Scene Paintings

Lake

So, I'm more an artist than I am a programmer. I mostly paint traditionally in acrylics, with some pencil crayon highlights. Lately I've been doing more environmental stuff. It's strange, but working on games I gravitate towards pixel art. Sometimes I wonder what it would look like for a 2D game world to be fully painted. Probably the closest I'm familiar to with this would be Legend of Mana. That was a pretty game. But then, I'd start to worry about the sprites clashing with the backgrounds. I dunno, what do you folks think?

Calinou

There are some programs such as PixaTool and filters you can use to turn arbitrary images into pixel art :)

Lake

Converting to pixel art isn't too much of a pain. Although, I suppose if I was doing a lot of it, I'd rather pay than write my own tool. Then again, I'd like it a lot better if it were open source so I could tweak things and apply the code to other things...

Calinou

Then again, I'd like it a lot better if it were open source so I could tweak things and apply the code to other things...

To be fair, applying a bunch of filters in GIMP or another image editing tool could get you 90% of the way there (Adjust HSV -> Downsize with nearest neighbor interpolation -> Posterize -> …).

cybereality

Nice art.

Lake

To be fair, applying a bunch of filters in GIMP or another image editing tool could get you 90% of the way there (Adjust HSV -> Downsize with nearest neighbor interpolation -> Posterize -> …).

My sample above was done using nearest neighbor downsampling, converting to indexed color in Photoshop, changing the palette size to 8, then adjusting the palette indexes by hand to pump up the saturation and contrast. Of course, for really gorgeous pixel art I'd have want to do a ton of pixel-by-pixel hand edits to make it look just right--That's where 90% of the effort goes, even if visually, yeah, the purely mechanical stuff is what makes it recognizably pixel art.

See, what I'd really love is a workflow to convert art to indexed color in such a way that the palettes are truly interchangeable like in the old SNES game--maybe to 16 colors, with transparent, your darkest color, your lightest, two series of six in-between values representing two different hue and saturation curves between them, and a spot color. Figuring out an algorithm to cluster an image's color space around the appropriate values sounds like a real pain, though.

Nice art.

Thank you!

Calinou

Figuring out an algorithm to cluster an image's color space around the appropriate values sounds like a real pain, though.

pngquant's --posterize N option might be helpful here. pngquant uses Floyd-Steinberg dithering by default and is generally quite smart about palette quantization.