AuthorTopic: [Discuss] So what's the big deal with people and "nonstandard" pixelart?  (Read 11522 times)

Offline ptoing

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Yeah, I can agree with that statement. Also please don't quote entire posts like that, does not help with seeing what is going on. You can just address me by name in your reply, that's enough.  ;)

Like:

ptoing: text here.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline ErekT

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Perhaps I wasn't descriptive enough with my post. I didn't mean that authenticity wasn't important. I meant that "authenticity" as in "you used non pixel art overlays in your game so you are a fraud."
Hmm. I'm not opposed to doing that in principle myself. I wouldn't call people frauds for doing it that's for sure. But at the same time I think pixel art mixed up with various kinds of automated render effects don't mesh so well. The reason being that high fidelity effects like blur, smudge, sharpen, gradient overlays etc feel at odds visually with the low fidelity quality of pixel art. Pixel art usually has very obvious limitations in terms of both resolution and color count, every pixel is deliberately placed, and the totality of it is completely crafted by hand. Render effects are diametrically opposite to all that; they're basically automated algorithms that go wild with color usage, no attention to individual pixel placement, and you have only indirect control over them by way of parameters to tweak.

Nothing wrong with mixing them in and of itself, but to some people, me included, the result will often look like a jarring hifi/lofi-clash.

Offline Ai

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I think that's basically the same reason that if you render something in your picture, you need the rendering levels in the rest of the picture to suit (don't have to match, but do have to be chosen strategically).
IMO this is actually an argument that generalizes beyond this area, into 3d rendering for example, where thoughtlessly hi-fi rendering (eg. too many frames / too much going on) hurts the artistic impression.
Really, the only way to be sure about this kind of thing seems to me to be either a) hand render everything, or b) use some level of AI.
If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.