AuthorTopic: Grass  (Read 3045 times)

Offline yyboyyy96

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Grass

on: February 07, 2021, 08:15:51 pm
Hi al,

Does someone know a handy trick to draw lots of shaded grass very fast? I want to make the world look as if it isnt made with tiles (most of the ground/grass etc.. made from hand). to give it a unique look. Obviously this is extremely time consuming to do!

I started with the roads and spray painted lots of different shapes in a selection to give it a ground path look. it works alright in my opinion.. But now the part where grass is overgrowing on the path from the sides. I can draw everything by hand but I think that will burnout even the best pixel artist at some point of the day.. so does someone know a handy trick to draw lots of different shapes and shades of grass and whatnot for this?

I'm using Aseprite.

Offline eishiya

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Re: Grass

Reply #1 on: February 08, 2021, 12:41:07 am
My "trick" is to use tiles, but
- with several variants, 4+ different tiles
- small enough tiles that there aren't big distinct shapes of grass within the tile that will be noticeable when repeated
- with different edges that line up to form different grass clump shapes when put together (this too benefits from smaller tiles)

Towards the end (after placing any props and such, which will cover up a lot of the tiling), the remaining bits where tiling is still noticeable can be touched up manually.

This is the method I'd employ for almost all terrains, tbh - grass, dirt, water, bricks, as well as transitions.

It's a lot easier to avoid the "tiled" look with tiles than it is to manually obtain a good level of polish on an un-tiled expanse like this. The key thing to avoid the appearance of a grid, rather than avoid tiles entirely. Break up those blocky straight transitions, and use a good set of variant tiles, and most people won't even notice you're using tiles at all.


In addition: you can embrace solid areas of colour. Your grass right now, completely solid green, actually looks pretty good, just a little boring! Solid colours "tile" perfectly, don't look tiled, and are easy to draw. All you need to do to keep the image from being boring is to break up the negative space with just enough unique elements and props that the scene doesn't look empty, you don't have to fill it all with texture.

Offline yyboyyy96

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Re: Grass

Reply #2 on: February 08, 2021, 08:21:28 am
My "trick" is to use tiles, but
- with several variants, 4+ different tiles
- small enough tiles that there aren't big distinct shapes of grass within the tile that will be noticeable when repeated
- with different edges that line up to form different grass clump shapes when put together (this too benefits from smaller tiles)

Towards the end (after placing any props and such, which will cover up a lot of the tiling), the remaining bits where tiling is still noticeable can be touched up manually.

This is the method I'd employ for almost all terrains, tbh - grass, dirt, water, bricks, as well as transitions.

It's a lot easier to avoid the "tiled" look with tiles than it is to manually obtain a good level of polish on an un-tiled expanse like this. The key thing to avoid the appearance of a grid, rather than avoid tiles entirely. Break up those blocky straight transitions, and use a good set of variant tiles, and most people won't even notice you're using tiles at all.


In addition: you can embrace solid areas of colour. Your grass right now, completely solid green, actually looks pretty good, just a little boring! Solid colours "tile" perfectly, don't look tiled, and are easy to draw. All you need to do to keep the image from being boring is to break up the negative space with just enough unique elements and props that the scene doesn't look empty, you don't have to fill it all with texture.

Hi,

Thanks for the tip I'll defenitly keep this in mind making more several tiles with different shapes! Do you know a good tile mapping software I can use for quick tile placement/autotiling with multiple different shapes? I doubt I can do that in Aseprite

Offline eishiya

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Re: Grass

Reply #3 on: February 08, 2021, 02:50:27 pm
Tiled is fantastic for all sorts of tiled work, and it has a bunch of tools for autotiling. It doesn't let you edit the tile art within the program, but for using the tiles once you've made them, I doubt there's anything better. It will auto-update the tiles when they're modified by an outside program though, so you can fairly quickly (though not instantly) see the changes you make to the tiles in Aseprite or other image editor.

You can export your Tiled maps as PNGs after you've made them, so you can pop them back into Aseprite for adding more art if you want.