out before by the example of 45°, this can create for a duality of understanding, that yet is cooperative.

The same is true for "single pixel". When looking at it from the finest resolution point of view, this term names a problem here, because it encourages certain techniques that maybe should not be the first thought upon setting out a work, but the last if anything. However when you consider dynamic resolution switches as part of how you create art, you find that a single pixel of a lower resolution is a cluster of its own on a higher resolution. And so you add single pixels on each iterative layer of resolution, to sculpt the pixels of the last, until on the finest you end up with a very cluster oriented construction; although this dynamic resolution workflow incorporates "single pixel" action, methods like dithering and AA become an afterthought at the end if anything, and even what you call 45°, because all of this turns out unnatural and more work in this kind of workflow; so maybe you could even say this innately informs the artist on pixel art as described here, without really enforcing it.

In his latest piece on PJ, Drazelic tried to emulate this workflow somewhat, though it is less intuitive without dedicated support:
Quote
by doubling-size and then re-pixeling over the previous version to bring it back to 1:1 pixel resolution.


I don't know if this particular result has much to do with what you are after or examplifies my point here, but at any case I think its interesting that we have these two unrelated techniques developed, that in their interpretation and terminology even suggest opposition, and yet maybe end up being a good fit.
« Last Edit: December 30, 2013, 04:42:50 am by RAV »

Offline ptoing

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #55 on: December 30, 2013, 05:59:40 am
I did not read the whole thread, but some very interesting stuff in here. I wonder how much different working with clean clusters is when not using 1:1 aspect pixels, like C64 MCOL stuff with this kind of approach.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Cure

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #56 on: December 30, 2013, 07:14:55 am

Am I doing it right?

Offline Helm

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #57 on: December 30, 2013, 12:13:30 pm
Yes, how do you feel about the result?


RAV, do you mind showing pixel art that demonstrates your technique?

Offline RAV

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #58 on: December 30, 2013, 04:24:44 pm
Ah, my friend, you know I'm not an artist. I thought that Drazelic's animation gave a good example of what I tried to explain. But I try something.

I don't know what's right or wrong here, just that my curiosity is honest, and my intuition tells me that although we started from different points of thought and process, both our things point into an eerily similar direction; take it as another confirmation from my unlikely side that this "direction" explored here might really be more than just a crazy quirk for nerd-iest of artists.

So now I will embarrass myself for your service: On this board here I am probably the most unskilled artist by far. The following is pretty much the first time in my life I "draw" something that might qualify as pixelart; or that I draw anything; last time I did was an oekaki of a *shoe* for when joking around with Cure -- a year ago. And before that nothing for a decade maybe?

If this here is supposed to teach people about pixelart, then I am the perfect guinea pig. In my success or mistakes, you can study on me.

So this is really quick here, I am "abusing" my voxel tool for creating pixel art the way I tried to describe. Sorry in advance for wasting five minutes of your life:



Now I want you to realize what I'm trying to say: this is not any "groundbreaking" process; but what I'm trying to hint on is that I believe there is quite a difference for reinforcing the learning process of what this is about here, between just blocking out with a different brush-size on finest resolution, or blocking out in a native lower resolution iteratively. I think that the later has an even greater effect on informing the principles of conscious polyomino-fication, from macro to micro, like a fractal.


You can observe two things readily: I start out with single pixels and 45°, but also on the next step, I already made my first few polyominoes; what I didn't show in the end was this: For making "texture" like little bumps, cracks and ornaments, I would have gone high and higher res, and distributed single pixels on blade and shaft, before I would go yet even higher res step by step and mold those pixels into polyminoes of themselves, etc. There is even that nasty orange 45° on the shaft at one point, but this one too would have "dissolved" in "resolution pixel sculpting". Same for the "backround".

I don't know if this helps by any means, maybe what I say is for granted already, although what I'm trying to say here is a little distinction, a little spin on this, that I think reinforces this concept as a whole. Or maybe what I'm trying to say is awkward bullshit, but by that it might help you too proving or better explaining yourself? I'm just really curious of how this turns out because I deem it relevant to my work, so I try to help, and maybe better understand this on my own too, although I'm no artist, but how to make good tools for art, if I have no clue about art, you understand my motive here.
« Last Edit: December 30, 2013, 07:09:10 pm by RAV »

Offline Cure

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #59 on: December 30, 2013, 04:49:57 pm
Yes, how do you feel the result?
On some areas it has cleaned up excessive aa and I enjoy the simplicity, overall it feels like trying to pixel with one hand tied behind my back. It certainly has a more 'pixelly' look, it's a bit low-fi for me though. It's satisfying to make clusters click, so it's probably a worthwhile exercise on less complicated images.

I will say that while it suffers a loss in fidelity, the actual pixel relationships are much more interesting.
« Last Edit: December 30, 2013, 06:31:58 pm by Cure »