Finally finished installing the majority of my dev tools and other stuff to my new laptop.
It was pretty late so I thought why not waste some time pixeling. Used to enjoy doing that a lot and a couple years ago when I got back into game dev again decided I couldn’t be wasting time pixeling so I try to limit game art to 5 minutes max per object. Tonight I spent nearly 30 minutes making two trees just for fun.
When I do pixel art for fun I have a custom 52-color palette I made years ago. No, it is not the NES palette. It just happened to come out to be 52-colors.
So… here you go… both trees use 7 colors.
And here the trees are in 2X size:
I know there are some people who are always looking for 2D pixel art. In fact, I normally am myself just because I cannot afford the time to do it even though I do find it quite enjoyable. It is just very time consuming for me. The first tree took 12 minutes and the second tree took nearly 15 minutes. Which is insane for just two trees considering I normally only spend 45 minutes per night total working on my game projects.
Anyway, there you go. Two trees! Feel free to use them in your 2D games.
EDIT: Updated the shadow color on the second tree for leaves and trunk (yeah the one on the right) and pixeled two rocks.
2X
EDIT: I don’t know why. I guess I have been bored with programming lately and enjoyed the break I took last week when I did some pixeling. Here is a wizard I spent a bit of time on over my lunch break. 11x20 rectangle 7 colors. Animating him will be the part that takes the most time. I might dabble with it here and there occasionally. Tonight I need to get back to my shmup game. Anyway, have a wizard.
LOL you are seeing the Illuminati everywhere! I like the first better too. The second was just to have something different. A different style and more detail in the leaves. It’d be good for variety or to indicate a change of area or for a “find the special tree” quest or even for a bright sunny day and the other would work better for dawn or dusk.
LOL! Well you know it’s pixel art. While it can be used in a high-def display it is usually used in a low-res view. They’d be fine for 640x480 or 800x600 and possibly even 1024x768. Lower than 640x480 and they’d be some pretty big trees. 256x192 or 512x384 are good resolutions to work in for retro pixel art.
Anyway, I just updated the original “free trees” post above with two more images of the trees in 2x pixel size. So if you blew up the display by 2X with camera this is how the original trees would look.
Thanks for mentioning them being hard to see by the way! One other reason besides your resolution is likely you use the normal forum theme so you have bright white everywhere. I use firefox with the stylish addon. For me these forums are dark-skinned which makes everything easier to see.
Aw yass. That’s much better. The original tree looks even sexier and the second tree is clearly affected by light, not afflicted by parasites.
I use pyxel for my pixel art, and there’s an option when you export it to scale it up a bit A highly recommend it, since it made even a noob like me able to do basic pixel art.
That is what I use and used for the trees. PyxelEdit. Excellent software! I used to use the Allegro Sprite Editor years ago but doesn’t seem very good on these modern machines. So for quite a while now until just a week ago I used Paint Shop Pro. The thing I really like about PyxelEdit is being able to easily pull in a palette from any image. So I just load up my 52-color palette image and it pulls in the palette. Before I loaded that image in PSP then created a second blank image and eyedropper selected colors from the palette image. Pyxel Edit reminds me of the kind of sprite editors I am used to even back on the Amiga.
I actually have multiple palette images ranging from 8 to 64 colors. So… I shouldn’t say always use the 52-color palette but for simplicity I did. I did use the 52-color palette for the trees. Working with a fixed palette helps to make everything in the scene blend together better.
I am sure I don’t quite use it to its potential haha. I used it to make some art for an attack on titan infinite runner for school a few semesters ago.
You’re joking?! One to two hours just to do a crate model? Or you mean the model and the texture? I could spend longer on an object like the tree and make it better. It just seems like a waste of time to do so. How can you get anything done if you spend up to 2 hours on a crate? I mean you’d have to spend full-time maybe even 12 hours per day for a long time just to get the graphics done. I used to model a lot too but stopped that also. Maybe tonight I will start the stopwatch and see how long it takes to do a crate. I am sure yours will be far better. lol
Keep in mind though 3D is definitely more work for a static object where you have to model the object, map out the UVs (I used a product called Ultimate Unwrap 3D not sure if it is still around but was awesome) then create the texture (which to me is basically the same work as creating the object in 2D).
However, for animation 2D pixel art can be a pain in the arse very tedious process. I always used the onion skin approach completely redrawing the image frame by frame. 3D Modeling made that part much faster. I just created a skeleton, attached the model, locked certain axis and set the range of motion on others set the start angles and end angles and the software basically animated it for me. Not sure what the modern workflow is for that stuff.
EDIT: I am not saying this like “holy crap you are too slow!” because I know absolutely whatever you are making is looking far better than what I’d be making or even could make. Want to get that out there right now. All I am saying is to me… just my opinion… I cannot spend that kind of time making graphics or I would “never” get anything done.
Imagine even 10 to 20 minutes spent per 2D image. Just to have a decent one-screen worth of scene would require many different tiles perhaps I could get away with 64 tiles but more likely would need around 128 and possibly even 256 tiles. That would basically be like 5 trees (64 tiles), 10 trees (128 tiles) or 20 trees worth of tiles. Assuming 10 trees worth it would be about 3 to 4 hours (more than 2 the math says because I would need to continually stop and start making new images/tiles) or possibly more.
That is the easy part. Then comes the animation. Adding characters. Each character would be about like making say half of a tree. But then add in walking frames, jumping frames, ducking frames, attacking frames, dying frames, etc and one character ends up being like 5 to 6 trees worth of time. Plus I just find that part more time-consuming in general. So it’d probably be like 2 to 4 hours just to animate each character. See… I have to get into “art mode”. My brain seems to have distinct phases. When I am in programmer mode and try to draw I cannot. When I am in art mode I would not want to try to program or I do crazy things. And I have to be in one mode or the other and it takes some time to switch.
I checked it out and almost bought it. It looks like an awesome deal. Unfortunately, just when I was about to get it I noticed it said requires Unity 5.1.0 or higher. I use Unity 4.6.7f1 and have no desire to upgrade to 5 yet. So this one is out.
UnitZ, on the other hand, requires Unity 4.6.1 or higher so that means it is the best! lol
Thanks, I added them to my forest stage. Having worked with vector, hi resolution raster and 3D graphics before, pixel art is by far the golden god of computer graphics, simply because it DNGAF about resolution and the overhead is a joke (35.5kb bwahaha) Pixel art is dead. Long live pixel art.
You can do multiple installs. I’m currently on 5.0, but I also have 4.3, and 4.6 installed. And I have the 5.1 installer downloaded, but saw nothing in the change log to make me jump just yet.
Yeah I’m talking from start to finish, box modelling, high poly, re-topo and texturing…
Over the years I’ve figured out what I can “get away” with though, at the moment I’m doing an underground part (corridor) based setup and mainly just bevelling away (most of it’s hard surface anyway). The scene will probably be between 400 - 500K tris, which is nothing really. So I’ll not bother doing retopo (unless there is some REALLY high poly detail in places)…
Which takes far less time, so I suppose it depends really :)…
Technology has allowed us to get away with a lot more (maybe be a bit lazy), not like I’m going to dump a load of two million poly sculpts in the scene of course, characters (uhhh) still have to be decimated etc.
It still takes a bloody long time to get it right… If I was doing it for an asset store release, I’d spend roughly double the time to get everything as low poly as possible, add LOD’s etc.
For my own game, there’s no real need 75 % of the time… Organic modelling is a bit more tricky and requires a deeper workflow (which takes more time)… Again it all depends.
Correct me if I’m wrong here, it seems pixel art has largely remained the same over the years?
I don’t blame you at all. I wish I could stick with 4.6 for a while, but I need some of the pro features for a project (plus I’m an asset store publisher).
But it’s definitely not a bad idea to have at least 2 versions installed.
A highly recommend it, since it made even a noob like me able to do basic pixel art.
