AuthorTopic: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!  (Read 80645 times)

Offline Ai

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #60 on: December 31, 2013, 12:51:22 am
RAV: Now that I understand what it is you are trying to say, I definitely agree. I have tried that iterative scale refinement process before.
Your video inspired me to try it again.

These are the stages 4, 2, 1. (that is, 4x4 pixels, 2x2 pixels, 1x1 pixels). I think I started at 8x8 pixels. It should conform mostly also to the stricter (90degree) version of the cluster exercise.

It really felt like the art was doing me, rather than vice versa. Disturbing. Well, it's probably just 'ego-death'.

Anyhow, my assessment of it is:
* does force more control
* I feel more anchored to the existing things in the picture, less willing to change them.
* more consistent positive feedback loop
* I struggle to avoid making things look sticky (look at the image and you may see what I mean)


Howto for GraFX2:
* Set your picture size to whatever you intend the final res to be.
* Set the grid size according to the pixelsize you want to start with. Turn on 'Show' and turn off 'Snap'
* Draw a non-bgcolor rectangle that exactly fills a grid cell.
* Grab that as your brush, and rightclick on the brush icon to set it to monochrome mode.
* Click on the lower 'fx' icon and set the brush handle to the upper left.
* Open the Grid dialog again and turn on Snap.
* Pick your color and start painting.
* When you want to go to the next finest level:
 ** Adjust the Grid size accordingly
 ** Hit 'h' to halve your brush size
 ** Set the brush handle to the upper left again (for some reason, 'h' resets the brush handle.)

4-step version:
* set your grid according to the current resolution you want
* have a brush that matches your cell size, set to monochrome mode
* make sure the brush handle is not central (I recommend top-left)
* draw







If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.

Offline Helm

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #61 on: December 31, 2013, 02:42:25 am
Yes, that video certainly helped illustrate your previous posts. Thank you for making it.

It's certainly the most literal way to work from general to specific in the pixel art medium, and I theorize that it is a useful activity - I also am dead certain that it will create exactly the problem Ai experienced above, where you're not likely to fundamentaly change an image as you go because you've already gone through a few sculpting zoom in iterations and psychologically you might be more tied to it.

However that is a larger scale issue with pixel art, and especially if there's no single pixels and the cluster relationships are super tight, small changes have a ripple effect. Large changes... you might as well delete a whole part of the image instead.

Like... the first thing I usually do when I edit people to help with their stuff is delete all highlights on their sprites, go back to middle color and fix from there (it's no wonder people have trouble with light - it's much more complex than a simple shadow cast). If I try to edit large highlight clusters while they're already there, I do a bad job. This is a thing you only learn from editing other people's work - when I work I don't even get so far lost in a bad highlight that I have to roll it back - but I do spot, say, bad anatomy waaaay down the line (not enough anatomy practice :(  ) and with this no-single-pixels deal, I'd have to delete large parts of the image to fix that.

But so be it, this is something we have to get over as pixel artists anyway, might as well learn early.

Offline Helm

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #62 on: December 31, 2013, 02:57:58 am
And a further thought on the topic.

Back in the ramblethread preamble (don't make the obvious pun) I wrote that one of the purposes of pixel art is to convey a higher resolution than what a single pixel really is. I don't agree with myself anymore, not even insofar that there can be said to be any 'purpose of pixel art'. Even that aside, I tend to lean more towards making the intended viewer resolution *slightly larger than 1=1 ratio* and then using the 1=1 pixel as a punctuation mark.

If we consider a single point of AA to attempt to convey a subpixel effect, meaning, a half pixel, here and there, then we have an image that is *mostly* 1 = 1 ratio of resolution, with gimmicks here and there that are 1 = 0.5 ratio. This is basically mixed resolution. Of course it's not as bad as actually mixing resolutions, it's mostly ok when looking at it from afar and if the picture is lush in colors anyway (lower contrast in the touching clusters, as well observed in this thread) but if you zoom in, it starts to look kind of like patchwork. Imagine someone making lush oil brush strokes for most of his art, and then going in with a flat marker and puncturing points here and there.

I theorize that even subconsciously this effect is noticed at 1x zoom, though I don't expect anyone to come up to me and remark on it. This is the gimmicky quality that I now see, but it doesn't have a name and it doesn't exist in the culture. Perhaps it's just me, also.

If we consider, then, an image made mostly out of at least two-pixel clusters, with the very occasional, super-sharp single pixel effect, there is no gimmick, and the effect of sharpness is retained and used wherever needed. No loss of coherency happens on zoom, there is no effect of 'mixed resolutions', as a single pixel lives just fine in the tetris jumble if needed be, and it doesn't have to be there either.

We live in 2013 (in 24 hours 2014). Most screens that will show pixel art today are crisp, well-lit, no bleed, high resolution screens. Do we really need, for future projects, to 'fake' less than 1 = 1 pixel resolution? And then we might even blow up the art to 2x or 3x zoom to show people how clever our aa and dithering is.

I'm not saying it's 'wrong'. I do it for work every day. But I am saying we should be thinking about it more.

Cure says above that there is a loss of fidelity. He worked over an image that is a cleaned up oil painting, so his eyes have already seen a level of fidelity pixel art would not be able to achieve in any case for this image. I think that at 1x zoom looking at them flip between themselves, I prefer the cleaned up version. It's sharper and much better understood without zooming and most importantly strong lines make much better visual sense as 'staircases' than as banding-by-themselves-lines. I theorize for pieces made from the ground up in this mindspace, without any mind's eye higher fidelity to sacrifice, the artist will not struggle to convey something with two pixel clusters as much as they might think (granted, with a bit of training).

And all of this is not to say the two-pixel cluster is the new pixel. Even those clusters shouldn't be overused (I'd have to practice a lot ot see what that means intuitively for my own art). There should be a healthy mix from broader clusters towards the smallest ones. Again, brush stroke economy from real fine art training would be useful here.

Offline PixelPiledriver

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #63 on: December 31, 2013, 07:00:04 am
Interesting thread.
Just wanted to throw in some reading that I was reminded of by your last post Helm.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc627092(v=vs.85).aspx
It may or may not help the conversation.

Once you start to involve numbers into anything its good to do quantity tests.
Raise the cluster size minimum by 1 and keep going.

I think I've thought about this before and forgot to do it:
It would be cool to program a line tool that has parameters for min and max length.

It can be visually repetitive, altho only subtly so, to add a single aa pixel to edge of all faces.
But I think that's why it's easier to perceive and apply aa as edges of vectors that fall on a pixel map.
That way you get thinking more about creating indentations, bulges, curves, weight etc.
Also AA feels a lot different in motion.



Edit:
Here's one more with a few changes to make the last part dissipate better.
« Last Edit: December 31, 2013, 07:08:48 pm by PixelPiledriver »
And knowing that it is, we seek what it is... ~ Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Chapter 1

Offline RAV

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #64 on: December 31, 2013, 01:21:27 pm
Yes, this thread is what I deem the most worthy way of concluding this year and starting out the next, thanks everyone participating.

Helm, hopefully without hijacking this thread too much, I want to give some more explanation of my thought process, why I really did what I did, although it's not immediately relevant to you now, but I think it's interesting, because in a way it's like reliving the early start-up progress of computer graphics / pixel art all over again; that's what makes this "new frontier" kind of exciting to me, it's all the same limitations and problems and aesthetics in the next dimension.

In what is populary referred to as voxel art in the form of cube meshes, resolution is as much a problem as it was for pixels on early computers back in the day. A higher resolution exponentially increases processing and memory requirements in pixel art, and for voxels it's sooo much worse even, at power3, making it extremely demanding even for today's best computers.

So what people do in things like Minecraft is making it extremely low-fy, and trying to make it more readable with higher res textures flat on them. In a way this is the worst kind of mix-and-match resolution. And then there is the idea of, hey why not give different classes of items a different resolution uniform, like the terrain is really rough, and the characters a bit less rough. This is a bit better, but still quite some hodge-podge.

So what I do is an actual natively mixed resolution on the fly for everything. BUT the trick is, the ace card, the joke of it, that it is not really meant to encourage mix and match resolution on the resulting art work! In fact what I really intended it to be used like is to give all the world a uniform fine resolution unlike any other such project to date.

What you do when modeling cubes in Blackbox is *surfacing* it  ;p. The layers of lower resolutions turn out to be hidden within the core of the model, or away from sight on a walled side not meant to be seen, like a facade in film and theater. They are just a logical requirement for constructing the model, or modifying it later, but they are not meant to define visible model aesthetics, rather as a purely logical definition of volume, and to save so much performance and memory that it makes a higher surface resolution and frame-based animation and large distances possible on today's computers.

They achieve this through dynamic level of detail, that means the engine itself decides in a given scene, how much detail of each object is shown. When you put your face down on the ground tile, you see every stick and stone in ten thousand fine cubes of surface "texture", but when you look at that tile from a mile away it's only that small hand full big cubes of its core, but you don't really mind/notice, because it's so far away, the perspective makes it so small as a couple real pixels. As you get closer, it fades back in layer on layer of cube-resolution. Important in my implementation is, that the engine understands that the bigger cubes can at any time be transformed/split into smaller, to make all assets dynamically modifiable/destroyable, as if it was all a single uniform resolution at highest; that means that resolution-information is not actually lost, it just knows how to abstract things for the right occasions, to get the best of both worlds.

In normal pixel art there is no "hidden pixels" as such; but if computers were less powerful than today, and we still wanted to do Doom-like sprite-based 3d, then the equivalent to my technique would be what's called mip-mapping, that means creating each sprite in multiple pixel resolutions for the engine to pick as required. And even though the construction of pixelart does not depend on hidden-low-res pixel either, it is really interesting that the technique we currently discuss actually does rely on exactly that... the mip-maps would be a natural by-product of how you create art anyway. So if this were the technical reality, it would naturally be the preferred way of creating pixelart.

So that's my little story, and the interesting historical point in time we're at, where in case of this technology, all our super modern hardware just turned into a C64 again, in terms of what is ever so required and what meager it can deliver, and how we have to work around all that by being smart, coder and artist hand in hand, rather than brute processing force of how any pixel art is delivered today as an afterthought by anyone who so much as sneezes. By that notion we might even say, voxelart of today is spiritually closer to pixelart back in the day, than modern pixel art itself, which, as has been noted before, in its lush fidelity is more and more difficult to differentiate from art made of pixels. But I don't mean that as valuation, I love it all, I mean that more in the modes of thought process of an artist in the process of creating. You know how you often put yourself under artificial restrictions to relive it and spark your creativity in certain ways? Well, these limitations are actual reality again for the next 10-20 years... maybe the last time any limitation is not artificial.

In entering discussion here, I was interested both in your advice, I am ever so doubtful of my devices, and if what I do has any value for you too, and if there are any funny quirks and interesting abuses and "syn-aesthetic" styles in it for pixelart as of now. It is always good to increase the total wealth of what pixel art can mean, in its pride.
« Last Edit: December 31, 2013, 04:49:12 pm by RAV »

Offline RAV

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #65 on: December 31, 2013, 03:34:36 pm
Ah, another thing I should have mentioned.

When I talked about texture mip-mapping, and that what I do is basically geometric mip-mapping, I explained it purely from a performance point of view, as if making a Doom clone today would not make it necessary for the sprite art anymore. But the truth is, mip-mapping is as important today as it has ever been, it still saves a lot of performance in modern engines; their lower mip-maps are usually auto-generated by a tool, from the finest texture the artist provides; disregarding how the algorithm mangles pixels on downsize.

But the even more important reason is another, aesthetically: having a lot of textures on screen, all at the same finest resolution created natively, but rendered at different scales and angles by perspective, resized every frame on the fly as view and movement requires, can cause a lot of very nasty noise/interference on the screen, especially on many small and far objects that still render down-sized the largest texture version that normally would exceed the screen-space given by the object currently, it's a dirty pain to watch. But having a couple of prefab texture resolutions that fit more naturally to the different scales of an object on screen, and then just resize for soft transitions in between, greatly reduces that visual noise, and mangles less the pixels of manually created mip-maps.

For this reason, even if you made a Doom clone today, you would still manually create mip-maps for all sprites/textures, as natural by-product of the workflow we talked about here.
Also still important even in my engine, for creating a torrent of particle effects, with which volume doesn't matter, as pixel-sprites still.

And this is the same reason why I, other than for ever much more critical performance, do the level of detail for voxel-sprites, and require the artist to create it with that in mind, naturally supported by the tool, even if I had all the performance in the world, because attempting to render a lot of items in all their detailed close-up glory, even at far away, makes for just as much flickering headache for the viewer.

Frankly, even a classic 2d pixel art side-scrolling or isometric game, would still greatly benefit of it, if for some reason a lot of zooming in and out is necessary. Like a dynamic and fluent replacement for the classic "overworld" view of the whole map, or minimap.

Probably that too not directly relevant to you, but interesting to know maybe. Though I think it's enough of that for this thread, it should revolve more around the actual work with pixel clusters again...
« Last Edit: December 31, 2013, 05:53:27 pm by RAV »

Offline Lanarky

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #66 on: December 31, 2013, 08:17:30 pm


I made Viewtiful Joe from scratch using DawnBringer's color palette, in IsoPix on my android tablet. I was trying to test myself with clusters and using a palette I couldn't change. ( I'll need to get used to touch screen. )

There are no single pixels in the image.

Offline Helm

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #67 on: December 31, 2013, 09:08:13 pm
Very well done. How do you feel about the process and the end result?

Offline Lanarky

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #68 on: December 31, 2013, 09:29:08 pm
I think the technique works really well, and I would suggest trying it first from scratch, since you have more control over the final outcome. There were a few places where single pixels would help, but it makes it easier to change areas of the same color with the fill tool. At first I thought this would only work with realism in pixel art, but with more practice I think it would work in more stylized approaches too.

I feel good about the outcome and I think I can see deeper into the structure of what I'm working on. I can spot single pixels easier, and banding pops out more when doing this. So I hope more people post some of their work since it seems like the thread is becoming a little off topic. I also started out thinking it wouldn't be good for anything but realism, but I think more people trying it out for themselves will make this a technique worthy of the ramble thread. You just need to step out of your comfort zone to be able to see it yourself.

Offline Helm

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Re: NEW CLUSTER STUDY THREAD!

Reply #69 on: January 01, 2014, 02:08:34 am
It absolutely is not just for realistic stuff, this is something I did for work (I retouched it just now to have only two single pixels. Before it had 45degree connections)



It's a Bad Ice-Cream avatar for a game we finished up before the christmas break, and during this is where I realized the single pixel aa problem. I was trying to keep it sharp for 1x zoom which is mandatory for avatars and it dawned on me what I was doing with single pixels.

Btw you can play the game here http://www.nitrome.com/games/badicecream3/

I am working on something more ambitious as we speak.

Also you are correct, I'm finding that fill-tool changes make for a faster workflow than usual anyway. It's interesting