Creating pixel art | MSX Resource Center (Page 3/40)

Par yzi

Champion (444)

10-01-2016, 17:20

Here's one more pixel art tutorial
http://androidarts.com/pixtut/pixelart.htm

Par Grauw

Ascended (10819)

10-01-2016, 22:52

sd_snatcher wrote:

I'd recommend this excellent pixel art tutorial on Pixel Joint Forum.
[…]
And, of course, palette crafting is also very important. This tutorial explains it in great detail.

yzi wrote:

Here's one more pixel art tutorial
http://androidarts.com/pixtut/pixelart.htm

Nice, lots of stuff I hadn’t considered before.

Par Grauw

Ascended (10819)

10-01-2016, 23:29

Quote:

JMP (Japanese Machine Palette)

I wanted to do the MSX palette because it has some character. I suppose there aren't any "official" RGB colors for it though. Working with the MSX sprite restrictions is quite an interesting challenge / puzzle. Each 8px line of a tile can only have two colors out of the 16 (which includes a transparent first index). The restrictions dictate how the characters are formed, so good animation is an even bigger puzzle than static poses!

The girl-portrait does not follow restrictions. Also, only the background tiles can have multiple colors, apparently the sprites are solid. Castle Excellent got around this by using BG tiles for movable characters, and I think some overlay sprites for skintones.

Did a Sonic mockup just for fun.

In the chat based on syn’s ultimate 16 colour palette link we were just talking about what MSX games would look if the palette were more carefully picked, seems this guy had a similar thought :).

Par syn

Prophet (2133)

10-01-2016, 23:37

if I recall correctly wolf posted an analysis here on MRC a long time ago about color palettes.. about that the MSX1 has some problems and that the c64's was considered very well balanced.. cant remember the specifics of that discussion though.

Par Grauw

Ascended (10819)

10-01-2016, 23:41

Quote:

Long ago there were computers with built in color palettes. The older BBC Micro for example, had only 8 colors, whilst the NES could pick colors from a (not quite) 64 color palette (though the sprites could only use 4 or 3). Generally, these kind of built in palettes seem to have been designed by an engineer and not an artist (perhaps reistors connected to the video signal). Computers were made to display text in readable (fully saturated) colors, but some systems ended up being used a lot for gaming instead. The C64 is a bit of an exception with its more muted 16 color palette, which I heard was carefully designed.

Par syn

Prophet (2133)

10-01-2016, 23:58

Palettes matter a lot.. look at the master system and nes.. they could display more colors simultaniously onscreen but msx2 in screen 4/5/7 has more colors to pick from (16 out of 512 instead of 25/32 out of 50-64). I always felt msx2 games looked better and actually thought the NES had fewer colors on screen... and I was kinda shocked to discover that it could actually display more on screen at the same time compared to msx2 in screen 4 or 5 (where most games are working in).

Par Daemos

Prophet (2165)

11-01-2016, 00:39

Quote:

C64 is a bit of an exception with its more muted 16 color palette, which I heard was carefully designed.

I have to dig deep but actually the designer of that VDP was interviewed once and told the interviewer they just picked some colors because they where running out of time

"I'm afraid that not nearly as much effort went into the color selection as you think. Since we had total control over hue, saturation and luminance, we picked colors that we liked. In order to save space on the chip, though, many of the colors were simply the opposite side of the color wheel from ones that we picked. This allowed us to reuse the existing resistor values, rather than having a completely unique set for each color.[7]"

Par Grauw

Ascended (10819)

11-01-2016, 01:28

Well, at least they looked at a colour wheel, and picked colours that they liked (=were aesthetically pleasing to them) .

I don’t have a high opinion of the C64 palette btw, too much brown in it.

Par wolf_

Ambassador_ (10135)

11-01-2016, 20:20

syn wrote:

if I recall correctly wolf posted an analysis here on MRC a long time ago about color palettes.. about that the MSX1 has some problems and that the c64's was considered very well balanced.. cant remember the specifics of that discussion though.

To be exact: the MSX1 palette is way too bright, and I would've wished for some other gradients.

What you probably recall is the wiki article I've made about it: http://www.msx.org/wiki/Setting_up_a_palette

The C64 palette is not the 'happiest' palette ever, it's not as saturated as the MSX palette, but it's somehow very easy to involve several colours that together still make up for pleasing gradients.

Par syn

Prophet (2133)

11-01-2016, 22:06

wolf thats probably it, although I seem to recall some 2 color tables (msx1 and c64) being posted for comparison.. or maybe i am misremembering things..

Anyway indeed, there are some decent articles to be found here on mrc as well

for sprite design i thought this article about OR Color was useful http://www.msx.org/wiki/The_OR_Color