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[Howard Day]

Working on custom shaders and rendering in unity to make 3d objects render like classic pixel art. Some success so far! The web build is here: http://www.hedfiles.net/PixelShader/PixelShader.html








I'm going to put together a tutorial and release the source when it's closer to done-ish.
Enjoy!

[s0]

damn, those look amazing

[Shackhal]

Working on custom shaders and rendering in unity to make 3d objects render like classic pixel art. Some success so far! The web build is here: http://www.hedfiles.net/PixelShader/PixelShader.html

I'm going to put together a tutorial and release the source when it's closer to done-ish.
Enjoy!

Holy crap, looks awesome!

Here is another mockup using 16 colors

[Areku]

Working on custom shaders and rendering in unity to make 3d objects render like classic pixel art. Some success so far! The web

 

Impressive. Amazingly so, in fact. With the scale at 3X it achieves the look of Fury3 or Wing Commander better than anything I'd seen before!

[happymonster]

Very impressive Howard! 

[Howard Day]

Thanks!
Okay, took the opportunity to put together a little kitbashed space fighter from bits. It looks pretty neat! First is in the native, intentional palette, the second is indexed to the Raptor Call of the Shadows palette. :D


..and a angled verticle SHMUP version!


Enjoy!

[Schoq]

That obviously looks amazing, but there's something about the flare glare there that breaks the illusion a bit. No clue about the process but maybe you need to split it up into a step where you put the glare on top of the finished render, instead of including it in whatever whatever it is you're doing to make these models look like that?
If that makes sense?

[J-Snake]

Working on custom shaders and rendering in unity to make 3d objects render like classic pixel art.

An issue with it though is the amount of aliasing, it is something classic pixel art doesn't have (except you zoom constantly).

[{VeTeR}]

This looks awesome man! Very nice game setting. With music and shadows it could be dark atmosphere level 83

[Lee]

In my opinion the biggest issue with the shader is that it has nice smooth animation, whilst you will probably see low fps keyframe based animation in sprite based games. The lack of hand-posed animation frames really kills the whole pixel art effect.

[diegzumillo]

Those aren't problems per se. It's different. It's still charmingly minimalist! I like it :D

A friend of mine is making a game and I'm making the art. Today I made a mockup of what the game could look like eventually.


^{I want food! I want food! I want food!}

There should be a blue wizard at the other corner.

[Howard Day]

Schoq: Wow, that's great feedback! I'll look into changing that... though if I want the whole scene indexed to the same palette, that might be tricky.

Lee: Yes! That was just a quick effort to show the rotation with the scaled fighter. in any game I'd make the rotational angles would be snapped - to 5deg most likely. :D

The Indexing shader that I wrote wasn't quite doing what I thought it was. As a result...the indexed colors were being smoothly interpolated. This is, safe to say, not the intended behavior. I've since fixed it, and now, the indexed results are absolutely perfect. Kills me that I missed something this stupid. Ugh. UGH.
Here's a look at the new output - pay attention to the LUT cube in the upper left. :D


So that's settled, and a weight off my mind. The next thing on my ToFIX list was the AA. It was very blurry - and just..looked artificial, and not pixeled at all. So, I figured out a method around that. The Scene is rendered with AA at 3x the final screen resolution.. then Nearest Neighbor scaled to the final desired resolution. Here's the image with no AA:

And with the new AA!


I'm stoked. It looks much improved to me!
I'd love to hear any and all feed back and thoughts you guys have.

Enjoy!

[gimymblert]

Purist would certainly point at some flaws, but as far as emulating pixel art by automating mean it's impressive, the trend of emulated pixel art si growing, that's the third with that blender plug in (see 3D art trick references thread) and index painting in photoshop proposed in the art thread.

Will there be an article about how you achieve that?

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

Yo Howard this looks super great, fantastic result. Is this a screen shader, ie could you feed this 2d images or textured assets and get out the same clamping? Have you experimented with baking similarly limited palette normal or gloss maps?

[ProgramGamer]

Purist would certainly point at some flaws, but as far as emulating pixel art by automating mean it's impressive, the trend of emulated pixel art si growing, that's the third with that blender plug in (see 3D art trick references thread) and index painting in photoshop proposed in the art thread.

Will there be an article about how you achieve that?

You could always refine the sprites post-render if you export them to a spritesheet for in-game use. Seriously, this could be a huge time-saver in terms of generating game graphics that both look great, accurate and crispy!

[EvilDingo]

[You could always refine the sprites post-render if you export them to a spritesheet for in-game use. Seriously, this could be a huge time-saver in terms of generating game graphics that both look great, accurate and crispy!

I think that would look much more impressive in real-time 3D instead of using it create 2D sprites.

[mtarini]

Here's the image with no AA: (img)
And with the new AA! (img)
I'd love to hear any and all feed back and thoughts you guys have.

First, let me tell you how crazy-good these pixel-art renderings are.
Wow. Really well done, kudos, I'm dyeing to know more about the how.
Not to mention, I can't wait to play that thing, whatever it is! I envision how the 5deg snapping it will add to the style illusion/confusion/mix-up [salivation intensifies]. It will look like playing some game with insanely well animated pixel-art graphics.

That said, maybe I'm totally off target, but, to me, the no-AA version would seem overall to be more similar to traditional pixel-art style (although there clearly are still a few pixels here and there not behaving the way they should).

Take this example: [screenshot from Metal Slug], which I think we might safely assume to be one of the pixel-art unsurpassed achievement, and observe the pixels at the silhouettes (e.g. around the middle three, the characters, the lines between the bricks). They seem to be crisp and non-AAed. Metal slug screenshots featuring mechinical things like [this one] are even more convincing.

[Despain]

Did some drawing for mockups of interface and style for a platforming adventure game.

[Howard Day]

Got dithered Alpha working! Boy, do I like this effect. It's much better than just straight alpha.

Enjoy!

[gimymblert]

we are effectively in HOLY SHIT! territories!

Is it unity? asset store that asap! ASAP!