I recently started doing some pixelart.
Currently i'm trying to learn some about animations. Tough topic though. I was looking through the animated sprites of my favorite sprite based game, and holy hell, what effort they made.

http://www.spriters-resource.com/psx_ps ... hoffireiv/

Here's a critter i've drawn this weekend, and a crude attempt at animating it
I think the similarity to the style of BoF is evident
The gif's colors got compressed unfortunately. Didn't figure out how i can preserve them with aseprite yet.




You guys know some articles about animating sprites that explain a few do's and don'ts?

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Animation is EXTREMELY difficult to get right. For most artists, it requires too much time and/or fiddling to get it right.

I will tell you the secret weapon of the aspiring animator is a book, by a seasoned animation veteran who has worked for companies like Disney extensively. I have a copy, and I would be completely and utterly lost without it.

So, see if you can nab a copy of "The Animator's Survival Kit", by Richard Williams. The "Revised and Expanded" (i.e. second) edition includes info regarding applying tried-and-true traditional technique with modern technology.


It is actually a pretty good effort.

The thing about the GIF format is that it is limited to 256 colors any way you slice it. Of course, your editor may have an option regarding the palette of the image -- there is the standard "Web safe" palette, but there may be an option to auto-generate your own palette for the image. This will generally make your animations look more true to the original as far as coloring (assuming the number of colors you use is fairly reasonable).


The book I mentioned earlier is a MUST.

There was also a series of Web tutorials specifically geared to pixel art, but I really don't know if it is still online -- when I last followed it (YEARS ago), it was getting bounced around a bit, and there was never a URL for it that was very reliable. Unless I'm mistaken, the series was entitled, "So You Want to be a Pixel Artist?", and was crafted by a fella who went by 'Tsugumo'.

I *might* still have copies of a few of the articles (seems like I saw something related to the series in some of my old backups), so if Google bears you no fruit, I'll let you know if I find anything useful.

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http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tut ... s/tsugumo/
woo that was easy to find



Thanks, but.. I CAN SEE THE PIXELS

What i mean is that you can clearly see i just moved sections of the image to create the animation.
This seems like a pretty lazy and not very dynamic way, although working fairly well for a beginner

Here are some sample animated sprites from bof4 as comparision





Yes. I like to compare to the best

The thing i love most about these sprites is the use of colors and shading. everything is very clear and defined looking with very few colors and there are a lot of frames with very slight changes so they look really fluid. These guys obviously knew what they did.

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Nothing necessarily wrong with the way you did it -- in fact, if you are truly going for a pixel-art look, then what you did is on par with start pixel-art animations in commercial games back around the 16-bit gaming days.


They're also not pixel art Most likely hand-drawn images, or CG-renderings, or a combination of both (there are pretty obvious signs in each image that one, the other, or both were involved).

Pixel art is done literally at the level of individual pixels. It's a carry-over from the 8-bit days, and to some lesser extent, the 16-bit era. The animations you've posted from Breath of Fire 4 are not of such a nature, by any means.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Yeah i don't really know where pixel art starts and ends, but since these are at low resolution and use a small color palette i'd say they are pixel art.
I think the border of drawing and pixeling is very blurry.
In fact the wikipedia says the sprites are hand drawn, but who knows who wrote that Unfortunately i didn't find any interesting articles or interviews with the artist.

When i played the game i often had the impression that the animations are made using offset sections, thats where i got the idea initially (hell this was like 8 years ago and i only did my first animation now).
What i did do was to study the drakes animation frames in detail and realize it really looks like they partially did this.
like the arm with the shield doesn't change at all, or the sword arm only has slight shading changes.
The head has 3 different frames and the upper body is simply
Theres a lot of subtle changes in every frame that makes the animation seem so alive its amazing.

If i compare that to my windworm (i have like 5 sections offset by a pixel in each frame) it really makes it appear crude and clunky, not very alive at all. But studying these animations is really helpful.

http://www.gsarchives.net/index2.php?ca ... 0=animated
Here are some more actually animated ones.

I read through that tutorial. I realized i read it before some time a couple of years back. It's a good starting point for anyone who is knew to pixel art, but if you know the basics it doesn't help very much.

Edit:
Does hand drawn in case of pixel art mean a drawn picture, scaled down and traced with pixels?

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And you would be wrong.

Pixel art is literally "art with pixels" -- you use actual pixel-level techniques to draw imagery. Taking "regular" art and shrinking it down (or using a pixelation filter) does NOT constitute pixel art -- just poorly processed images.


Hardly -- if you use anything other than a mouse, and/or draw more than one color-per-pixel at a time, it's not "pixeling". Working at the pixel-level is literal. Applying filters, using gradient fills, and anything of that nature results in an image that falls away from the "purist" definition of pixel art.


That is a common technique in animation -- animate only what is needed. You see it even in traditional animated cartoons on TV -- when you see someone talking, you often can tell (if you look for it) that the mouth is moving, but the rest of the character is stationary. This is because a subset of the character frames are used, and the mouth animation is superimposed onto those few frames.

This technique saves a LOT of wasted energy -- why draw each frame of an animation in its entirety, when only part of it changes significantly?


No.

Hand-drawn pixel art involves taking a mouse, and using tools such as pencil, flood-fill, line, and such (the simple ones... and single-colors only at a time -- NO blending/gradients allowed!). It is certainly a painstaking process to get right, even at very low resolutions (below 32px*32px). Scaling things down and tracing them with pixels (or applying a pixelation filter) doesn't count. You can get an effect similar to pixel art, but to a purist, while the image itself may be considered pixel art, the actual process used to create it is not one of pixel-artistry. (Which isn't a bad thing; purist pixel art in today's age is usually more difficult to get right than stuff drawn in ways which resemble more traditional techniques.)

In other words, it's fine to draw something at a large resolution, shrink it down, and touch it up at the pixel level (or close to it); but don't call it a work of pixel art (even if pixel-level editing is performed, it's still not really pixel art -- more like 'mixed-media' digital imagery ). I do this a lot when creating character graphics when I want something a little more modern... but if I want something old-school, I draw it pixel-by-pixel -- THAT is pixel art.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Haha, there even seems to be contradictions in the terminology
When i mentioned hand drawn i was actually referring to illustrations, but yeah i understand what you mean.

In my case i'd say it's pixel art. I draw in low resolution, handpick colors and set them pixel by pixel. Except i draw with a tablet.

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wzl's burrow

Is the Wiki Definition of Pixel Art incorrect then?

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

It's art -- if there weren't contradictions in the terminology, you couldn't exactly call it art, now, could you?


A tablet is good. The main idea is that you work strictly at the per-pixel level.

And honestly, low-resolution imagery is not a prerequisite... although working on large images, pixel-by-pixel, is pretty much the field of the true pixel-art madman (barring reuse/tiling techniques).

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

I would say it is fine -- not shallow enough to leave everyone scratching their heads, yet not deep enough to cause any serious arguments.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

The example pic looks like gradient filled clip art. Will have to find some better examples.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

I went ahead and added some more content to the page

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wzl's burrow

Here's two new pixeled images

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wzl's burrow

Nice!

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

Hey weezl, got any new works of art you would like to share with us?

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Just a quick one so far



I try to do one sprite daily, but yesterday i didn't get around doing it

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wzl's burrow

Just did another quicky



yes, i know, it's quite cheesy

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wzl's burrow

Not as cheesy at that line you just put out there.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Crackin' Sprite Grommit!

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

I had a dream of this little guy tonite, walking around in space stations, shootin stuff with pixels.
I'm wondering if i should make a metroidvania kind of game

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Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow