About assisted animation
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Diversions
Forum Discription: Get to know your fellow pixel freaks. Chat about anything to do with video games, comic books, anime, movies, television, books, music, sports or any other off topic bs you can think of.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=25997
Printed Date: 11 September 2025 at 12:30am
Topic: About assisted animation
Posted By: essadege
Subject: About assisted animation
Date Posted: 24 October 2017 at 12:10am
Hi, guys, for my first forum post I'm bringing you a discarded design that I did at my workplace, just for a bit of controversy talk.
You see, as a designer (not artist), I find myself using a lot of shorcuts most of the time and I wanted to discuss whether or not a distortion mesh/wave pattern can be used and still be in "pixel-art territory". Which was just what I did there 
I'm a firm believer that it's still pixel and it works so well with graphics from the 16-bit era, simulating those special fx chips from the SNES used, for instance, to rotate, escalate, modify sprites in Yoshi's Island. (although I don't consider the majority of the game visuals to be pixel art, despite being made for absolute care for each pixel) On the other hand, I feel that those tricks tend to get percieved as cheap and quite unnatural compared to the hand drawn ones, but maybe it doesn't matter that much if it gets to the point. What do you think, guys? P.D: I want to point out that not that long ago I used 255col. gradients to "pixel-art" so... maybe I'm just too much of a noob here. |
Replies:
Posted By: NancyGold
Date Posted: 24 October 2017 at 6:09am
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It is pixelart, but I doubt real Halloween pumpkin teeth would wobble like tentacles, so it attracts attention. The animation itself also has some banding and misplaced pixels. Disclaimer: I'm not an artist either, but a programmer. |
Posted By: eishiya
Date Posted: 24 October 2017 at 9:42am
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I agree that it's pixel art, it's just not good pixel art, since the process creates banding, jaggies, and noise, and generally doesn't look very good. If the rotation is quick and the viewer/player doesn't get to look at it for too long and notice the flaws, I see no problem with it since yes, it does get the message across. However, getting the message across is just the bare minimum requirement of the art - ideally, it should also look great. It's always a trade-off between looking great and not taking too long to make, and these methods are just a tool for when time is significant issue. |
Posted By: NancyGold
Date Posted: 24 October 2017 at 12:13pm
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Also, the art in your post has too much dithering. Unless you really want it to be compatible with some ancient hardware or existing assets, it would be better to just introduce another color shade instead. Dithering was used so much back then, because older composite output had color blending property: http://www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/rgb_compare2.html So art in old games was developed with color blending in mind. There are composite-like upscalers that achieve similar effect, but I doubt you want to pass your art through such blurry filter. TLDR: there was no visible dithering in the old video games and it is not part of the art, but a technical method to blend colors. Artists used the same composite output, so the didn't see their dithering either. |
Posted By: essadege
Date Posted: 24 October 2017 at 4:16pm
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Originally posted by eishiya
I agree that it's pixel art, it's just not good pixel art, since the process creates banding, jaggies, and noise, and generally doesn't look very good. Maybe it could be better used to make some fast iterations and use those as a foundation to get work done faster. Originally posted by eishiya
It's always a trade-off between looking great and not taking too long to make, and these methods are just a tool for when time is significant issue. Yeah, I often have to do those things faster than I would like to, but I don't think I'm that well aware of those mistakes on my own, for now. Originally posted by snv
So art in old games was developed with color blending in mind. Woah, that makes absolute sense! thx We're so accostumed to play within emulation platforms that we tend to forget how stuff really looked on screen (I actually like those rainbow distortion that the transparent tubes make in Sonic2) It makes now more sense to me introducing more colors &/or making a well-thought use of them but will the client see that as a involution? as people tend to like dithering in retro-but-sharp aesthetics... Also, seeing how dithering can make more noise than needed, would be interesting to see if the pumpkin would look less cheap if those distortion effects were actually applied to a dither-less drawing. (or applying dithering manually afterwards to simulate some texture instead of using it to blend colors) |
Posted By: Hapiel
Date Posted: 26 October 2017 at 5:42am
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I think methods like these can be very useful and should be studied more. They might not be for the PJ gallery, but that does not mean it is not pixel art or shameful or whatever....
However, in this particular application I don't think it works very well. The dithering makes it very obvious that things are shifting in weird ways, and the ripple effect does not resemble at all how a pumpkin mouth might open and close |