10 ms·

Creating Pixel Art (2010)

146 points by memorable 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dinkleberg 4y ago
This has made me super nostalgic, thanks for sharing this! I definitely look fondly back on the days of the old phpBB forums. So much knowledge shared freely and without any motive other than sharing knowledge and wisdom with their community. Of course I’m a biased since those were my teenage years and the world in your teenage years is always the best lol.
me_smith 4y ago
I don't know how many times I have read this set of forum posts on pixel art throughout the years. It is always one of my go to resources when I get that urge to build a 2d pixel game. Well, I haven't finished a game and I can't do pixel art, but it still is a great resource to go back to, at least for the memories. Thanks for sharing!
memalign 4y ago
I love pixel art and I wish I had this artistic talent! Folks that like this post might be interested in this web-based tool I made for making pixel art as ASCII art: https://memalign.github.io/m/pceimage/index.html https://memalign.github.io/m/pceimage/index.html
- memorable 4y ago
  A bit of self-promotion, but hey, that's pretty cool!
once_inc 4y ago
I've had to wing it in a number of situations where I'd needed to draw a small sprite or touch up a picture by placing individual pixels. I now see that I've fallen into the pit of hugging banding quite often, which explains why my edits were sufficient, but always lacked something undefinable. Thanks for sharing!
optimalsolver 4y ago
The Pixel Art subreddit is a great source of inspiration: https://www.reddit.com/r/pixelart https://www.reddit.com/r/pixelart
mxwsn 4y ago
A tip to ease anyone interested in making pixel art: instead of starting from scratch (very hard), for beginners it's much easier to take a high res image and down sampling it as a template. The down sampling algorithm will create many issues as mentioned in this guide, but you can then edit on a single pixel level following the principles of the guide.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  I've been something like this with Pixaki on the iPad - that allows for a reference layer which means you don't need to downsample, just fit the pixels where you want them to be accordingly. Helps in the learning of "how would this translate to pixels?" too.
  - kixiQu 4y ago
    +1 for Pixaki -- its line tools are the first thing I'd ever used that made pixel art fun (rather than a constant struggle against jaggies).
scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago
Wow - pixel joint still exists. I spent several years in that community ca. 2004-2008. If this type of art is something that you would like to do, I would highly recommend hanging around there. They do challenges and share tricks about how they do what they do. They also have very strict policies, which makes it a game of it’s own.
wheybags 4y ago
I feel like I need to shout out aseprite here: https://www.aseprite.org/ https://www.aseprite.org/ It's a really good pixel art tool, but I think their licensing strategy is particularly interesting to the hn audience. The tool is open source, but they don't distribute binaries for free. So if you just want to use it, you can buy a copy like normal software, but if you've got the technical ability to do so, you could just build a binary yourself from source. Always struck me as such a good compromise.
- rmvt 4y ago
  there's also libresprite, a fork of aseprite from when they changed their license
  - bitwize 4y ago
    Except it hasn't been updated and Aseprite has.
    - sodapopcan 4y ago
      They say that's because they are re-writing it from scratch. That's just looking at their website, though, I'd never heard of it before and happy with Aesprite.
- tmountain 4y ago
  Aseprite recently added some truly unique features for creating tessellated tiles. I have always struggled with creating good looking tiles, and the process is much easier for me now.
  - runevault 4y ago
    Is this in the beta branch? I feel like the main branch hasn't gotten a lot of updates in ages. I haven't used aseprite for a while but I did finally switch to the beta since it has been getting most of the love lately.
Aardwolf 4y ago
In the mid 2000s there was a whole community of pixel art for signatures in forums about Runescape. I don't know if this community still exists today (the game certainly does), but it was quite something. Random examples: https://i.imgur.com/eEZtmJd.png https://i.imgur.com/eEZtmJd.png https://i.imgur.com/P8HfrIv.png https://i.imgur.com/P8HfrIv.png
joemanaco 4y ago
I love Pixel Art - yet I often don‘t like how a lot of games try to approach it in a „modern“ way so I started to create my own dream pixel art game (working ob it >5 years now): https://store.steampowered.com/app/541310/Tiny_Thor/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/541310/Tiny_Thor/
- hjkl0 4y ago
  Looks beautiful
- dgb23 4y ago
  Beautiful design. The feel reminds me of my childhood, some of the best 2d platformers came out mid/end of 90’s right around the 3d hype. Rayman, Yoshi’s Island...
  - joemanaco 4y ago
    Yes, that's right. Yoshi's Island, for example, is a great inspiration for me.
- tonyjstark 4y ago
  looks fantastic and now on my wishlist. As just starting out developing a game myself, what engine are you using?
  - joemanaco 4y ago
    The engine I'm using is based on this one with lots of customizations: https://github.com/blitz-research/monkey https://github.com/blitz-research/monkey
- ndrake 4y ago
  That looks great. Some of the outdoor backgrounds remind me of Rastan.
  - joemanaco 4y ago
pygy_ 4y ago
There's been recent innovation in the pixel field... Astortion brings skeletal animation and texture mapping to the world of pixel art, in a way that is very convincing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsOKwUwL1bE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsOKwUwL1bE
pelasaco 4y ago
I finished my game development graduation now in May. My graduation project was a pixel art based beat-em up as we used to have in the 80s and 90s (like double dragon and crime). I loved to work with pixel art and I feel that I can draw (and animate) pretty much everthing that I want/need. However I would like to pursue any kind of graduation in that area, online for sure, but not certifications like udemy, coursera and etc, mainly because I like the loop: learn, homework, feedback, improve work, feedback and so on. I would like to learn "Art" but with Pixel art as main topic. There is such thing?
- dboon 4y ago
  If you’re interested in some spriting work for a science fiction visual novel / RPG, send me an email at thomas (dot) spader (at) gmail (dot) com I’d love to see your portfolio!
robbiejs 4y ago
I love pixel art, when I was a teen I drew a number of famous football (soccer) players in pixel art style: https://www.deviantart.com/iglobear/art/International-soccer-players-44734015 https://www.deviantart.com/iglobear/art/International-soccer.... They ended up in the gaame Sensational Soccer as unlockables. (Score three goals in a match and you get Zlatan). I was honoured.
lijogdfljk 4y ago
On the note of pixel art, anyone have any interesting techniques for 3D -> 2D Pixel Art? Of course the difficulty here is producing good quality pixel art from three dimensions. Often it simply ends up worse. Nonetheless i've been researching this and toying with it for a while. Notably for producing art in different isometric projections which would be very difficult to do by hand.
gwern 4y ago
One interesting thing about neural net generation of images is that up until recently, pixel art didn't work at all. Attempts at using GANs to learn Pokemon pixel art etc always failed miserably. The release of CLIP turned out to enable pretty good pixel art generation, and it's only gotten better - DALL-E 2 also can just do pixel art. eg https://github.com/pixray/pixray https://github.com/pixray/pixray (see https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1532197896090681344 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1532197896090681344 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1532129051434958851 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1532129051434958851 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1531478055344082944 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1531478055344082944 ) https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uswf2r/pixel_art_of_a_baby_tiger_drinking_boba/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uswf2r/pixel_art_of... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/upf93v/a_raccoon_learning_to_crotchet_with_neon_yarn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/upf93v/a_raccoon_le... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ulh07q/spaceships_24_pixel_art_game_assets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ulh07q/spaceships_2... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uh8sep/pixel_art_of_a_bernese_mountain_dog_in_the_forest/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uh8sep/pixel_art_of... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uav52t/tileset_of_fantasy_dwarf_characters_with_various/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uav52t/tileset_of_f... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uc4jnv/spritesheet_of_fantasy_dwarf_in_motion_pixel_art/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uc4jnv/spritesheet_... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ufb564/cherry_blossoms_and_mount_fuji_at_sunrise_in_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ufb564/cherry_bloss... https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1531545772420132865 https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1531545772420132865

146 points by memorable 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

This has made me super nostalgic, thanks for sharing this! I definitely look fondly back on the days of the old phpBB forums. So much knowledge shared freely and without any motive other than sharing knowledge and wisdom with their community. Of course I’m a biased since those were my teenage years and the world in your teenage years is always the best lol.

me_smith 4y ago

I don't know how many times I have read this set of forum posts on pixel art throughout the years. It is always one of my go to resources when I get that urge to build a 2d pixel game. Well, I haven't finished a game and I can't do pixel art, but it still is a great resource to go back to, at least for the memories. Thanks for sharing!

memalign 4y ago

I love pixel art and I wish I had this artistic talent! Folks that like this post might be interested in this web-based tool I made for making pixel art as ASCII art: https://memalign.github.io/m/pceimage/index.html https://memalign.github.io/m/pceimage/index.html

memorable 4y ago
A bit of self-promotion, but hey, that's pretty cool!

once_inc 4y ago

I've had to wing it in a number of situations where I'd needed to draw a small sprite or touch up a picture by placing individual pixels. I now see that I've fallen into the pit of hugging banding quite often, which explains why my edits were sufficient, but always lacked something undefinable. Thanks for sharing!

optimalsolver 4y ago

The Pixel Art subreddit is a great source of inspiration: https://www.reddit.com/r/pixelart https://www.reddit.com/r/pixelart

mxwsn 4y ago

A tip to ease anyone interested in making pixel art: instead of starting from scratch (very hard), for beginners it's much easier to take a high res image and down sampling it as a template. The down sampling algorithm will create many issues as mentioned in this guide, but you can then edit on a single pixel level following the principles of the guide.

zimpenfish 4y ago
I've been something like this with Pixaki on the iPad - that allows for a reference layer which means you don't need to downsample, just fit the pixels where you want them to be accordingly. Helps in the learning of "how would this translate to pixels?" too.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  +1 for Pixaki -- its line tools are the first thing I'd ever used that made pixel art fun (rather than a constant struggle against jaggies).

scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago

Wow - pixel joint still exists. I spent several years in that community ca. 2004-2008. If this type of art is something that you would like to do, I would highly recommend hanging around there. They do challenges and share tricks about how they do what they do. They also have very strict policies, which makes it a game of it’s own.

wheybags 4y ago

I feel like I need to shout out aseprite here: https://www.aseprite.org/ https://www.aseprite.org/ It's a really good pixel art tool, but I think their licensing strategy is particularly interesting to the hn audience. The tool is open source, but they don't distribute binaries for free. So if you just want to use it, you can buy a copy like normal software, but if you've got the technical ability to do so, you could just build a binary yourself from source. Always struck me as such a good compromise.

rmvt 4y ago
there's also libresprite, a fork of aseprite from when they changed their license
- bitwize 4y ago
  Except it hasn't been updated and Aseprite has.
  - sodapopcan 4y ago
    They say that's because they are re-writing it from scratch. That's just looking at their website, though, I'd never heard of it before and happy with Aesprite.
tmountain 4y ago
Aseprite recently added some truly unique features for creating tessellated tiles. I have always struggled with creating good looking tiles, and the process is much easier for me now.
- runevault 4y ago
  Is this in the beta branch? I feel like the main branch hasn't gotten a lot of updates in ages. I haven't used aseprite for a while but I did finally switch to the beta since it has been getting most of the love lately.

Aardwolf 4y ago

In the mid 2000s there was a whole community of pixel art for signatures in forums about Runescape. I don't know if this community still exists today (the game certainly does), but it was quite something. Random examples: https://i.imgur.com/eEZtmJd.png https://i.imgur.com/eEZtmJd.png https://i.imgur.com/P8HfrIv.png https://i.imgur.com/P8HfrIv.png

joemanaco 4y ago

I love Pixel Art - yet I often don‘t like how a lot of games try to approach it in a „modern“ way so I started to create my own dream pixel art game (working ob it >5 years now): https://store.steampowered.com/app/541310/Tiny_Thor/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/541310/Tiny_Thor/

hjkl0 4y ago
Looks beautiful
dgb23 4y ago
Beautiful design. The feel reminds me of my childhood, some of the best 2d platformers came out mid/end of 90’s right around the 3d hype. Rayman, Yoshi’s Island...
- joemanaco 4y ago
  Yes, that's right. Yoshi's Island, for example, is a great inspiration for me.
tonyjstark 4y ago
looks fantastic and now on my wishlist. As just starting out developing a game myself, what engine are you using?
- joemanaco 4y ago
  The engine I'm using is based on this one with lots of customizations: https://github.com/blitz-research/monkey https://github.com/blitz-research/monkey
ndrake 4y ago
That looks great. Some of the outdoor backgrounds remind me of Rastan.
- joemanaco 4y ago

pygy_ 4y ago

There's been recent innovation in the pixel field... Astortion brings skeletal animation and texture mapping to the world of pixel art, in a way that is very convincing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsOKwUwL1bE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsOKwUwL1bE

pelasaco 4y ago

I finished my game development graduation now in May. My graduation project was a pixel art based beat-em up as we used to have in the 80s and 90s (like double dragon and crime). I loved to work with pixel art and I feel that I can draw (and animate) pretty much everthing that I want/need. However I would like to pursue any kind of graduation in that area, online for sure, but not certifications like udemy, coursera and etc, mainly because I like the loop: learn, homework, feedback, improve work, feedback and so on. I would like to learn "Art" but with Pixel art as main topic. There is such thing?

dboon 4y ago
If you’re interested in some spriting work for a science fiction visual novel / RPG, send me an email at thomas (dot) spader (at) gmail (dot) com I’d love to see your portfolio!

robbiejs 4y ago

I love pixel art, when I was a teen I drew a number of famous football (soccer) players in pixel art style: https://www.deviantart.com/iglobear/art/International-soccer-players-44734015 https://www.deviantart.com/iglobear/art/International-soccer.... They ended up in the gaame Sensational Soccer as unlockables. (Score three goals in a match and you get Zlatan). I was honoured.

lijogdfljk 4y ago

On the note of pixel art, anyone have any interesting techniques for 3D -> 2D Pixel Art? Of course the difficulty here is producing good quality pixel art from three dimensions. Often it simply ends up worse. Nonetheless i've been researching this and toying with it for a while. Notably for producing art in different isometric projections which would be very difficult to do by hand.

gwern 4y ago

One interesting thing about neural net generation of images is that up until recently, pixel art didn't work at all. Attempts at using GANs to learn Pokemon pixel art etc always failed miserably. The release of CLIP turned out to enable pretty good pixel art generation, and it's only gotten better - DALL-E 2 also can just do pixel art. eg https://github.com/pixray/pixray https://github.com/pixray/pixray (see https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1532197896090681344 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1532197896090681344 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1532129051434958851 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1532129051434958851 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1531478055344082944 https://twitter.com/KaliYuga_ai/status/1531478055344082944 ) https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uswf2r/pixel_art_of_a_baby_tiger_drinking_boba/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uswf2r/pixel_art_of... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/upf93v/a_raccoon_learning_to_crotchet_with_neon_yarn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/upf93v/a_raccoon_le... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ulh07q/spaceships_24_pixel_art_game_assets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ulh07q/spaceships_2... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uh8sep/pixel_art_of_a_bernese_mountain_dog_in_the_forest/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uh8sep/pixel_art_of... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uav52t/tileset_of_fantasy_dwarf_characters_with_various/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uav52t/tileset_of_f... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uc4jnv/spritesheet_of_fantasy_dwarf_in_motion_pixel_art/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uc4jnv/spritesheet_... https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ufb564/cherry_blossoms_and_mount_fuji_at_sunrise_in_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ufb564/cherry_bloss... https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1531545772420132865 https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1531545772420132865