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[joekeller]

Hi, I've put together a breakdown of my process on some pixel art backgrounds I did awhile back.

I have more experience with painting and 3d than pixel art, so this way of tackling it leaned on those skills. Because of this, it might not always be the most efficient process. Hopefully it could atleast provide ideas for someone looking to go about creating pixel art backgrounds.




Step 1. 3d Render

The two main reasons I liked starting with a render:

• Gets the perspective of all the big shapes starting out "correct". My perspective knowledge is weaker than I would like so starting with a render gives me a solid base to work with and saves me time trying to fix wonky angles.
     
   
• Allows me to play with the composition quickly. I'd usually start with a small thumbnail drawing as a guide when modeling, but starting in 3d gives me a lot of flexibilty to make big adjustments on the fly. Lowering or raising the camera, turning it, moving/scaling the objects in the scene until I've got something I like.

Step 2. SUPER rough drawing

As you can tell this was super rough. Mostly just figuring out what all those primitive shapes were going to be.



Step 3. Clean up/Painting

I tried to make sure I had the basic color scheme, form, and lighting, but a lot less detail than if I were to just paint normally since I know it's going to be shrunk down and simplified even more.



Step 4. Shrunk and Indexed

Here I shrunk the image down to the final resolution (240x160), indexed it to around 80 colors to simplify the detail. You can also try reversing this, indexing it and then shrinking it which will give you a slightly different result.



Step 5. Pixel it out

Here I went in with a pixel brush at full opacity and just simplified all the forms and details to get the look I wanted.



Step 6. Color adjustments

Lastly I made some color and contrast adjustements to make it a little less green and saturate the colors in some areas. I also didn't have a strict rule about keeping a limited palette. I was mostly just going for a retro feeling look, so you can see some overlay/soft light gradients in the final image.


Here's the same basic process on another image:













Thanks for checking it out, hopefully this is helpful to someone. If there's feedback or questions let me know!

[eyeliner]

Nice technique! Thanks for sharing!

[InfiniteStateMachine]

That's some fine work. Very cool approach

[Bombini]

That is very helpful!

[Fat Pug Studio]

Great work, i really like the idea. I do something similar for my backgrounds, i'll make a post when i remember to take some screenshots

[Koobazaur]

I've tried the shrinking-down method (with nearest-neighbor) and haven't had too much success, but I didn't consider indexing. Great tip, I'll definitely make use of it!

I did a few quick rounds but it makes my shadowy areas fuzzy, rather than nice dilieations like in yours. What tools do you use? Do you do any other pre-process before indexing (like cut-out filter) to get it so smooth?

Also, what tools do you use? I mostly work with Photoshop.

[LambCannon]

Awesome technique, never thought of prepping a 3D greybox scene before drawing environments.

The final result is great, but "Step 3. Clean up/Painting" is also pretty amazing.