AuthorTopic: Official Off-Topic Thread 2015  (Read 92328 times)

Offline Ai

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2015

Reply #220 on: August 19, 2015, 06:32:52 am
On language: the fact that we call it pixel "art" as a mode prevents it from ever being taken seriously as a medium.
Not saying "pixel art" would never be a proper term, but how often do you hear oil art, acrylic art, charcoal art, chalk art etc, versus drawing/painting... in x medium.
Its close relationship with games will always make people biased toward it, but a simple language shift would be a concrete step toward accepting pixel as an legitimate medium.

Just a thought.

TBH I think there is a qualitative difference between things like pixel and crossstitch, and things like CG, painting, collage and sculpture. Very constrained mediums like pixels and crossstitch don't lose the artistic aspect, but they gain a craft or algorithm-design aspect -- A lot of the thought that goes into making sprites goes not into 'what is really there in the real thing I'm observing' and 'what of that I should show', but optimization: describing a complex system with a minimum of elements.

I'm not sure we have a word for this thing between craft and art, but I think it misrepresents pixels to describe them simply as another medium, much as I wouldn't call a sculpture a drawing.
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Offline Joe

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2015

Reply #221 on: August 20, 2015, 03:08:36 am
Hmm. Well said, I'll have to think about that. On the one hand it's true that at smaller scales, most of the work is shifting pixels around to find their right position, to form the image you already more or less know. On the other, I'm not sure that there is a lack of optimization in other mediums, just that it's not discrete (for example color count). Aren't the masters of any medium renown for their economy of element? That seems to be a goal in any medium.

Interesting that you lump pixel with cross-stitch... it certainly shares some aspects but it surely is a digital paint. A digital paint/cross-stitch hybrid

Sculpture is not drawing as pixel is not medium doesn't make sense to me. You acknowledged cross-stitch and pixels as mediums, but you're saying they're more than that?

Offline Ai

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2015

Reply #222 on: August 20, 2015, 12:31:28 pm
Yeah, I should have said 'a drawing medium' rather than just 'a medium'. CG and traditional painting have a lot more in common than pencil/charcoal and pixels.

Cross-stitch is a comparison which has been brought up before on Pixelation. The constraints of the two media are different in nature but similar in degree, IMO.

I guess what I mean , more than just optimization, is the narrowness of choices -- there are many ways to efficiently represent a given human figure, in high-res or traditional art. In pixel art, there are enough that each person's way of doing it can still be unique, but the amount of options is many times smaller, so, for a lack of a better term, the 'face of the system' shows itself. In things like, for example, the limited number of body-plans used for small character sprites, or the small range of views on a tiled landscape. Discreteness, like you say.

Perhaps this view is overly focused on art that will be used in games, but IMO that makes up the majority of pixels.
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Offline Joe

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2015

Reply #223 on: September 03, 2015, 06:38:04 am
Tablet users: do you pixel exclusively with the stylus? I find it great for sketching but prohibitive for precision work.

Offline surt

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2015

Reply #224 on: September 03, 2015, 07:22:12 am
Same for me.

Offline Ai

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2015

Reply #225 on: September 03, 2015, 10:59:51 am
Yes. Zoom more.
Seriously, once I got more comfortable with heavy zooming, stuff just worked. Doing things at the right zoom level (which is often higher than you feel 'comfortable' with) makes things so, so much easier to draw. Draw big things at a low zoom and small things at a high zoom.

IMO most zoom commands don't zoom enough -- GIMP's 'Zoom in a lot', 'Zoom out a lot' actions are about right, they zoom in big steps like 100% -> 300% -> 800% -> 2300%. I modified Grafx2 to get a similar effect[1].

I've tried mice old and new, they're not relevant IMO.

The angle that you set the tablet up at can make a big difference, but I'm not sure whether there is an optimal angle (aside from ones that prevent RSI). Personally mine is almost vertical -- 80ish degrees.

[1] Actually very simple. src/engine.c lines 1036 and 1040 are 'Zoom(+1);' and 'Zoom(-1);', you just change them to read 'Zoom(+3);' and 'Zoom(-3);' and recompile.
« Last Edit: September 03, 2015, 01:15:53 pm by Ai »
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Offline PixelPiledriver

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2015

Reply #226 on: September 03, 2015, 05:14:28 pm
Try a Cintique.
I find it to be a good balance.
Never did learn to use a tablet all that well.
And knowing that it is, we seek what it is... ~ Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Chapter 1

Offline Ai

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2015

Reply #227 on: September 05, 2015, 09:23:34 am
Also on the tablet issue, there is a fair amount of training involved. Styluses aren't really like traditional media at all, and it took me a long time to realize the extent of this and adapt my workflow to it.

Main topic of this post:
I just implemented silhouette, reduced opacity, and alpha inversion (aka 'negative space') display options in my fork of the image viewer sxiv.
Here is a small run through. It's shown in thumbnail view here, but works in image view too.


(they are all combinable, but I didn't bother to go into that too much as the effect is fairly predictable.)

I'm considering implementing a 'tile view' next (tiles the image 3x3 times).
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Offline Ai

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2015

Reply #228 on: September 13, 2015, 01:15:47 am
Just implemented tiling view in my sxiv variant. Here's a gif of browsing through some pixeled patterns with tiling mode on.



I'm pretty pleased with this as I have always wanted an image viewer supporting tiled view, not only for tiles but also to help spotting errors in images in general.

Currently alpha-quality : panning needs some tweaking, and limiting the total number of tiles seems to be necessary to prevent slowdown.

Am also planning to implement an alternate tiling mode that incorporates V/H-flipped variants of the tile.
If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.

Offline Joe

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2015

Reply #229 on: September 13, 2015, 07:02:58 am
Holy crap that's awesome. Should be standard in image viewers.