Sub-pixel by hand? Silly little experiment.

[djork]

This is just a little experiment.  Not really art, I guess.  Anyway... this little diagonal line is exactly 1.33 pixels, or 4 sub-pixels, wide.  It only works on an LCD screen as far as I know.  The goal is to use the individual red, green, and blue components of a pixel as pixels themselves.  I tried to do a little bit of anti-aliasing, but it's kind of an unusual mental exercise to draw this way anyway, and it was late.

Without further ado:



I want to make a sub-pixel game in a 32 x 32 square, with an effective resolution of 32 x 96 due to the extra horizontal accuracy.

Here's two more... a sub-pixel chain or helix, and a curvy variation.  Keep in mind that the strip of colored pixels is only 2 pixels wide...

[Ryumaru]

this is fucking amazing sir. maybe not to the qualified pixelers here, but atleast to me. the double helix thing is just amazing.

[djork]

Here's one more I did to demonstrate the technique to a coworker.  You can do a lot with 2 pixel-wide fonts

[Xion]

 

I'm impressed.
Extremely.
These are only 2px!?
*zooms*
Amazing.

[Faktablad]

Wow, great experimentation.  I especially like the third image in the first post.

I understand now, the red pixels tend to appear more totwards the left, and the blue pixels tend to appear more to the right?

[Rydin]

I vaguely remember something about this way back on the old forums.  Doesn't it have something to do with the triangle shape of a single pixel or something like that?

[robotriot]

No, on a TFT screen, a single pixel consists of a row of red, green and blue. They're slightly offset left/right to each other since they have to be arranged in a square to make up a single pixel. Now if you only use 255,0,0 for example, the green and blue parts stay black, so it looks as if only one third of the pixel is actually lit on the screen.

[Larwick]

Man... I wish i had an LCD so i could see this... 

[ndchristie]

Man... I wish i had an LCD so i could see this... 

me too, since CRT monitors arrage differently and it just looks like nonsense

[goat]

On a similar note to anyone interested in 2D console art:  many artists working on systems such as the SNES used aliasing and contrast selection techniques to give the illusion of subpixel detail, exploiting the way a TV tube displays a square pixel at that resolution.  For the sake of comparison, we use different techniques like AA and selout to arrive at a similar result on our sharper PC/handheld displays, which is why a lot of art drawn natively for a console will look grainy or messed up on a pc monitor, and fully anti-aliased pixel art put on a tv screen will look too fuzzy and flat.

I was working on a full writeup of this a few months ago; if I find it I'll try to finish it in more detail and post it later.