Could i trick you saying this is pixel art?

[cels]

Thanks for the explanation, Cyangmou. Makes sense to me. Kind of like an uncanny valley of pixel art, I suppose.

[questseeker]

3D rendering is unlikely to look more similar to pixel art than this, but it looks obviously not hand-drawn because of wrong shading (the left and right outer edges are mirrored images of each other) and sloppy antialiasing (countless shades of grey, without making a deliberate choice of palette and patterns).

[RAV]

Yeah, the problem is added up mix. And I think that the issue of animation we've been talking about is a mixed bag too. What Rikfuzz did first and foremost is making a better animation, it's not just more pixelartish if you will, it is plain better, it's mechanically "snap-ier", more aggressive, fitting to the character of such a weapon. This improvement is "stylistic", unrelated to technical implementation/smoothness, and only peripheral related to pixel art, a 3d animator would have it just the same by hand, it's just that the pixel artist is forced to be more economical in his considerations to begin with. So the problem would be that as of right now content generation was too automized regardless genre of art. This mixes the kind of problem we are dealing with here, of trying to make it a better art in general, and trying to make it look more like pixel art, but I think it shouldn't try too hard about the latter, especially if the mindset of how to get there is just about how to make things worse, rather than aesthetically economical.


And I think this is where we get to the core of the problem: the quickest way to not look in spirit of pixel art is a sense of wastefulness.
A good pixel artist is an effective artist for an economic expression. But this has everything to do with the skill of the artist at creation, and least to do with some shader option, you see.
The software cannot consider the impact of "emotion" in its allocation of resources, that's what the artist does every step.
Before the art is very good in that principle sense, there is not much sense talking about it in terms of how to make it more like pixel art.
And in the very end then what differentiates this art from pixel art is about the depth of control the artist has in realizing his vision as economically as possible -- down to the pixel of result.
All you can try then in terms of tools is keeping the gap in control small -- but someone has to make good use of it with the mindset of pixel art.
The knowledge required for this is pretty much the sum total of this forum, for a general appliance technique this is too much for one thread to cover.
We'll barely make do one asset at a time. It's really not about coming up with that one super solution that auto-solves it all forever, not some overlay filter that turns anything into pixel art.


But here's the thing: avoiding wastefulness is not about making things as simplified as possible, it is about not having more than required; but different visions require different resources -- all the detail is intentional.

That's what I find so strange about most 3d interpretations of pixel art, the assumption of being as simplified as possible in every aspect to be synonym to pixel art aesthetic. But when you look at the standard of professional quality pixel art, it's highly detailed with intricate structure and texture. Just that this detail is perfectly implemented, in a pinnacle of intentionality.

It's almost a paradoxon, on one hand LowSpec 3d art is considered a kindred to PixelArt in terms of minimalist spirit in creation, on the other hand I'd say its biggest problem in terms of visual impact of result really is it's too simplified than required to capture the soul of what many good pixel art shows, which enables naturally more complex visuals than 3d was able to do for the longest time.

Personally, the closer I get to it in my own 3d interpretation of it, I end up with many ten thousand polygons and very high res detail texture, and my tech is about having it not bog down despite. And yet I find it looks more akin to pixel art than ever. But that might be because the very process of creation is closer to it from the get to go, it is about fully integrating the classic pixel artists, not replacing them in favour of a processing that supports 3d artists posing as pixel artists. Being like pixel art really is about the art and the artist first and foremost.

[jams0988]

Like madmenyo, I'm very curious to know why you say that. What specifically makes this look "nothing" like pixel art? I'm not being sarcastic, I'm sincerely hoping for an explanation, as extensive as you have time for 

I was going to reply, but Cyangmou and RAV have summed up my feelings more eloquently than I could have without spending two hours thinking out my post, hahah.

That is what most basic pixel art looks like isn't it? Looking at your avatar it has a outline and on certain angles (cels) it gets another tint. That is what i have going on, or at least somewhat close especially the linework needs to be sharper. I will work on this if only for experiment and study sake.

No, mine is obviously hand-drawn art, while yours is obviously computer-rendered. Cyangmou and RAV explained why already, though. The example you posted looks much closer to the pixel art aesthetic (though it still looks like 3D CG), because it appears to be using pixel-art textures, while your coloring is very flat, hence my cel-shading comment. Again, I'd try just using normal low-res textures on your art, and see how that turns out. Paint your textures as pixel art, and apply them to your models. I think the results will look much better. =)

[Indigo]

Just saw this thread.  Totally awesome to see some Lucky Space inspired art.  And im impressed you were able to replicate the process as far as you did.  It definitely wasn't a simple pipeline, and I didn't describe it in too much detail in my original thread.

I don't have too much time to discuss this at the moment, but I wanted to give a little context to the goals I had when making the art pipeline for Lucky Space...

for context: Screenshot 1,  Screenshot 2

It was never my intention to make people believe this was pixel art, but rather it was the other way around.  We wanted to apply the principals of pixel art for a 2D game using a 3D renderer.  This was a natural progression from another isometric project we had just finished that used actual pixel art called Lucky Train.  That project was interesting in that we were pretty much the only ones doing the pixel-isometric look with such a strong focus on anti-aliasing.  In large part this was a style we shifted towards when we hired Monsoon2D onto the team.  Monsoon just had this super slick way of doing it.  Ironically, due to that focus on AA, not many people recognized our game as pixel art - especially in contrast to popular isometric games like hobbo hotel.  If you were making an isometric game with pixel art, that was THE style.  We were breaking that rule.  Lots of players complimented us on the graphics, but not one mention of "pixel art" that I recall.

So when we began working on Lucky Space we did a lot of R&D as to how we'd approach it.  We already knew from experience that hand-pixeling isometric animations - especially rotating ones like the trains - was an extremely time consuming process.  Just look at this sprite sheet and tell me you didn't shit you pants.  We developed some ways of speeding up that process like pixeling over rough 3D renders, but all of that AA and animation was done by hand.  And we knew that Space would need a heck of a lot more animation than that.  Every building was going to be animated.  We knew we didn't want that crude isometric pixel style that everyone was doing, and we also know that we didn't want hyper-realistic 3D renders either.

So what we decided to do was develop a render shader in 3DS Max which simulates the style we had developed on Lucky Train, and render out all our assets.  Not only did this jive with our "brand" we developed, but allowed us to do all the crazy animations that we wanted.  It also kept the clarity to our assets that usually only pixel art provides.  But keep in mind, we were a team of 2D artists.  We painted our textures specifically keeping in mind how the line thicknesses would translate into pixels in the end render.  We constantly were refreshing the render to check.  We were essentially making a lot of the same decisions we would make as pixel artists, but we were doing it in 3d space.  Even the shader itself was perfected over many weeks to get the exact result we wanted.  For example, the outlines weren't a solid color, but rather a darkened version of the colors it surrounded exactly like we did with Train.  Our lighting setup was done with a layered composite map rather than just using scene lights so we could maintain consistent control over the 2D image.  Nearly every decision we made when crafting Lucky Space were 2D decisions, not 3D.  We learned 3DS max on-the-job to accomplish our goals

The result was a game that felt much in line with our company brand - an attention to detail at the pixel level - but with a much more broad depth.  Like I said, we never set out to fake pixel art, we set out to achieve the benefits of pixel art in 3D.  And to that end I think we succeeded.

[RAV]

Yes you did. It's a very good mindset, it looks pretty damn cool, and that's a fact. People can call it whatever. It's a worthwhile direction to pursue in any case. It profits from pixel art skill.

Since this topic is rather close to my interest, I have some more general comments on the issue of "looking like pixel art".
This is not meant to discourage any other kind of effort in that direction, just my thoughts about the difficulties of it, to take into account.

You can have things like cross-stitching -- an entirely different matter of medium altogether -- to which people say it "looks like" pixel art, and you can have two pictures side by side on the very same computer screen, yet one of them does not look like pixel art -- although literally made of pixels -- because you do not recognize the same creative logic of medium in it.

It seems a common approach in interpreting pixel art is to employ the most popular stylistic choices of it. Like, make chibi characters, give them outline, flat lighting -> now it looks like pixel art, merely because that's the style many famous pixel art games employ. But this "looks like" really is very different in meaning than the first. It's sort of a "psychological trick". That's not to say it's bad. It may be finicky in whether the impression works out, depending on how important "being like pixel art" is considered to the atmosphere.

Pixel art can be realistic or comic, few details or high detail, all kinds of lighting, proportions, perspectives, super smooth or very rough, simple or complex, cute or "mature", clean or "dirty", all kinds of content depicted. Any and all of it can be amazing in its own right, and although it's all so different, it's all readily identifiable as pixel art -- even if it's bad pixel art! -- because none of this really defines pixel art, it's just a choice within, and what ties it all together is about something else, the obvious logic of creation, the less obvious the process is recognizable in the result, the less likely people recognize it as pixel art, and the more obvious, it gets very flexible what people call pixel art. That's why I emphasize so much the process instead of result. At that point, even despite after-effects, aa, "bleeding", all these cardinal sins or quirks or fads, or mode of view, or platform, or whatever, it still stays recognizable throughout as pixel art -- its very nature very resilient. If the process is obviously different, every littlest thing that's "off" in the result will quickly make it appear uncanny as pixel art, or simply not identifiable as such at all. (However this is a different discussion from "short-cuts" or "helpers" or "little dirty cheats" along the otherwise same workflow, which in the hand of a pixel art expert doesn't take away from looking like it in the end.)