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[shrimp]

Just wrote a big rant and then deleted it.

Unlimited Detail annoys me too much to make a useful comment on the thread topic. Grrrrrrrr oh God I can't stop watching it :/

Heh check out the comment on that last video fishing for sponsors.

[Tycho Brahe]

god he is patronising 

[Ivan]

They "boosted graphics by a 1000 times"!

[BorisTheBrave]

So patronizing, I have to wonder who the video is actually aimed at. It's a turn off for developers who might actually use the technology, and a consumer will not really remember it for long enough to cause adoption of the technology.

[Dacke]

Bleh, you guys.
They have done something pretty cool and are (understandably) proud. They are happy about their new, shiny toy. Try to look at is as "enthusiasm" rather than "obnoxiousness". Breaking new ground is something worth celebrating, even if it's not completely revolutionary.

[PGGB]

So patronizing, I have to wonder who the video is actually aimed at. It's a turn off for developers who might actually use the technology, and a consumer will not really remember it for long enough to cause adoption of the technology.

I had this problem as well. They didn't go into technical detail at all which made it seem as if it was aimed at the consumer. But the consumer does not care about this technology until it's used in a real application. The ones who might be interested would need much more specific detail.

[Skofo]

The videos are aimed at clueless investors. It's odd to me that everyone else didn't immediately figure this. There are more types of people in the mainstream game scene than just developers and consumers.

That 'certain company' that rejected Unlimited Detail didn't do it because of a strong fetish for polygons as that asshat claimed, it is because they know bullshit when they smell it. The people who this presentation was targeted at, on the other hand, probably do not.

[Triplefox]

The thing which I think defines the pixel art look more than anything else is the color palette.




Here's a scene from Heavy Rain that I just ran through "1-bit palette mode" in GIMP. There's tons of detail lost that wouldn't be missing from a hand-crafted scene. I tried adjusting color curves to bring back some detail, but it proved tricky to make any improvement.

In general, hand-crafted pixel art won't try to butcher together a global palette like a full-screen shader effect; instead, the palette will be carefully tuned to emphasize each part of the scene differently. Color and lighting are also heavily related; exaggerated lighting warmth and shape preservation tends to be preferred to color accuracy in palette selection. Edge-detection and unsharp masking would also be useful towards this goal: I came across this tech demo of

recently; it's probably applicable to the problem.

So I think the way a 1-bit shader would work for the Heavy Rain scene is to say "strongly emphasize the edges of all models, then posterize each model separately with its own palette." Then you would be able to bring out appropriate amounts of detail from each object.



is an example of an alternate approach, which is to start from harshly palettized textures and use little or no actual scene lighting. That helps control the effect, I guess, but I found this game hard to look at, and it definitely isn't a "pixel art" look.

This still doesn't cover the low-res aspect of the problem, which is probably solvable with an LOD type of system that suggests giving certain polygons Z priority at a certain distance(which would pop them to the front). Again, it's a matter of preserving the shape.

[John Nesky]

Ooh, that unsharp thing looks interesting. I've already thought a bunch about how to make a monochrome renderer (it is one of my favorite art styles after all!) but I hadn't thought of that, thanks.

[Firepith]

Ok, ok, forget the shaders.

NEW IDEA

What about some kind of voxel engine that forces the voxels to always face the camera and calculate which voxels are in the foreground, and which are hidden (by the foreground ones, then force the foreground voxels to constantly form into a perfect grid, followed by edge detection that decides which voxels of a given object are the "outline" and changing them to another color (either lighter/darker depending on lighting angles, or just black, or ).

So you'd still have to create the voxel objects, but you don't have to draw a bunch of sprites. Everything is 3d, but appears 2D on-screen. Could this work? Would it allow for 3D lighting/shadow effects, etc, etc, ad infinitum???  

[drChengele]

Voxel thickness depends on zoom level, so I don't see this as applicable. One voxel can correspond to 0.0001, 1, or 100000 pixels based on the distance from the camera.

I still think that the correct way to go about this, if it is possible at all, would include PIXEL level processing. You need to be able to transform the scene into pixels and then work your magic at the pixel level. Of course the geometry pipeline can and should be tweaked to ease this process.

To do ANYTHING with this topic that isn't empty talk and theorizing, we must first define what pixel art is, i.e. the mathematical principles behind "good" and "desirable" pixel art.

Any takers?

[Firepith]

Voxel thickness depends on zoom level, so I don't see this as applicable. One voxel can correspond to 0.0001, 1, or 100000 pixels based on the distance from the camera.

Oh yeah. Well what if in the described model, the foreground voxels are always pushed to the same zoom level? I don't know, man. I'm not a technology guy, so all I can do is theorize.

[John Nesky]

You don't need to be a technology guy to tackle this problem, which I agree is an important one:

To do ANYTHING with this topic that isn't empty talk and theorizing, we must first define what pixel art is, i.e. the mathematical principles behind "good" and "desirable" pixel art.

[nikki]

maybe

• round the floating 3d position to integer
• posterize colors
• work in a small scale with not to many polygons
• apply 'pseudo hand pixeled' gradients
• disable rude anti-aliasing

 

[Firepith]

The above image is from Tales of Vesperia, a cel-shaded game.
I tried doing some filtering and resizing on various cel-shaded games' screenshots. This one turned out the best. Where I ran into trouble was keeping the black border from disappearing when I shrank the image, but this is an image editing problem. Now, I think this image looks allllllmost like pixel art. Not quite. But I wonder if anyone has or would be willing to try doing something with cel-shading at low res and zoomed in to achieve a convincing pixel art effect?

[drChengele]

But I wonder if anyone has or would be willing to try doing something with cel-shading at low res and zoomed in to achieve a convincing pixel art effect?

Well I would be willing to TRY SOMETHING, but I suspect you will need some vertex shader voodoo before true pixel art can be achieved, which is currently beyond my scope...

Now let's tackle this one step at a time. Your image and the black line outlying the girl gives me an idea. First we will need a way to get edge lines exactly one pixel wide between objects. I would go about this by looking up the z-value of every pixel and, where ever a pixel has a z-difference (with at least one of its 8 neighbours) greater than a threshold value, the pixel is an "edge" and is substituted by an "edge color". This would be applied only to the pixels who have SMALLER z's than 1 or more of their neighbours, so that the "edge line" is a property of the object sticking out. Combining sharp 1-pixel edges with cel shading would be a good first step towards a pixel art shader.

[gimymblert]

The image is a bit blurry but pixel perfect edge here (depth buffer post processing)





Blurry Vidéo
http://www.onlinegamesector.com/onlinevideo/6680/urban_race.htm

I have work on that game, i can tell you it's closer to the OP image (minus ray of god and fog)

Pixel art can be achieve with shader, some tweak, and obviously some graphic understaning BEFORE making the art.

[Ivan]

That's not pixelart.

[Skofo]

Ok, ok, forget the shaders.

NEW IDEA

What about some kind of voxel engine that forces the voxels to always face the camera and calculate which voxels are in the foreground, and which are hidden (by the foreground ones, then force the foreground voxels to constantly form into a perfect grid, followed by edge detection that decides which voxels of a given object are the "outline" and changing them to another color (either lighter/darker depending on lighting angles, or just black, or ).

So you'd still have to create the voxel objects, but you don't have to draw a bunch of sprites. Everything is 3d, but appears 2D on-screen. Could this work? Would it allow for 3D lighting/shadow effects, etc, etc, ad infinitum???  

Wouldn't the angled voxels would intersect one another in "pixel" form?

The above image is from Tales of Vesperia, a cel-shaded game.
I tried doing some filtering and resizing on various cel-shaded games' screenshots. This one turned out the best. Where I ran into trouble was keeping the black border from disappearing when I shrank the image, but this is an image editing problem. Now, I think this image looks allllllmost like pixel art. Not quite. But I wonder if anyone has or would be willing to try doing something with cel-shading at low res and zoomed in to achieve a convincing pixel art effect?

Whoa, that's pretty damn neat! What screenshot did you convert that from?

[Firepith]

Whoa, that's pretty damn neat! What screenshot did you convert that from?

Seems to work best with cel-shaded characters that have solid color texturing. I had much less successful results with other cel-shaded games like XIII.

Eww.

Here's one from a DBZ game!