Realtime Rendering of 3d Meshes as Pixelart

[DatMuffinMan]

just to add my 2 cents in, if I stop the animations at any given frame, the models have much more 'lonely' pixels than any pro pixel art that I've seen. I don't mean this in the way that Helm talked about them in his cluster study thread, if you're familiar with it, but just random dark/light pixels that aren't part of a larger shadow or highlight.

take this image by andylittle on PJ -

very detailed, lots of precise pixel placement, but there aren't any pixels that are just totally separate from their surroundings, aside from that one in the cloak (but I think that's a hole in the fabric).

edit - after looking at the renders again, it seems that you don't have this problem in the fire/smoke renders. Those are really really really nice 

[Ai]

Yes; that's why I liked the 'blobby' / relatively undefined grass in Howard's previous post. It hung together better.
(the noisier grass works okay for small chunks, but not larger chunks, IMO)

I'm pretty sure that what you're talking about -IS- covered by Helm (meta-clusters? anyway, he covers the idea that isolated pixels can work if they 'aren't really isolated' -- hang together clearly with surrounding clusters.)

I agree that cleanness-wise, the smoke and fire is near faultless.

[Gil]

The main issue right now is animation. The stills look pretty good, the animated ones look nothing like pixel art IMO. You can't animate at 60FPS and expect it to look pixel art-ish. Guilty Gear Xrd devs said that's the first thing they threw out, smooth animations, because it ruins the hand-animated aesthetic immediately.

[Cherno]

I think it might have more to do with the relatively high resolution in which the animations are rendered. Smooth pixel art animations can work, as seen in the Metal Slug series, but not if the sprite is so big that the illusion of a hand-drawn image is lost.

[astraldata]

The techy guy in me is giddy inside just wondering how one could take colors from a texture applied to a 3d model and render them with specific colors from a limited palette. If ever Mr. Howard Day returns to this thread one day, I'd love it if he shares his secret to how he does this, and possibly even how he might render this without using a paid plugin. I wonder if it's possible to get this effect without the f-edge plugin. I'd really love to play with this shader extensively, but I've got no money to spare.

Howard Day has done an excellent job with this, but I'm not sure whether the shader is usable in any game engine yet, despite him saying it was realtime. If it is usable in a game engine, does anyone know which one?



@Cherno & @Gil
I agree with you both, but at least it doesn't suffer from the ghastly look that many 2d computer games (mostly adventure point n click and RTS games) in the early 90's had where they'd take a bunch of crappy 3d models and pre-render them with really *really* low framerates and low poorly-auto-selected color-count optimizations using limited-but-also-crappy palettes at stupid-low-resolutions. Even when this is at its worse, I can't imagine it to ever look *that* bad. ;S

[Cherno]

It's all done in Unity3D.

[astraldata]

So, I've finally delved into 3ds Max's material editor and discovered how to make some pixel-art looking stuff:



There are still some artifacts, and this doesn't have hueshifting, so I've got a long way to go, but the body/arm/leg portions (not his eyes or mouth/nose) is an image texture material I've rendered to resemble DKC graphics.

I would love to learn how to make hueshifting and dithering possible directly through this (rather old) method, but I've yet to spend enough time to learn how to do it. The method I used was from Howard's Irkalla mech demo, so it's pre-rendered, but I would love to be able to get a similar look in Unity in realtime at some point. It'd be really cool if Howard would share even his incomplete Unity shader project with us! I would love to play with using indexed colors with 3d models directly!

For now though, I'll keep plugging away at pre-rendered sprite materials... I'd prefer not to reinvent the wheel anymore though...

Somehow, we game designers seem to do that quite a lot, don't we??


-----------

Update:



This one is a LOT better render-wise, and without a ton of artifacts! Got a lot of the pixel stuff sorted now! I even did a little hueshifting manually!

[MrLeePerry]

Howard, I can't say enough how much I hope you come back and put this up for sale in the asset store for Unity.  You would inspire many devs to look into these styles.  The asset you posted a link to earlier, from Kode80 is just nowhere in the ballpark of what you've been doing here.

I hope you're not discouraged or abandoning it.

I've been looking into techniques like this as well, although I'm going more for a style like Hyper Light Drifter where it's more about solid masses of colors, not outlined, and only maybe 2 colors per basic value.

[Howard Day]

Back to it, like...2 years later. Done a ton to clean up the code and methods, and the result is a lot faster than it used to be. I'm  looking into the math to modify FXAA to enforce traditional pixel clusters. I'm also going to simplify the source textures to promote less... flickery single-pixel detail.

It's now using a custom palette I Frankenstein'd together from like.. 6 Classic DOS games. That was a ton of fun.

[RAV]

Good things take a while, and this is looking great. You're addressing a lot of the concerns from the start. The image quality just keeps going up.

What kind of end product do you have in mind for this? Is it more a general pixel converter, or are you gonna make a game of this?