AuthorTopic: Pixel purism and the PixelJoint  (Read 41141 times)

Offline Ben2theEdge

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Re: Pixel purism and the PixelJoint

Reply #30 on: February 25, 2009, 06:59:33 pm
Nothing less either, and at the end of the say all digital painting is restricted to a grid which gets elimitated the higher the res goes, which is why paying attention to where you place stuff is paramount.

Yes, I didn't mean to belittle the art form; hope I didn't come across that way.  :-X

64x64 is pretty small :) I guess that has to do with personal workflow tho.

Yeah as an artist I have a tendency to get locked into details and forget the whole picture, particularly when pixelling. I have less of a problem in mediums where it's less costly to be sketchy or experimental, so that's usually where I start. (And I really like to play around before I commit to an idea, which is very time-consuming in pixel art)
« Last Edit: February 25, 2009, 07:02:37 pm by Ben2theEdge »
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Offline ptoing

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Re: Pixel purism and the PixelJoint

Reply #31 on: February 25, 2009, 07:47:34 pm
Hehe, I did not see your comment there as offensive at all, I was just saying. :)


I think the whole experimenting in pixelart depends on your workflow. I have worked out some good workflows in promotion to sketch and to play around with stuff before I commit.
Tho I think I will do some pieces based on pencilsketches soonish as well, because I am still more comfy sketching with natural media than digitally, be it photoshop or promotion.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Jad

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Re: Pixel purism and the PixelJoint

Reply #32 on: February 25, 2009, 07:54:08 pm
I quote this from the Flowers commentary field, written by pixelblink:

"PJ standards for creating pixel art dos not allow the usage of these 'dirty' tools. Basically, pixel art should be able to be drawn by manually choosing colours and placing them 1 pixel at a time..."

...

Why?

If you say you can stand behind this statement AND stand behind the statement that you 'agree with Ptoing' and what he said, then you are contradicting yourself a great deal.

As I see it, people trying to utilize special tools and filters for speeding up their pixel art process (or making it more comfortable) are either professionals who need to churn out lots of pixels for their cash or people like Ai who are passionate about trying to make tools that automate things like colour selection and still arrive at a result that's pleasing to the human conscious.

Having rules like that written above more or less have the result that people working in the field or people experimenting with different processes of pixel art making are being stripped of their possibility to display their art on pixeljoint.

Why?

Is there any merit in that?
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Offline pixelblink

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Re: Pixel purism and the PixelJoint

Reply #33 on: February 25, 2009, 08:12:36 pm
the complete quote:
"PJ standards for creating pixel art dos not allow the usage of these 'dirty' tools. Basically, pixel art should be able to be drawn by manually choosing colours and placing them 1 pixel at a time... NOT by doing all of that and then using 'dirty' tools to create highlights and shades. There is NO way 728 colours is at all acceptable for a piece to be submitted at PJ."

how am I contradicting myself? It is clear to me that I said "should be able to be drawn" I'm sorry if that leaves it up to interpretation but that means that the end result should look like it was done as such giving the end result a look and feel to it. The process is somewhat important but the end result is what is seen and judged upon. And you can't deny that a little of the process is important to know.

The end result being a messy 728 colours, which is outlandish to me for such a piece. It didn't feel like pixel art methods were used and dirty tools had been put to use. The end result (I'm going to use this term alot now) was sketchy and suspect. Would you have thought differently in my case?

Offline ptoing

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Re: Pixel purism and the PixelJoint

Reply #34 on: February 25, 2009, 08:33:10 pm
The one pixel at a time thing really has to go. I can place pixels with a 3x3 or an 8x8 brush, or a brush that is shaped like a diamond or one shaped like a diagonal 45 degree line. What I do is still pixelart. Fillbucket would not be allowed, which would be silly, you know exactly what happens when you press the mousebutton in Bucket mode. And that is why it is fine. Imo you can use whatever tool you want as long as you know exactly what the outcome will be, this includes tools which speed stuff up a lot (because not everyone wants to saw his hands off and use MSPaint). Even dirty tools are fine during the process as long as nothing of them shows or everything has been checked to be pixelperfect etc. Also a picture with 2000 colours could be pixelart.

A limited palette is a boon to pixelart, but if someone would go and make a picture with gradients where he chooses massive long ramps of 64 colours and tweaks them by hand, and then uses those to make single pixel step gradients, who is to tell him that is not pixelart? Imo if would be. Dirty, smudgy aa and so on, can be signs of dirty tools, as can many other things. Lots of colours can be too, but colours need not be. Just because for example Kenneth does not care about having near 100 colours in his iso house does not make it any less pixelart, he is just not focused on the aspect of colour conservation. But still each colour has been picked by hand. The too many colours argument is a double edged blade.

Also things can have a lot of pixel level detail and not be pure pixelart.
Example, a WIP texture of mine:
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Jad

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Re: Pixel purism and the PixelJoint

Reply #35 on: February 25, 2009, 09:07:06 pm
the complete quote:
"PJ standards for creating pixel art dos not allow the usage of these 'dirty' tools. Basically, pixel art should be able to be drawn by manually choosing colours and placing them 1 pixel at a time... NOT by doing all of that and then using 'dirty' tools to create highlights and shades. There is NO way 728 colours is at all acceptable for a piece to be submitted at PJ."

You know that the 1 pixel at a time is just a miswording for 'placing all pixels consciously', please never ever use that wording again in the role of a moderator explaining the rules, because it's total BS D:

Not trying to chew you out for telling people to place their pixels consciously (why not, dude, having control is paramount, as we can both agree), but dropping that line casually in a private conversation is ok when there's mutual understanding, but when speaking in an official position it's recipe for misunderstanding, since newbies will think that they're doing something wrong if they use anything but a 1x1 px brush. It's just a flawed wording. Don't use it please (:

Also there is DEFINATELY a way that 728 should be acceptable for a piece, I'll get to that later.

how am I contradicting myself? It is clear to me that I said "should be able to be drawn" I'm sorry if that leaves it up to interpretation but that means that the end result should look like it was done as such giving the end result a look and feel to it. The process is somewhat important but the end result is what is seen and judged upon. And you can't deny that a little of the process is important to know.


Yeah, except no. That's not clear wording at all. You're definately able to make smudgy shit AA by using 2000 colours by hand, something I did when I was around 13 magnifying non-pixel grass tiles from Heroes of Might and Magic art to 'find the secrets of making nice low-res images' and copy it. The 'should be able to' doesn't mean a lot here. If I want a dithered gradient fill for, say a sky, it should go without saying that I should be able to use some kind of tool to create that dithering instead of manual pixel-pushing. If you don't agree with this, then we're definately speaking two different languages about pixel art.

The process is definately important to know, it's just kinda sad that some pieces suddenly are not longer 'acceptable' because of a certain part of the process.

the complete quote:
The end result being a messy 728 colours, which is outlandish to me for such a piece. It didn't feel like pixel art methods were used and dirty tools had been put to use. The end result (I'm going to use this term alot now) was sketchy and suspect. Would you have thought differently in my case?

I would definately have thought differently!

As you might've noted, this picture is a compilation of many different pieces of pixel art, each having a separate pallette. In the case of the image being a compilation, what should be judged is the individual pieces, am I right? If no, then I guess that's too bad. The most colours that one separate tile/picture had was 54, and that tile was, accordingly to neota/Ai - not index-painted. The 728 colourcount is thus also moot in my opinion.

I don't think Ai's way of making pixel art is the optimal way and I both like and dislike the results according to different cases, but I enjoy his search for the "perfect automated process" for making indexed-palette-based art. And I'd like for him to be able to showcase his pieces on pixeljoint without ever having to worry about the validity of the pixel-artness.

If you know what you're doing then automated AA within the confines of an indexed pallette and special tools that modify hues for creating shadow and highlights are completely okay in my opinion when you're aware of the colour count in the end product.

That's also ptoing's opinion, from what I can gather.

From what I gather from the moderation of pixeljoint, that's NOT the general opinion, nor it is yours.

There! Contradiction!
« Last Edit: February 25, 2009, 09:36:34 pm by Jad »
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Offline Ai

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Re: Pixel purism and the PixelJoint

Reply #36 on: February 25, 2009, 11:40:00 pm
the complete quote:
"PJ standards for creating pixel art dos not allow the usage of these 'dirty' tools. Basically, pixel art should be able to be drawn by manually choosing colours and placing them 1 pixel at a time... NOT by doing all of that and then using 'dirty' tools to create highlights and shades. There is NO way 728 colours is at all acceptable for a piece to be submitted at PJ."

I don't recall whether this was mentioned in the gallery:
Quote
NOT by doing all of that and then using 'dirty' tools to create highlights and shades
Anyway, in fact what I did was the reverse. I made an outline, indexpainted it, then cleaned it up. And I stated that this was the case in the very first blurb IIRC. The reason the lavender looks messy after cleanup, is because well, lavender DOES look messy like that. My cleanup actually deliberately made things look significantly MORE messy, since before that it was not uniformly messy.

how am I contradicting myself? It is clear to me that I said "should be able to be drawn" I'm sorry if that leaves it up to interpretation but that means that the end result should look like it was done as such giving the end result a look and feel to it. The process is somewhat important but the end result is what is seen and judged upon. And you can't deny that a little of the process is important to know.
Certainly. And that's why I objected so strenuously in this case; because this is not consistent - otherwise, I would not have been punished for explaining my methods (as jalonso said "To be fair to others because you freely admit to some index painting this will be sent back")

The above encapsulates the problem: Vagueness. When you (pixeljoint moderators in general) can and have approved pieces that clearly have indexpainting (eg some of iLKke's recent stuff), and disapprove a piece because it explicitly says "partly indexpainted", you are saying lying by omission is good, and this clearly indicates a problem with Pixel Joint culture - lying by omission is not any more good than lying by commission. As Helm said, some people will take up this lesson and omit such details deliberately, and there is nothing good for the PixelJoint community coming out of that. This needs to be addressed promptly and clearly.

I personally make a point of describing my methods, and as I said there, I will continue to do so. I'm only one person, who clearly does not reflect the PixelJoint culture in which information about processes magically changes a picture.

Quote from: Jad
Yeah, except no. That's not clear wording at all. You're definately able to make smudgy shit AA by using 2000 colours by hand, something I did when I was around 13 magnifying non-pixel grass tiles from Heroes of Might and Magic art to 'find the secrets of making nice low-res images' and copy it.

Me too. Well, not copying, but when I was 17 and trying to figure out Rayman's shading, I had this 'recursive shading' idea which basically required that there were no square blocks of color larger than 2x2 (so if there were, you had to get intermediate colors and fill it in, until the 'thickness' of all color regions was approximately 1px. I could easily attain > 300 colors on a piece, all hand picked, when doing this, and the result looked like polished crap (cause I barely understood how to draw people then). That was pixel art for sure by pixelblink's definition (done just with single pixel brush IIRC, not even floodfill), but it was also the kind of ignorant crap level of quality that you see in newbies and is regularly required to be revised on PJ, despite how long it took to make.

You can definitely make any possible picture 1 pixel at a time.  It's more a question of whether you would be sane to do so.
IMPO, there are many things in pixel art in which, once you understand clearly what you want and how it works, the only point to doing them 1px at a time is mental masturbation / machoness.

Which, I hope we can all agree is not what we want PixelJoint to be about. Techniques are one thing, pretentious ego-stroking quite another.

Quote from: Jad
I don't think Ai's way of making pixel art is the optimal way and I both like and dislike the results according to different cases, but I enjoy his search for the "perfect automated process" for making indexed-palette-based art. And I'd like for him to be able to showcase his pieces on pixeljoint without ever having to worry about the validity of the pixel-artness.
Since it's relevant I'll clarify: Of course there is no such thing as the perfect automated process :) What I'm looking for is more like the perfect process which *includes* automation.
Characteristics including :
a) A marked lack of aforementioned machoness / pretension - exercising control at the right detail level (so you are not manually pixeling 50% checkerboard dithers or reshaping curves pixels at a time)
b) increased control at higher levels (the same kind of control that CG artists get from layering and effect layers,  allowing easy recoloring, pattern overlays, or other (possibly partially applied) automated processing by virtue of the way the image is structured)

examples being:
1. Using clone tool to apply dithering patterns, or path tool to draw smooth curves.
2. Using resynthesizer on a sketch of a texture to get a starting point for making tiles
3. Using gradient map to apply coloration to different parts (the original sprite being drawn in grayscale)

I've even used gaussian blur, to smooth out a silhouette sketch I knew would be a bit messy.  I think most of us try to cheat with making the necessary frameworks (eg perspective, action line->skeleton->shapes-> detailed anatomy, volumetric shading -> angular shading) and this would be less of an issue if we allowed ourselves more freedom in the way we build up things from idea to finished product, to do what seems logical to get things done rather than masochistically restricting our workflow. The underlying structure is *the* most important thing in any picture; rendering effects are just rendering effects, pixel-precision is essentially very cheap to attain if all our frameworking and sketching/concept art  is properly done.
« Last Edit: February 26, 2009, 12:02:32 am by Ai »
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Offline ptoing

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Re: Pixel purism and the PixelJoint

Reply #37 on: February 25, 2009, 11:53:00 pm
Ai, damn, passion. I totally agree. Also some of the things you described (gradientmap on greyscale picture) are essentially around since the time of DPaint and the likes.
Pixel in grey, then make a ramp spanning more than 2 colours, tada.

I would love to know what kinda tools the majority of PJ mods use, just for curiosity.
I wonder how many of them ever even tried index painting or even worked with tools available in DPaint, PM, Brillance or Grafx2, tools made to manipulate indexed images in low resolutions.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Helm

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Re: Pixel purism and the PixelJoint

Reply #38 on: February 25, 2009, 11:58:42 pm
Above Pixelblink at least said he has not tried any of these tools and yet he is one of the people making calls on what is allowed or not, which is in my opinion profoundly problematic.

Offline ptoing

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Re: Pixel purism and the PixelJoint

Reply #39 on: February 26, 2009, 12:13:41 am
It is a bit like going "woooohhh witchcraft, burn the witch!", when you never really checked what they do. Just a little.

Anyone of the PJ Modsquad who uses MSPaint of PS (which is much better than paint, but still not geard towards pixeart) should at least give Grafx2 a serious try, or maybe fire up an Amiga Emulator and run DPaint 3 or Brilliance 2 (tho Grafx2 is enough really). See what tools evolved with the medium and how they actually affect the pixels and what can be done, and that some things that can be done with total control and not even remotely dirty. Then judge.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.