A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
dinofarmgames.com
dinofarmgames.com
--Brian Eno
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T42WuUpBuHE (AgentX) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9hPOUvgKTA (AgentX II)
Photographing in black and white forces the photographer to concentrate on light, shadow, and texture.
There are several art forms where the artist picks a set of restrictions to work in and that exploration can create great things.
The demoscene creates mind-blowing works because they have to work in such a small data space.
If every organism survived and reproduced without any restriction, the sum of life would be pond scum.
The punishing negative feedback of restrictions drives creation – just as much as breaking those boundaries.
Less is more.
Worse is better.
Everything in moderation.
Vinyl has been demonstrated to be able to cut and playback frequencies of up to 70khz, and many commercially released records from as far back as the 70s had data up to the mid 40khz range (and in fact this is required for quadraphonic playback).
A turntable with a nice amp and speakers is a novel treat to people who have grown up with low-bitrate mp3s and ear buds. Sounds different. And having to work a bit harder and paying attention means you tend to get more out of it.
Of course, a well-mastered CD and a nice pair of headphones also sounds great and might be a more accurate reproduction of what they heard in the studio.
I just like music every way :)
I don't know, this all sounds like rationalization to me. Saying "I grew up with vinyl so it sounds more familiar to me" is fine, I grew up with 8-bit graphics and I like them, but they're not objectively better. Trying to rationalize this preference with things like "bigger pixels are easier to see" is a bit disingenuous, though.
Students were asked to judge the quality of a variety of
compression methods randomly mixed with uncompressed 44.1 KHz
audio. The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and
rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear
preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at
128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including
a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC). To my surprise,
in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated
the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 -
particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass
hits, etc) rising over time.
... each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises.
In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of
sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said
that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to
music. It is a sound they are familiar with.
... It is not missed.
I think the reason is that the effort these limitations assign to us -- the imagination we need to activate in order to overcome them -- is what attaches us to them.
Too bad for him that such things do not exist.
Not the same thing, but "film grain" is a thing.
I mean, he argues about the way the devices scale his art up and change aspect ratio etc.
But on the other hand, he compares a picture of Yoshi at the end to an algorithmically smoothed version.
However, Yoshi was never intended to look like the leftmost image. The thing is, pixels aren't square. In fact, when we played it on the SNES, it was rendered very differently, it was interlaced, scanlines were distinct, and each pixel was a bit of a blob.
Because of this, an image like Yoshi looked just fine, because we weren't looking at a blocky grid of squares. The brighter colored glowed around the darker colors, the darkness between the scanlines caused your brain to interpolate the lines. We got a nicer looking image.
When you blow it up to 500% on a crisp LCD panel it doesn't look the same. What used to be smooth lines are now stair steps. And just the same way that he complains about Auro being blurred or stretched, when you display pixel art designed for a CRT on an OLED display at 600% nearest neighbor scaling, it doesn't work.
I like the symbolic style of pixel art. But we don't have the same limitations. When people made great art for the NES, it's because that's what they had to work with. We have more to work with.
It's one thing to represent things in a symbolic, simplistic or minimalistic style. It's another thing to feign technological disadvantage.
To my eyes, the SF4 Chun Li is infinitely inferior to SF3, and I'm not even an animator. And haven't played either game, so I truly have no preconceptions at all in this case.
To me, SF4 looks like those. Except in motion, with lots of special effects. The way I imagined them as a kid. :)
In Mortal Kombat, the typical shaolin monk character has a typical "shoot fireball" special move. In the latest SNES game, a badass dragon made of fire shoots out of his hand and explodes on contact with the enemy. In the next game, for the PlayStation, it looks like he is flinging a flaming turd at his opponent. Final Fantasy had similar problems in the transition from awesome 2D (FFVI) to awful 3D (FFVII).
Both Mortal Kombat and Final Fantasy eventually got 3D high definition graphics right, in my opinion. I hope eventually the artists will be as good and as experienced at making 3D art as they were at making 2D art in the SNES era.
So who wants to start writing a 3D package designed around making those kinds of things as easy as possible? With a way to easily drop them into a game and fire it off in realtime?
Maybe not you, but maybe someone reading the comments here just found a side project.
The big tactics 2D cartoonists use to stylize motion are squash and stretch, smears, and multiple images. How can these be represented efficiently in data structures? How can you make it easy for a character to leap into the air and turn into a giant eyeball with arms and legs sticking off of it[1]? And how can you make it easy for a non-techie artist to make it happen? This is probably not a quick weekend hack.
Guilty Gear Xrd does a lot of this; can it be done in a game with a lot more characters running around at once?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=clampett's+corneal+catastrop...
And it has been done with 3D animation, Pixar is an easy example: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GnfdLp0PcSg
Different in what ways? It's a perfectly valid and common artistic resource to "feign disadvantage", limiting the colors, the subject, the perspective or, yes, the resolution.
If I understood the article, the author acknowledges the historical limitations of the "pixelated look", states he and an "insular" community of artists like it by choice, and at the same time he also acknowledges to the general public, the pixelated look is bizarre (what he calls the "pixel tax"), and therefore he understands he must change with the times. And in the end, he more or less concludes that good art is good art, regardless of the specific style.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/...
Living in Europe, I could hardly recognize my favorite games when I saw them in American movies, or tv-show. i wonder how the Japanese PAL would render it, because despite being PAL it's still different from Europe.
For me personally, I think that good pixel art is timeless (emphasis on "good"). It gives an artist a limited canvas and forces them to be creative. You can instantly deduce an artist's skill based on how well they can convey a concept with a limited palette and resolution. An unlimited palette and high resolution actually magnifies the flaws in art, IMO (leaves less to the imagination). I find that in many modern 3D games, the suspension of disbelief is destroyed when I walk up to a character and see blurry textures and pointed polygonal edges.
For an idea of what good pixel art looks like (at least according to my opinion and many others), check out Henk Nieborg's work:
Which, unfortunately, is usually the case when it comes to game development.
Agreed about the timelessness. I find good pixel art more timeless than other forms of good videogame art. I thought about it and I think it's actually a case of abstractness, not pixelation. Pixel art is often more abstract. Another example of good non-pixelated game art that has this same quality is Another World's, which I find awesome.
I believe slightly more abstract game art -- slightly abstract, I'm not talking cubism here! -- is more appealing to me because of something related to Scott McCloud's concept of "closure", as explained in his book "Understanding Comics". This concept for me was the main takeaway of the book. When something is more abstract, having elided some aspects -- be it character details, animation frames, whatever -- your brain "fills in the gaps". And I think when my brain "fills in the gaps", the art itself ages better. The less my brain has to imagine the details not explicitly put there by the artist, the worse the art ages for me.
Not sure if this applies to other forms of art, but for me it definitely applies to videogame art, and is part of why I tend to like pixel art.
https://www.google.com/search?q=low+poly&safe=off&rlz=1C1CHF...
These sorts of lines, constantly repeated, irked me, not because they weren't technically true or anything, but because it's such a "looking-backward" point of view. At the time, that's not how people saw it. It was all about pushing forward the state of the art, and we miss something when we look back on it in that way.
I guess in a similar way I've had the same feeling about "modern" pixel art, where it often seems to miss the point. By treating it as just an art style, it turns it from an exercise in conveying a vision despite limitations, into an effort to simplify and downsample because those are the most easily-recognized surface-level hallmarks of that period.
For me, the magic of that era comes from seeing techniques like color cycling ( http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0 ), where the desire to get a certain effect led to interesting workarounds, rather than being satisfied with limitations because it's "retro."
It's even worse with older games. I tried to play the original X-Wing in DOSBox a while back, and wow, I couldn't believe it. Did it really look that bad back then? Maybe my 486 DX2 and 14" CRT made it look better somehow.
You're in luck: "Black Mesa is a re-envisioning of Valve Software's classic science fiction first person shooter, Half-Life. ... All-new music, voice acting, choreography and added dialogue give way to a more expansive and immersive experience than ever before."
Story/dialog/writing/role-play don't go out of style as quickly as graphics/gun-play.
However, my brain eventually forgot about this and I could continue play, and eventually I stopped seeing crude low-poly models and instead saw just "people".
But I'm inclined to agree with Igor Stravinksy:
"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution."
Further, as someone who works on games, the decision as to what kind of art style is used, most often is not a decision to aim for something specific, but a question of money. Art doesn't happen on its own, you either have to make it yourself, or find someone else to make it (who makes something that looks good) AND then pay them, often also for many many revisions and additions. For a small team simple sprites that remain appealing and consistent even when scaled up can be the choice simply because anything else is prohibitively expensive.
Pixel-art is great, when it is crisp. Most of his examples are crisp and well animated, until you get to his. The characters are oddly proportioned, but I can deal with that, and at least they were pretty crisp, but the interface around them was horrible.
I'm sorry you're not into Auro's art, but I just popped in to clear something up.
At no point do I laud my own work as all that great. I can't speak to how good I am. I do my best, and that's all I can do. Full disclosure, the only reason I included it at all was to plug it. We're a small, new company and need all the help we can get.
I also think it's a little strange to hear that I spend no time on my art's issues when the whole article is basically saying the entire art direction was a big mistake.
I'm not a graphic designer, yet I had to make every art asset in the game. I have to wear many hats, and I wear some better than others. I'm always learning, always pushing, always questioning, always trying to improve. Pretty much every example I gave of pixel art is insanely better than I am. That doesn't bother me. There will always be someone better, and there will always be someone worse. Besides, even if my work was the most ghastly thing you've ever seen, it wouldn't make my arguments any more or less valid. If you think my positions are incorrect, I don't see how that has to do with how much or how little I discuss my own work. That said, I'll be the first to fuss and fuss and fuss over the flaws and shortcomings in my work. I'm my own worst enemy. Does it make you feel better to hear that?
Meanwhile, "retro"-style games are doing gangbusters on Steam, selling to people that actually appreciate those styles of art, music, and game design.
The Chun Li discussion happens a lot in my circle of friends, and I'm always in the minority. Very few people appreciate classic pixel art.
* Squish and Stretch * Fallow through * Secondary Action
These principles really help make dynamic scenes. If you look at the Chun Li animations, you can see that the older one does a better job of using these.
I feel like if the HD version took advantage of these, it would look the best out of all of them, but it failed to reach its full potential in it's medium.
Watch this early Pixar short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4NPQ8mfKU0
See how alive and full of emotion the little lamp is?
That said, as somebody who loves pixel art, I still really love what Capcom did with SF4's art style.
The artists of SF4 definitely took a bold direction; the SF4 games don't really look like any other 3D fighting games. The characters are cartoonish without falling back on the crutch of cel shading; they're realistic without looking like drab psuedo-photo-realism. To me they look like childrens' action figures, fighting it out on the screen.
As the author says, SF4 could have been animated better. Specifically it probably would have benefited from some squash-and-stretch as he suggests.
It's also worth noting that SF3's traditional cel animation, while awesome, also has room for improvement. The animation style isn't very consistent from character to character. In a lot of cases (Chun Li in particular) it's not even consistent between her various moves.
A great critique here: http://www.finalformgames.com/uncategorized/style-study-moti...
Actually, Arc System Works ironically was the one who pushed the envelope here.
SF4 took a huge number of cues from Battle Fantasia. The "Super-Attack Zoom-in" animation, the dynamic camera movement, "Super Freeze", and so forth.
Its ironic, because Arc System Works made Battle Fantasia as a "learning project". In various interviews, Arc System Works noted that they had very little 3D skill and needed to train everyone up on 3D Animation skills, and the best way to do that was to make a 3D-animated video game.
Then a few years later, Capcom basically takes all the cues from Battle Fantasia and added a decent-style on top of it (the "Black Lines" and a unique style of cel-shading). And of course, Capcom's SF4 cast was much larger, more detailed animation and all that. Nonetheless, it is clear that it was Arc System Works that pushed the envelope in their experiments with the one-off Battle Fantasia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZDJenxXPuM
IMO, Arc System Works has done 3D a massive favor here with Battle Fantasia, and they are once again pushing the envelope with Guilty Gear Xrd.
Not to hate on SF4's style of course. I think I prefer Capcom's SF4 style over say... Tekken, DOA or even MvC3. And Capcom definite added a lot of "love" in the art-style. But the _core_ of the animation techniques were more or less copied from Battle Fantasia years earlier.
Super Smash Bros always had the right idea with the attacks however. If you watch SSB:M carefully, the bones of the various characters expand with the hitboxes. For example, Mario's FAir attack has a huge exaggerated fist, and other characters shrink/ grow with their hitboxes. (Which adds for some interesting strategies / counter-strategies, since hitbox / hurtbox manipulation is a major element of high-level Fighting Games).
The Super Smash Brothers series has been the best at communicating the hurtboxes and hitboxes in a 3D environment. And it looks like Guilty Gear Xrd is finally a 2nd series that finally communicates those important cues as well.
----------------------------
Still, it is clear that the 3D Artwork style of SF4 is still relatively new and isn't as a refined of artwork. Again, the Chun-Li animation from SF3 is near the peak of Capcom's animation prowess, while SF4 is probably better described as a great first step for Capcom (even if it is in many ways copied over from Battle Fantasia).
Despite that fact, people are wow'ed by the the zooms, the buttery smooth animations, dynamic camera angles and automated shading. Things that honestly didn't take much effort on the part of SF4 artists. Heck, all of those things basically come for free when you use 3D Models.
Compare the super-attack animations between SF4 and Battle Fantasia. And note the following similarities:
1. The 'Super Zoom' that changes the camera angle, to focus on the character performing the super-attack. 2. The 'freeze frame' mechanics: which "pause" all other 3D animations while the super-attack user remains fully animated. 3. The way the background melts into a new environment, and then melts back into the stage as the super-attack either hits the opponent... or misses.
True, SF4 has better character models, better backgrounds, and better animations. But the camera mechanics were all invented and pioneered by Battle Fantasia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb5rTtSrP3E
Rival Schools also changed the background during supers/knockouts, although it was just "fade to blacks" and 2D overlays rather than a new environment. But looking at this video of Battle Fantasia supers (been so long since I played it!) that's all that game did as well:
The "freeze other animations while the super move executes" thing is such a minor stylistic thing that I'm having trouble really thinking of it as an innovation and to boot... is that even what Battle Fantasia does? I mean look at this super: the steam in the background is still animating:
I think it's possible though. It's been done to a limited extent in video games: note how Link's sword arm and sword grow when he takes a swing in Wind Waker.
Don't blame the game or the style. Blame your chosen audience.
Funding is also a big part of it. It's much easier to get funding for a mobile game than for an indie PC game, even though the mobile game is significantly less likely to make a return on investment. So perhaps some mobile devs know they aren't going to make it, but take the money anyway so that they can work on something on someone else's dime, while they build up experience and add another piece to their portfolio.
I'm not convinced it's a worthwhile trade, however, if it makes you lose your faith in humanity and your art form in the process.
"Funding an original game that has already proved itself by actual sales, on a proven and stable platform?" Not interested.
"Giving away a few millions to take a crap-shot chance at a totally unethical business on a overcrowded platform?" Yes please!
How does your second statement follow from the first? Does choosing to play freemium mobile games somehow mean you have poor artistic taste?
People who have some emotional draw to it (maybe they like the art) and play it despite recognizing that the mobile freemium game industry is a giant social engineering experiment aimed at extracting money by exploiting weaknesses in the unaware human mentality.
People who don't recognize this, either by simply lacking awareness, or lacking enough experience to draw a comparison to non-exploitative games. Regardless of which it is, in both of these case, on average over the entire population, it is fair to assume that they will either not be attentive enough to appreciate details in the art, or won't even have enough knowledge to draw a useful comparison to other kinds of art.
I'm not implying, i'm explicitly saying that people who primarily play games that are either sold up-front and without any IAP, or only with IAP that unlocks the full-game part of a "free demo", are, on average over the entire population, are most likely to be found in the third category of people who either have enough experience with games that are not menschenverachtend or are able to recognize games that are menschenverachtend, and avoid those consciously, and are thus also more likely to have the experience or attention to appreciate small detail art decisions.
These two statements are wildly different.
But since you went there, I do think that exclusively playing freemium slot machine games is an indicator of bad taste. Just as someone that exclusively eats at fast food restaurants probably has bad taste in food (yeah, I made a fast food analogy).
I feel sorry for the kids that grew up with smart phones and have never known a game that wasn't vapid and exploitative. There are worse fates, but still.
http://www.noe-v.com/images/articles/terry_sprites01.jpg
KOF XII/XIII sprites were rotoscoped from 3D models. They did this because pixel art is far more expensive. For reference, SNK stated that it costed them around $1m per 3D character in KOF XIII. But the savings come with tweaking the models when they rebalance moves. They can just alter the model. 2D sprites have to be redrawn.
SNK Playmore published a great article which I cannot seem to find now with details on their technique.
The reason purists don't like the look of the game though is because SNK was traditionally known for superb pixel art.
http://images.wikia.com/snk/images/e/e8/Kof99park3bglite.gif
Granted, their 3D Artwork is quite good now, so maybe they can succeed in the transition. But fewer and fewer major developers (and even small, niche developers) are producing pixel art.
"WayForward Games" has an interesting vector art style however which gets the classic feel down. Its technique is more akin to a high-quality Newground game however, as opposed to the nostalgic Pixel Art feel. And artists know that vector art is easier to do. Still, WayForward (Ducktales Remastered, Shaente Half Genie Hero) might be one of the last great 2D Artists still around today.
The Chun-Li dissected animation reminded me of Disney classes on how to convey emotions rather than simulate movements. And for Jazz lovers, search about Mitsuo Iso : www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvx7p6-lABw
Old GBA Game: http://lparchive.org/Fire-Emblem-Blazing-Sword/Update%2063/1...
Fire Emblem Awakening: https://youtu.be/ls0Nn_-hv-8?t=3m35s
I showed this to multiple people, and a lot of them seem to think the 3D animation was better. :-(
But the Fire Emblem sprites were redrawn with details from each of the characters in the game. Amelia from FE8 for example, was the only blonde female paladin, and her long-blonde hair would blow in the wind during her critical hit animation.
The animations were incredibly personalized to the characters, a true feat for a game with several dozen playable characters (and random mooks to KO).
In contrast, the 3D Art of FE:Awakening is clearly built off of recycled bone animations across multiple units. Furthermore, they were mostly recycled from FE9 and FE10.
The level of effort needed to create the 2D sprites is clearly much higher than the level of effort for FE:Awakening's animations.
Similarly to movies, early 2K era movies were speaking too much of CGI, now SFX aren't attractive anymore, you got to give density.
ps: about the level of effort, I think it's not fair, 3d modeling and animating was hard, but more than that it made people focus on low level details rather than 'impressionist' ones. You had to care about all angles and didn't have time nor knowledge on what made a good animation. Same goes for old animations.
As is whatever the heck this is from: http://kotaku.com/sorry-yes-animation-is-also-games-art-1699...
So solid, good 3D art exists, and is around. Gears of War also deserves a mention.
My favorites were always the sprites for the "hero" unit:
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/fireemblem/images/3/38/F...
My favorite animations overall though were definitely swordmaster, specifically their "dodge" animation. They only moved like 3 or 4 pixels, so it was hard to tell that they actually dodged. But once you saw it, it was in fact amazing.
"Even in the limitations of the individual voices, in their relative incompleteness, there are advantages.* The necessity for utilizing them within the narrow range of their effectiveness demands characteristic usage and treatment consistent with the material. Thus the pupil learns by this simple example to heed an important principle of handicraft: to make characteristic use of the strengths and shortcomings of the material at hand.
"*I am taking such pains with these things ... to establish explicitly that these principles are not derived from aesthetics but from practical considerations. If what is known as aesthetics does in fact contain much that is merely practical handling of the material, and if what is known as symmetry is perhaps often not much more than an organization of the material that reveals a sensible regard for its properties, yet I consider it worthwhile to set down these observations. For the conditions of practicality can change, if we take a different view of the material and if the purpose changes."
--Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre
It's so much quicker to do.
Everyone who actually _does_ high-quality pixel art understands. Good Pixel-Art is much MUCH harder to do than good 3D.
It lothes me to say it, but the blogpost is correct. Very few people understand this fact except for the artists who actually do go pixel art.
That's the right reason to defend using modern screens to their full capability with a certain simplified-art style.
http://i.imgur.com/mDlQYar.gif
Count the number of colors on Jin Kisaragi. The smooth, defined lines going down "strong", hand-crafted pixel art lines. With massive sprites built for the high-definition era to boot.
The 3D art gets a bit intricate and busy, but the 2D Sprites.
I would bet that if you superimposed that BlazBlue animation over the 3D reference, there would be a huge difference - that looks like it's had a lot of human thought put into it.
(And then go look at Arc's latest game, Guilty Gear Xrd. Which is presented entirely 3D with some models that have had a LOT of love applied to them.)
IE: What Archer does with all of its 3D models of cars it sticks into the show.
(Which still isn't to devalue the effort that it takes to make good-looking sprites; I've tried, and damn do I suck at it.)
You need a baseline of art, and then you need to tweak the animations to match your video game. A model may not have a "double-jump" animation but you can easily add one through bone manipulations with any 3d model.
But if a sprite-sheet were missing the double-jump animation? You're either doing it yourself (hard pixel art style) or hiring someone else to do it.
Whereas in 24fps (pixelation), creators can get away with more as your brain fills in the gaps. There's also the bonus that it feels dream-like; larger than life.
There's also the question of pixel-perfect platforming. HD platformers can feel sloppy and untrustworthy if not done right. It's easier to trust a pixelated platformer. (And yet I've never felt cheated by a jump in the polygonal New Super Mario Bros.)
Japanese animation, on the other hand, plays fast and loose with the rules. Very little is animated at the full 24 FPS, drifting around 12 to 8 to 6 FPS (called animating on twos, threes, or fours) for typical scenes. This allows for the user's attention to be captured by backgrounds and stills in expository scenes, and encourages a different style of exaggerated movement that emphasizes the ''feeling'' of the movement over brute force motion quality. It also allows the budget to be conserved for the most important scenes, sakuga ("moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action.") So called "key animators" work exclusively on these parts of an animation, and here, their skills in creating expressive motions shine when given the time and resources to completely bring a dramatic scene to life.
As the game, comic, and animation artforms grew alongside one another, early games took direct influence from styles of animation native to their creators. The concept of sakuga fit Japanese games well, which would often sparingly animate unimportant "cannon fodder" enemies for the sake of saving budget and development time for elaborate boss monsters. In contrast, I was always struck by the fluidity of motion in Western games produced by groups like The Bitmap Brothers for the platforms like the Amiga, yet unimpressed by the gameplay underneath. It seemed almost as if these groups would spend so much time lavishly animating their characters, that they would forget they were making a game.
Another important consideration is that more frames can work against an action game. Every frame of a sword swing, for instance, is another 16th of a second delay between the player's button press and the intended action occurring. A 1 or 2 frame anime-style sword swish fits perfectly into this mold, allowing for responsive control and an expression of energy. Whereas many Western games I played would lavishly animate the beginning of a jump, or thrust or swing of a sword, compromising the feel of responsiveness for the sake of the artist's ego.
So if you notice the lack of frames in a modern "pixel art" game, then while the artists might have been lazy (the typical "pixelated platformer" drawn at a lower resolution than an Atari, with more colors than a SNES game), perhaps they instead were copying older Japanese artists without understanding the reasoning behind their animation choices. Or perhaps you just don't appreciate this style of animation.
Back in the 50's or so, when the major American animation studios had a couple decades of experience under their belt but anime was just getting off the ground, some Japanese animators took a trip to Hollywood to learn how the industry worked in the US. They were given a tour of a major animation studio, but through some kind of miscommunication, they came away with the impression that the studio was spending an order of magnitude fewer resources (time, money, manpower) than they actually were.
When they returned to Japan, they budgeted their productions using those lowered expectations, forcing their animators to cut corners and squeeze as much expressiveness into as few frames as possible. Which in turn led to audiences getting used to that style of animation, and created the recognizable Japanese aesthetic that has persisted to this day.
My interpretation was that anime's more limited, stylized animation was due to its direct influence from the prolific manga artist and animator Osamu Tezuka (sometimes called "the Walt Disney of Japan.") All comics, Western or Eastern, must heavily stylize motion in order to have any hope of expressing it in still frames. So having an accomplished dramatic comic artist lead most of the earliest, most influential Japanese animations, most of which were direct adaptations of his comics, working with the low framerate stylized motions that extended naturally from comic book stills, seems to have had a profound effect on the Japanese school.
In contrast, Disney's early animations were inspired by conventional cartooning in subject, and early film and Vaudeville in motion, so given Disney's influence, it should similarly not be surprising that the Western animation school tended towards comedy and fluid motion that attempted to emulate the impression of film.
Most Western animation has historically been done at 12fps ("on twos"); you go to 24fps for very fast motion or stuff you want to be super-smooth. This holds even in big-budget 2D theatrical features[1]. You will also find no small amount of super-stylized motion - dig up "The Dover Boys" (dir. Chuck Jones), commonly cited as the first cartoon to experiment with the smears, multiple images, and other crazy stylizations of motion. Single-frame your way through that someday; it's full of amazing semi-abstract images.
(First in the US, at least; there may have been people in the East playing with this as well, but there was very little cross-pollination at this time.)
The big difference between the Western and Eastern animation traditions, in my mind, comes from different decisions in how to best allocate "pencil mileage". You have a budget of X number of miles of lines drawn by your animators for each project; how do you spend it? Westerners generally pursued "the illusion of life", favoring really fluid and subtle motion over a huge number of drawings. This meant that very few single drawings could be very complicated. Easterners, on the other hand, gravitated towards complicated character designs. You might spend four or five times as much effort drawing a single frame. This meant that very few motions could be fluid.
Fluidity of motion × character design complexity = pencil mileage. Pencil mileage is fixed by your budget. Which one of those do you want to emphasize? You can't have both unless your budget is amazing. (This is also why animated commercials can have both; they can cost more per second than some features.)
To eyes trained in one tradition, the other one looks like crap. Why is this Eastern cartoon barely more than a slide show half the time? Why is this Western cartoon full of such simplified designs? Personally, it took me many years to learn how to appreciate Eastern animation.
(Also it is worth noting that most lovingly-animated Western games quickly converged on quickly popping into a motion as a result of a control input, with exaggerated settling into the new pose - look at Crash Bandicoot, Earthworm Jim, or Aladdin.)
I am rambling. Mostly I just wanted to mention that my experience of the Western tradition (including years of single-stepping cartoons) is largely on twos, with occasional bursts of ones.
[1] except for anything Richard Williams directed because he is kind of a total obsessive who would wander around the studio late at night and inbetween stuff onto ones that maybe should have never been on ones. See 'Raggedy Ann and Andy' for instance. Or if you want to actually see a decent movie hunt up the Recobbled Cut of 'The Thief and the Cobbler' because RA&A is pretty much 80 minutes of pure nightmare fuel.
As for games, I wanted to add a comment to my post about how I was mostly thinking about mid 80s-early 90s games, but Hacker News seems to have some restrictions keeping new users and throwaways from editing posts. Many European games from this time stood out to me as compromising gameplay at the expense of their animation. In contrast, many of the 90s and early 2000s Western mascot platformer games, as you mentioned, did great jobs of working charismatic, fluid animation into the medium. Crash Bandicoot in particular is notable for being one of the few games to use per-vertex animation; for each key frame of animation, the vertices that made up Crash were placed manually, giving the artists an unprecedented degree of control.
Since then, sadly, most Western AAA devs have tended overwhelmingly towards more "realistic" art styles that make heavy use of inverse kinematics-driven procedural animation for gameplay, and motion capture for cutscenes, leaving the animators much less room for expression.
Regardless, my intent was not to comment on Western animation as a whole, but (bringing it all back to the original commenter's remark about mobile games being sparsely animated) simply state that sparse animation doesn't have to be a bad thing, and in fact, there's an entire school of animation built around it.
Anyway, thanks again for replying, and I'll be sure to check your suggestions out.
I was thoroughly impressed Knights of Sidionia on Netflix, and though it can match some feature animation, it is still far from Ghibli/Disney. And it isn't even 2D!
The other day someone posted a gallery from Ghost in the Shell on Reddit and I thought "When was the last time we saw art like this on the big screen?"
The idea of "pencil mileage" works both ways; really thinking about that helped me be able to finally actually enjoy some Japanese stuff.
There is also a strong tradition of Western limited animation; it actually started as the artistic cutting edge with the work of UPA (Gerald McBoing Boing, Rooty Toot Toot). Even Disney played win that domain with stuff like Pigs Is Pigs or Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom.
But then in the 60s, TV came along, and Joe Hanna and William Barbera's sweet gig doing beautifully animated Tom & Jerry shorts was gone; they started doing super-simplified cartoons that were carried largely by the voice talent. This got worse in the 70s and 80s, with tons of terrible toy-based cartoons done on the smallest budget possible (He-Man! GI Joe!). "Limited animation" is a dirty word to an entire generation of American animators.
Or at least it was until John K's "Ren & Stimpy" hit the cable networks, and inspired a new generation of animators. Who're busy making a lot of the TV stuff of today.
(But honestly I think that deep in the heart of every Western animator, there is a grey-toned Fleischer character bopping up and down in time to their heartbeat. Their hallucinatory version of Snow White - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNG8GYrh1mg - is a good example.)
Crash and Spyro are great examples of what can be done when a 2D animator's mindset is applied to 3D games! It carries on nicely from all the gorgeous 2D work on games like Aladdin or Earthworm Jim. I would love to see people come back to that mindset in video games. Guilty Gear Xrd is the first ray of light in the clunkily-puppeted darkness in a long time.
If one was so inclined to stick with blocky pixel art, one could always render the bitmaps' pixels as filled vector rectangles and the target display would autoscale those rectangles without blurring them (unless they became subpixel-sized.)
But, I personally think a high resolution pixel art style in games is just going to confuse the consumer. Box shots no longer sell a game, trailer videos do. Are you going for high detail but low color count and 24fps animation? That does seem like a strange choice when I write it like that.
Low resolution pixel art (320 pixels wide or tall) makes a statement, and I think the consumers get the "retro" style the developer is going for there. But then why would an artist with a pencil and a budget ever want to restrict themselves like that?
I don't know what Ubisoft did in recent Rayman titles, but it looks like 3D or 2D vector art. The animations are super fluid, scale very nicely, and are super fun to watch! I suppose as the author suggests at the end, hand-placed curves could be a good substitute for hand-placed blocks.
Huge blocky pixel art never really looked that way in the first place. The pixels in Atari/NES games were made to go through the various distortions in the video pipeline (composite crossover, scanlines, flickering, misaligned electron guns and all that) that left them with all the hard edges blurred off.
The aesthetic is totally based on people running emulators showing you the framebuffer in a way it was never meant to be seen.
Some did. For instance, I played games like LucasArts adventure games and WarCraft 1 on a Mac with a Trinitron display, which faithfully showed the blocks in all their glory. I imagine the experience was similar for other PC games. Not all pixel art was made for NTSC TVs.
One can see a Cg shader here that attempts to recreate the look of an actual Game Boy screen, complete with several characteristics including motion blur and contrast settings:
http://filthypants.blogspot.com/2013/04/customizing-harlequi...
"These days, thought, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness"
'Many developers who try to achieve the retro aesthetic overlook how much magnification is going on, resulting in not one, but several different resolutions at once. Not only can this be unsightly, but it’s “showing its strings,”which defeats the purpose of limiting your resolution in the first place.'
For some reason I find that really jarring.
There are some good points in the article, but pixel art in games (or art heavily influenced by pixel art) is a style that many people enjoy, especially when it is done well. It's very puzzle-like and you have to think economically when creating larger pieces. Pixel art and low poly art are fundamental art styles of gaming, I think partially because they are so overtly digital.
I think my favourite pixel artists show how the medium is always changing and getter better, e.g., Paul Robertson, Pixels Huh, Yuriy Gusev (Fool), Barney Cumming, and Mrmo Tarius.
PS. I'm a game developer and also run a pixel art on community on Twitter called @Pixel_Dailies. Come check us out sometime. :)
That said, I quite enjoyed the article, and some of those modern pixel art pieces linked were very impressive. I think overall his decision to make the switch is a good one though, if I can consider myself any kind of sample of his audience.
The key question is, who is your audience?
For a lot of modern art the audience is other insiders. And also, possibly, buyers. The average person may not find it so compelling.
And so it is here as well.
[1]http://coachingleaders.emotional-climate.com/nlp-presupposit...
We were a small group of friends who wanted to make a Harry Potter MMO (post-trio era, if anyone cares). Well, we did make it, but we were young, didn't know how shit about marketing and that stuff, and it never launched properly. So, the first M of MMO was never achieved, sadly[1]. I still know shit about marketing and that stuff, now that I think about it.
In the end there was a big (personal) argument and people divided into two groups and we parted ways on not-so-good-terms.
[1]: http://nino.miletich.me/public/pixel_art/ Note: not all of it is my work, in fact most probably isn't. I don't even remember what is what isn't; we colaborated on a lot of stuff. I was mostly the programmer/developer and not the artist for the project.
[2]: Maybe not so much sadly, since WB is apprantly very aggressive towards fan-made products that get a bit of attention.
Likewise, I like old Victorians and Art Deco, but I wouldn't be excited about one built today. No one would respect a 2015 medieval-style castle quite like one from 1515.
I sure would love to see some new cathedrals built using the methods of centuries past, though.
Some of the greatest film movies ever created are black and white, ironical because most of them were recorded in two colors but the color was lost(as the only copy that not degraded over time were the black and white television copies).
But if you tried to make a film that last 20 seconds like the first Lumière movies, or without sound like Chaplin most people won't understand it.
Even Chaplin got nearly bankrupt trying to stay with silent pictures.
Most people can't understand that making a movie without sound is actually harder than with it, as a movie without sound feels weird and you have to apply lots of work in order to fight this limitation.
So it just does not make economical sense when 99% of the people do not understand the work behind and you have to make something 99 times more expensive to those that do in order to live of your work.
For any given object, over a large enough population, most people won't be exposed to it; those that are won't understand it. Hit TV shows might reach 10M viewers in the US - out of 350M.
FWIW I think the OPs move is slightly premature: there's a movie coming out soon called Pixels that will certainly raise the profile of this style: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2120120/
And I'm going to keep making games with pixel art. Why? Not because I want to evoke retro nostalgia. Simply because the asset pipeline is easier to manage. I avail myself of high resolutions and millions of colors, but even with those you can create great pixel art even in a simple paint program and from there it is easy to load into a game and draw on the screen. Plus, well done pixel art reads incredibly clearly -- compare pixelated Mario with the 3D-rendered, mushy Mario used in Mario vs. Donkey Kong.
For 2D gaming pixel art gets the job done and requires minimal tooling and middleware. That's why I love it.
The most important thing is the part about speaking the language of the users. And especially "the users don't owe you their time"
These are principles that are extremely important if you want to build a product that reaches people and change their lives. Be it in the marketing department, engineering, UX or as this article, art work.
Another great point is that we can produce great art/products/UX while speaking the users language.
Pixel art is very trendy right now, but it probably won't remain so forever. Shooting film in black and white used to be all that was possible. Then it became what was cheap. Today, we still see some B&W films for aesthetic reasons, but it's very uncommon. Pixel art will probably become very similar to B&W film eventually. Seldom used, but used for a specific effect when it is used.
There's room for plenty of aesthetics besides pixel art and "HD" though. With modern displays, there's no reason that games can't borrow aesthetics from other mediums. Watercolors, comic book print, you name it. Heck, even though it's similar to pixels, I'd kill to see a good game created to look like a Byzantine mosaic! Adopting these limitations when appropriate offers artists a chance to take on problems nobody has seen handled before, and it's therefore more interesting than just working with the same artificial limitation everyone else is currently working with.
I'd just like to expand on the idea of a mosaic aesthetic a little bit more. It may seem like mosaics are just irregularly shaped pixels, but it's actually much more than that. Mosaics were made out of a variety of materials that scattered and reflected light in very different ways. Some tiles were matte, some colored glass, and others backed in gold leaf to amp up their reflectivity. Mosaic tiles were also angled to reflect light very strategically, allowing the artist to make some features grab your eye. A mosaic-based game would require a virtual mosaic toolset that would give artists the ability to simulate different tile materials and angles and a lighting engine to render the results. The resulting image would have complexity on a much smaller scale than a single tile.
[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/...
It's as if every musician under twenty was content to play in the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.
Don't get me wrong, I love pixel art — Paul Robertson and the Sword & Sworcery guys are doing some of my favorite work — but if the artists of yesterday were stuck in their own pasts… you know?
I feel like the author is so close to the issue that they lost the forest for the trees: there will always be some games that benefit from the pixel art, it just takes a full and proper understanding of what they style instantly communicates to your audience.
Anyway, whether or not something is old is immaterial. Pixar is making some of my favorite animation period, and they keep getting better. AND they're American.
By all means, dismantle my argument. I would be happy to discuss. I don't think ad hominem is the best place to start.
Thanks a lot for reading, either way!
I am not using a double standard. Though, even if both figures were deformed beyond what is absolutely realistic, there could still be well-executed and poorly-executed iterations.
Artists: 0
(I agree with him)