New Algorithm to Depixilize Pixel Art is Magical.

Tain said:
Hideous. People should instead be talking about the new MAME D3D9 HLSL filter, now part of official MAME.

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on an unrelated note, why do people keep using imageshack? every image from them links me to this:

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stop using that crap, please.
 
The graphics looks silly... Why don't they just figure out how to imitate what old TVs did to make the pixel art look good (as intended)?
 
Even the "HELP" speech bubble shows the issues with this. The text is clearly supposed to be bold and angular, not some flowing bubbly shit.
 
I kinda feel sorry for the OP. He seems to not have an understanding that pixel art is a specific look for its own sake, and rushed to show off what seemed to be a way to "make it modern".

The thing about pixel art of yore, is that the artist who had to construct it so painstakingly did just that: they painstakingly crafted the art to look exactly as it does and made every single pixel count.

You can't smear, interpolate, or otherwise fuck with that artwork without changing what makes it aesthetically pleasing.
 
RomanticHeroX said:
Oh god why would you desecrate beautiful pixel art like that
epmode said:
What's wrong with chunky pixles, anyway? What a waste of technology.
Guardian Bob said:
Give me pixels or death.

Uh... you guys know that the graphics of older games don't ACTUALLY look like that on the actual hardware, right? The creators of these games knew that the TVs at the time would smooth out the graphics and make them look completely different than how they look on a computer monitor. When sitting at a reasonable distance from an old TV you can't see the pixels.

In other words... there's a massive amount of false nostalgia going on here
 
Kiiji said:
Uh... you guys know that the graphics of older games don't ACTUALLY look like that on the actual hardware, right? The creators of these games knew that the TVs at the time would smooth out the graphics and make them look completely different than how they look on a computer monitor.

In other words... there's a massive amount of false nostalgia going on here

Right, those examples on the left aren't accurate at all. Perfectly blocky integer scaling is often nothing like what the original artists of these games worked with. They were drawn to look good on low res CRT displays.

Which is why people should look into the new MAME HLSL filter that I posted a shot of. It has a ton of options to simulate the look of a CRT, built out of a good chunk of research as to how CRT displays work.
 
Tain said:
Hideous. People should instead be talking about the new MAME D3D9 HLSL filter, now part of official MAME.
Is that a camera picture of your screen, or does the filter actually make it look like that on the screen?

Because that is terrible.

Literal pain in my eyes.
 
purely the filter baby

I don't use those settings (I have less curvature and defocusing), but it's close enough to give an idea.
 
Kaijima said:
I kinda feel sorry for the OP. He seems to not have an understanding that pixel art is a specific look for its own sake, and rushed to show off what seemed to be a way to "make it modern".

The thing about pixel art of yore, is that the artist who had to construct it so painstakingly did just that: they painstakingly crafted the art to look exactly as it does and made every single pixel count.

You can't smear, interpolate, or otherwise fuck with that artwork without changing what makes it aesthetically pleasing.
i judge the images based on what i actually see and not memories of the games on my tv 15 years ago or some sort of hidden factor of hard work. i'm glad to not be blinded by nostalgia either way.
 
Kiiji said:
Uh... you guys know that the graphics of older games don't ACTUALLY look like that on the actual hardware, right? The creators of these games knew that the TVs at the time would smooth out the graphics and make them look completely different than how they look on a computer monitor. When sitting at a reasonable distance from an old TV you can't see the pixels.

In other words... there's a massive amount of false nostalgia going on here
I am quite aware how the pixels would look like on those TVs. I still own a SD TV and old systems and have played them recently.





Personally, I like pixels more than these filters. And it's not because of the nostalgia.
 
That MAME filter is so sexy. Is it a computer hog?

Green Biker Dude said:
i judge the images based on what i actually see and not memories of the games on my tv 15 years ago or some sort of hidden factor of hard work. i'm glad to not be blinded by nostalgia either way.

Errr. Not all of us are blinded by nostalgia, we just have preferences.
 
For emulators and such: Cool. More options is always a good thing.

For downloadable rereleases and such?

Just hire a fucking anime studio.

Not that hard.

Looking at you Capcom.
 
Slamtastic said:
For emulators and such: Cool. More options is always a good thing.

For downloadable rereleases and such?

Just hire a fucking anime studio.

Not that hard.

Looking at you Capcom.
Yeah you look at them like that and we'll get Udon again. Is that what you really want?

Seriously, Omar Dogan or bust
 
TheOGB said:
Yeah you look at them like that and we'll get Udon again. Is that what you really want?
Yes because if it turns out bad, I could just go into the options menu and pick classic sprites.

Win-win no matter what.
 
Gravijah said:
That MAME filter is so sexy. Is it a computer hog?



Errr. Not all of us are blinded by nostalgia, we just have preferences.
No way man, we're wrong. How can we prefer pixels over blobby filters? BLINDED BY NOSTALGIA!
 
Slamtastic said:
For emulators and such: Cool. More options is always a good thing.

For downloadable rereleases and such?

Just hire a fucking anime studio.

Not that hard.

Looking at you Capcom.
Replacing beautiful pixel art with some fugly "HD" shit? No thanks. SSF2THDR looked atrocious.
 
qq more said:
No way man, we're wrong. How can we prefer pixels over blobby filters? BLINDED BY NOSTALGIA!
Blocky, Blobby, or Blurry.

Those are your choices, and they're all bad to some degree.

Lesser of evils situation.
 
Aigis said:
Replacing beautiful pixel art with some fugly "HD" shit? No thanks. SSF2THDR looked atrocious.
I thought SSF2THDR pretty good though.



...Then again, it's been a while since I last saw the game.
 
qq more said:
No way man, we're wrong. How can we prefer pixels over blobby filters? BLINDED BY NOSTALGIA!
pixel artist defending pixel art, news at eleven

forum full of people who grew up playing games with pixel art defending pixel art, right after the previous news segment
 
Green Biker Dude said:
pixel artist defending pixel art, news at eleven

forum full of people who grew up playing games with pixel art defending pixel art, right after the previous news segment

Yes, people who like pixel art are defending it...
 
Green Biker Dude said:
pixel artist defending pixel art, news at eleven

forum full of people who grew up playing games with pixel art defending pixel art, right after the previous news segment
I didn't grow up with 2D games but that's all I play nowadays. This shit is offensive to the artists and just downright ugly. All it does is smear the image and destroys detail.

People who like this shit are probably the same people who think excessive DNR looks good on Blu-ray releases, or like QTEC filtered anime.
 
Green Biker Dude said:
pixel artist defending pixel art, news at eleven

forum full of people who grew up playing games with pixel art defending pixel art, right after the previous news segment
Pixel art didn't really look like that on CRTs after the Atari era. Art composed of massive distinct blocks is a relatively new thing.
 
Green Biker Dude said:
pixel artist defending pixel art, news at eleven

forum full of people who grew up playing games with pixel art defending pixel art, right after the previous news segment
I grew up with N64/PS1 games too, but I'm not defending their graphics. And I think they look ugly nowadays.


Blind nostalgia has nothing to do with my preferences on pixel art.
 
qq more said:
I grew up with N64/PS1 games too, but I'm not defending them.

You should. They're beautiful in their own special ways.

So are Atari games. And vecter based arcade games/console games. The list goes on and on.
 
Slamtastic said:
For emulators and such: Cool. More options is always a good thing.

For downloadable rereleases and such?

Just hire a fucking anime studio.

Not that hard.

Looking at you Capcom.

Yeah my feelings exactly, I'd want to see these in action to really give an opinion. I like the non-character sprites, I also like how Yoshi and the Space Invader looks. Toad looks like some kind of stained glass art. Not bad stilled, but I'd imagine it would look weird in motion. The Axe Battler looks atrocious though. I never cared for these kinds of filters in emulators I think I've only dabbled in H2Q4x here and there. I've been more of a middle ground kind of guy, just a TINY touch of smoothness to blend the pixels slightly mostly for large pixel art in Arcade games and to make sure the sprites still look pixelated but in a way I can still see the character's features first before the pixels. SNK's PS2 ports were AWESOME with how you could customize the sprites to your liking. OP could have them blurry and unpixelated as hell, and total pixel purists can have their pixel perfect sprites, and I could have mine with just a hint of smoothness.
 
Aigis said:
Curvature, RGB aperture, shadow masks.

lol why would anybody want to emulate CRT curvature? Perfect example of nostalgia getting in the way of what is actually better.
 
onken said:
lol why would anybody want to emulate CRT curvature? Perfect example of nostalgia getting in the way of what is actually better.
You can adjust it. The image is on the more extreme end of settings to show what it can emulate.
 
loosus said:
The Yoshi sprite is a prime example of why these algorithms will never work. Look at his nose. It looks deformed because his left nostril was incorrectly identified by both algorithms as being part of the border rather than a nostril. And because there is no color green to the left of that one-pixel nostril in the original pixel art, the algorithm could not realistically know that there should be any green over there.

Real-time post-processing probably isn't the best use for algorithms like these. I wouldn't mind seeing them used as a base for HD remakes, though - dump the graphics of the original title, batch-convert them using an algorithm like this, then have artists do manual touchup rather than just using the raw output. Less time-consuming than redrawing every tile and frame, but you'd get much better results than you would just shoving the visuals through a filter.
 
Gravijah said:
That MAME filter is so sexy. Is it a computer hog?

It's just about entirely GPU-dependent. I'm sure you'd be fine with, say, a Radeon 4850 or something, but I don't know how far back you can go.
 
Tain said:
Hideous. People should instead be talking about the new MAME D3D9 HLSL filter, now part of official MAME.

[im]http://y2gqvw.blu.livefilestore.com/y1ppJDAIJGnm9KL1vWy4YAvVpgdIaY9f5pFOEmvZNAl-jgI9kVBcQtHFPmABCuf-COPHX-qDm0wzI5qgKtSMhTLjWnFxJ-GA0Qy[/img]

Scanlines and curvature of the screen to emulate the old CRTs? BRB


lol why would anybody want to emulate CRT curvature? Perfect example of nostalgia getting in the way of what is actually better.

Because that is how it looked on the original arcades?
 
Well done pixel art can still be pretty awesome and is still a viable art form. Not an old 16x16 sprite zoomed x8 which is probably what the clueless have in mind (i.e. blocky mess). I hope 2d hand drawn sprites never die. I can see this being useful for certain things (read: old emulated stuff) but it loses some detail of course.
 
Tain said:
It's just about entirely GPU-dependent. I'm sure you'd be fine with, say, a Radeon 4850 or something, but I don't know how far back you can go.

Haha, I'm screwed. Sometime in the future, then. Thanks. :)
 
Kiiji said:
Uh... you guys know that the graphics of older games don't ACTUALLY look like that on the actual hardware, right? The creators of these games knew that the TVs at the time would smooth out the graphics and make them look completely different than how they look on a computer monitor. When sitting at a reasonable distance from an old TV you can't see the pixels.
In other words... there's a massive amount of false nostalgia going on here

I feel like saying that the graphics of the older games DID look like that if you used a decent display. Granted, that would involve using a monitor designed for old computers and not a run-of-the-mill TV, but the "the graphics were all smoothed out" thing is really a gross exaggeration. Yes, the graphics weren't as sharply blocky -- but they looked far closer to that than any of the filter smoothing attempts. Urk.
 
Look, for pixel artwork like what we see in games this is crap, and quite frankly all attempts to "smooth" them to get a higher resolution make no sense. However, if this were to eventually be worked with to vectorize bitmap images it could potentially lead to some amazing abilities to enhance details or pixelated objects in digital images.

However, all you CSI fans you should remember that the "enhance" tool on that show is not what I am talking about, and is and always will be impossible to do.

You cannot enhance what isn't in the photo. Some things are simply too pixelated to be left as anything more than shades in a digital images if it's too far away so no "Corneal imaging" for you folks getting off on the prospect of vectorizing bitmap images.

No, by "enhance" I mean that it could vectorize a bitmap and then enhance the color appearance of the image by smoothing it out. This would just be something useful for taking the graininess out of peoples faces or hair in images taken from too far away or on poor resolution cameras. It would clean up a lot of things without the need for detailed photoshop airbrushwork.

Other than this use though its a dud. Smoothing isn't good in any form for old pixelated games and no one wants classic titles to look like a childs oil painting.
 
Shrinnan said:
You have reduced pixel art into mere clip art! Do you realize what you've done?!

^Winner

It's better, and could be kinda fun to see someone work towards making art with the filter in mind; could be an odd, rounded style in and of itself.

But... yeah. I'll be very happy if, one day, the only filter we need for pixel art... is the artist who decides to draw it at "modern" resolutions! Tech that speeds up the process, not tries to hide it like an old embarassment.

Oh yeah, and new MAME filter looks pretty cool.
 
SAB CA said:
But... yeah. I'll be very happy if, one day, the only filter we need for pixel art... is the artist who decides to draw it at "modern" resolutions! Tech that speeds up the process, not tries to hide it like an old embarassment.

The thing about pixel art is, if you draw it at 'modern' resolutions, it stops being pixel art. The real artistry is the way artists can suggest details with a handful of carefully-placed pixels. When the resolution's high enough that you're hard-pressed to make out individual pixels and actually need to draw in those details, you're just making hi-res 2D artwork, and placing one pixel at a time is just a waste of effort. At that point, you're better off just doing traditional 2D animation with pen and ink, then scanning and coloring it. (Unfortunately, that's a lot of work, too. :s )
 
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