hi i have only a mouse and i am really bad at pixel art whatever i do i am really bad i need help
i don’t want to do minimize graphism to my game pls comment i really need help
Pixel art is time-consuming to get done and even more time is needed to get it done properly, especially animated pixel art. My advice would be to learn and focus on vector art and use the various tools available, Spriter Pro, Spine etc to animate.
Unfortunately, pixel art requires an artists mind. If you don’t have it you just don’t have it.
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thanks for the advice
I personally never got good at pixel art. It feels much more “artsy” to me as compared to 3d modelling for example. With 3d modelling, you can often get away with things you can’t when using pixel art(though it applies the other way around as well). In 3d though, you can take a look at all sides of a thing and fix the anatomy, etc… which isn’t easily done with pixel art. You have to figure things out more directly in 2d space.
Basically, not saying I’m an artist by any stretch…but I can get much closer to acceptable results from 3d models as compared to 2d sprites. With 3d, I can tell the computer to give a sphere, and it will light it up according to the instructions I give it(moving lights around, etc…). It feels a little closer to coding than pixel manipulation does.
There are also advantages in other ways, for example, that you only have to create the model once, and once you do the animation and texturing, it is a matter of rendering it out. If it doesn’t look right, you can make slight changes to the model, and re-render. You don’t have to modify tons of pixels, etc… So basically once you get to a certain point, iteration is generally easy enough.
The disadvantages however, lie in that there is much more technical stuff to learn, more steps to get things going, etc… 3d isn’t for just anybody, though it may be more for some people than pixel manipulation is.
You can do pixel art with mouse, but it is called pixel art because you pretty much do it pixel by pixel.
I would not recommend to focus on vector art, because in my personal opinion, vector art tends to be significantly less expressive and worse looking most of the time.
If you’re going to do pixel art, get yourself Aseprite. It is availble on steam and it is not very expensive.
Also working at lower resolutions is easier, because you can brute force your way towards making your sprite look better.
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thanks for the advice
thanks for the advice
Pixel art is pixel by pixel. That’s why we call it pixel art. If you aren’t willing to play around with individual pixels, you should probably look for another art style.
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You can make pixel art from low poly 3d assets there a ton of that on the store.
There are many ways todo it and it can even be done in real time. This is first hit on google
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As MDA was mentioning you can take 3d models, render out an animation while keeping the model centered perfectly, then degrade the actual frame by frame images down to pixels.
It isn’t actually what I would call traditional pixel art but does work.
Allot of people don’t know this but MANY of the original DOOM games pixel art and assets where originally traditional stop-motion animation using puppets, dolls, and clay that they converted over to pixel art. Kinda like MoCap but for pixels.
EDIT: Here’s a little proof of concept I just whipped up out of a 3d tribal model I have. The original model was made (By me) in blender and has around 15k tris so it’s not exactly “Low” poly.
After rendering out a very very simple and short wave animation with a solid color easy to crop backround I loaded it into Photoshop, converted it over to pixels while trimming down the palette to 14 colors, then finally turned it into a .GIF
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This picture is an example of a 3d pre-rendered Asteroid(done in Blender). I also rendered a normal-map for it which I’m using in the shader to have the bullet light it up. It actually has an animation of 32 frames. I didn’t mess with cleanup, and don’t think I need to primarily because I’m not actually going for pixel art. But, this shows how you can use 3d to create 2d just serving as another example. Yes, I used Gamemaker Studio(pretend you don’t see the icon 
), and yes, Unity can do the same thing if you use the 2d side with a normal-mapping sprite shader.
One issue here is that in this case the animation usually will look bad and will have wooden movement. As you’ll be dealing with both limitations of pixelart and problems arising from animating things in 3d.
And “wooden movement that lacks fluidity” is a problem you’ll be very likely to hit when animating in 3d.
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Simply rendering a 3d model out as a sprite does not result in pixel art, and I personally wouldn’t call kburkhart84 or zypherem’s examples of pixel art. They just look like sprites of 3d models. For example, the rough edges around the sprite and between the quantized colours of zypherem sprite is generally not something you would expect to see in a style where the artist has taken care with each pixel individually.
This is a thing that applies even if you aren’t using 3d for pre-rendering sprites, though I think it gets worse in this case. The cool part about doing it as renders instead of real-time is that we can use any tools available in the modeller to make things better…in Blender, that includes things that would normally have to be baked into the animations, like driver usage, animating things that aren’t normally animated, like materials, and plenty of other nifty things, like hair, metaballs, modifiers, etc…
This is 100% accurate. If you lower the resolution and do some palette limitations, it may give the ILLUSION of stereotypical pixel art, but IMO the definition of pixel art is about the creation process in a literal sense, not the result. The 3d suggestion is more about an alternative to art in general instead of actual pixel art. It is technically off-topic though since the OP asked specifically about pixel art, though they also emitted a bit of a cry for help that wasn’t specific to the art type .
I would have to disagree with you. So long as you know what your doing and not being SUPER lazy and moving only 1 bone.
(As I did for the prototype proof of concept)
It isn’t hard at all to achieve fluid motions in blender. Especially considering the power of the timeline editors/keyframe systems.
I could easily spend a day and make that little pixel tribe guy dance with the grace of a flower petal dancing on the wind. But If I am gonna put that much effort into something like that, somebody had best be paying me for it.
(As for the rough edges and quality? I spent an hour on this and have never made anything close to pixel animation in my life. I am 100% certain though there are ways and methods to convert raw low res images over to direct vector pixels. And had I spent more than a little under an hour to make that little guy trust me. He would have buttery smooth edges. I just wasn’t gonna dish out that amount of effort to show a concept.)
Sorry, I just used it as an example, I didn’t mean to criticise your artistic skills in any way.
Pixel art has a particular “look” that is more than just being pixelated. It is traditionally the result of drawing sprites pixel-by-pixel, but there is no reason you cant create it using other methods such as rendering out 3d models and processing them (MDADigital’s examples, for example, do a decent job of looking like pixel art). It just takes some additional care and effort to try and capture that particular sort of look.
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It depends on exactly how you define “pixel-art.” Most times I’ve seen it discussed, the definition is more about how it is made than the final look. The way it is made is quite literally at the pixel level. This doesn’t mean you can’t modify more than one pixel at a time, rather the shortcuts taken are more about saving clicking on single pixels, not calculating things for you(like using photoshop brushes that do AA in 50 colors). And pixel art can be as small as 8x8 and as big as thousands by thousands of pixels(though bigger images take massive time if done as pixel art).
I have seen other define it the way you do however, with it being about the style of the end result. I see the merit in that definition, even if it isn’t my preferred definition. But like I said, at the least from what I’ve seen of the discussion, if you aren’t modifying the pixels directly, it isn’t really pixel art, even if it looks like it. I’m sure this community is full of opinions on the subject and I’m sure they will soon follow my post either way.
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By the time you know what you’re doing you would have years of experience as a professional animator, and then the question would be - why are you trying to do pixelart.
I would recommend to grab OLD tom and jerry cartoon and try to repeat what you see in 3d. It is incredibly, incredibly HARD.
Doll animation (doll, not clay), paperdoll animation, vector animation, and 3d animation are prone to wooden movement, because the model is constrained to a fixed form.
A drawing is not constrained by a fixed form, because of that, it is easy to deform the model to accomodate fluid movement.
Trying to make 3d look like 2d is difficult, as explained, for example, here.
Additionally, long time ago I heard advice of professional animators and that was to first animate the scene in 2d, and then work on it in 3d.
I also recommend to check this video, as iti s related to pixel art in general.
Especially if you “never did pixel art in your life”. As the point is to express what you had in mind using limited resolution AND palette. If you just render a 3d model and worry about sharp edges- that’s not really a pixel art.
If you want to make 2D mouse-only art, then vector art is the way to go.
Otherwise go 3D.
A short hike, is a 3D game that uses downscaling to give a pixelart-esque appearance.
Ori and the blind forest all the characters are 3D rendered to look 2D.
Multiple ways to go about it, but you will need an artists mind to make art. Changing the method wont solve that.