How Indie Games Texture EVERYTHING

what do you see when I show you this image how about this one you're probably thinking pixel art and you'd be right kind of let me explain if you've been keeping up with Indie Games over the past decade you might have noticed a trend pretty much every game coming out has been using pixel art and that begs the question why well I did some research on this topic and let me tell you the results I found were insane not only did I find the methods they used to get this amazing art style but how we can replicate it and make our own pixel art in seconds [Music] when we're talking about pixel art specifically in games there are two methods of creating the assets and the problem a lot of people face is that pixel art is hard you have to create each character pixel by pixel understand color theory limited palettes and on top of all that you need to create Sprite sheets do you see the problem yet this workflow is insane you're having to create tens sometimes even hundreds of individual Sprites just for character animation alone this isn't including things like weapons or environments oh and not to mention design changes if you want to make a fresh new weapon or change the design of an existing one you have to do the whole process again from the start this can the progress of a game's development and for some it definitely did but I want to hide in on one game in particular and it's this game I'll learn that popularized the new age Pixlr workflow which is Method number two wow what are you doing motion twin is a game Studio based in France and they actually made a slew of games before reaching their breakout success I'm talking of course about dead cells this game was Monumental in the creation of pixel art not because of the style but because of how they made their spreadsheets instead of going pixel by pixel and manually drawing each characters of multiple animations they developed a way to automate the process and it's why they were able to push out a crazy amount of updates to the game during its Early Access run on Steam this included things like new weapons characters even full-blown environments all of these were able to be created and implemented into the game almost on a monthly basis the methods they used to achieve this workflow are actually super simple but not as simple as learning a new skill with the sponsor of today's video skillshare is an online learning platform curated to show the best of the best creators you can learn everything from 3D all the way to pixel art with literally hundreds of career Focus classes to start the new year the right way plus it's entirely ad free if you're like me I love learning new skills and with the theme of this video I've been watching introduction to pixel art by Simon Sanchez this class gets you super comfortable with pixel art Basics and how to create gorgeous designs the traditional way with skillshare no goal is too small whether you want to explore 3D or pixel art skillshare teachers take you step by step through the process if you're still watching this and aren't convinced well skillshare has hooked me up with an amazing offer for you the first 1000 people to use the link below will get a full one month free trial of skillshare that's more than enough time to binge watch a certain someone's classes grab your free month below and thank you so much to skillshare for sponsoring this video oh yeah so in order to automate the process of pixel art dead cells needed to find a way to generate pixels instead of drawing them manually and luckily enough this was actually done Years Ago by a little company you may know called rare that's right Donkey Kong Country the Sprites in this game were actually made by modeling Donkey Kong in 3D and rendering them out into spreadsheets this was some of the first instances of pre-rented Sprites being used in video games now back then with their primitive technology the render was pretty much already a Sprite and they were going for a more 3D style anyway but for dead cells they wanted pixel art not just a flat 3D render and this is where the next step of the process comes into play [Music] pixel art is one of the few art Styles born out of limitations limiting the palette of color you can use and the amount of pixels forces you to think outside the box however with dead cells they quickly learned that they could create essentially anything in 3D space and convert it from a high quality render to a low resolution pixel art with some simple post-processing this is why they could create tons of new assets for the game and sometimes just weeks so how did they do it well it's through a process called quantization in layman's terms they create a model in 3D render the image scale it down to pixelate the image then scale it back up it essentially limits the amount of pixels available to work with and creates that crisp pixel art style with way less effort but it doesn't stop there you can see here with smeef the color palette isn't huge but it still doesn't feel quite like pixel art that's because we need to convert and limit the color palette to do this it's the same process but with the HSV values instead essentially you separate each value add some math in between choose the number of colors that you want your image to be limited to and combine the HSV values again now you can see the massive difference this makes and especially when using a smaller color palette of two to four colors this process rapidly speeds up the workflow to creating pixel art but there's still one more way that details was able to push this effect even further [Music] but game engines oftentimes they'll be emissive materials or objects that directly interact with lighting if you're pre-rendering a Sprite or into your game there's almost always going to be problems with how Lads interact with it because it's essentially a flat plane there's no information on the Sprite to tell the game engine how a light will interact with it so it'll just end up looking like trash and this is where the concept of imposters come in this is a term commonly used for optimizing a game engine and it's actually heavily used in breath of the wild if you have a dense model like a tree for example but it's super far away from the camera you don't need to render all that geometry instead you could just render a flat plane image of the tree habit always facing the camera and bake the normal map data into it this means that the lights will still interact with the spread and your game isn't going to explode from the insane amount of triangles it's trying to render now for dead cells they're not trying to render 3D objects and triangles but this workflow is still relevant to them as you can see the lights in the game interact beautifully with its characters and environments so now you know the process of pixel art creation it's actually fairly simple but if you don't know how to use blender or other 3D software you kind of have a bad time and if you'd like to fix that you'll want to watch this video right here

Channel: Smeaf

Views: 238,152

Keywords: Blender, Blender 3d, blender tutorial, b3d, blender pixel art, pixel art, dead cells, pixel art tutorial, pixel art deadcells, why all games use pixel art, pixel art shader, pixel art shader tutorial, how to pixel art, blender pixel art easy, easy blender pixel art

Id: RQkaWxp5iiM

Length: 7min 44sec (464 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 11 2023