Pixel Art Class - Parallax Beach Scene

a beach [Music] if you love in details be sure to subscribe here and on twitch where i'm live most weekdays you can also show your support through patreon or on itch.io where i upload assets and games shown on the channel welcome to a new video we last week created a lovely alpine parallax background as part of a tutorial and i thought today it would be really interesting to just follow that same process but with a new scene so today we're going to be creating a beach scene in pixel art it's going to be a parallax background and it will be added to the asset pack or asset series that i've been creating starting last week so we've done a snowy background now let's do a summary beach background i've been checking out some references here and i'm pretty sure i know what i want in terms of colors and foreground background elements so let's just jump straight into it shall we first thing i'm going to do is just um start with this background layer and i'm going to start just with the whole thing on the one layer and just plot in some colors so i'm going to go for my shade brush and i'm going to treat this kind of like a thumbnail what that means is i'm going to stay zoomed out and i'm just going to think about the composition at the most broad level so you know what are we looking at here in terms of colors what time of day is it you know if we have you know another element here the foreground might look like this maybe we've got some greens nice fresh greens i've been told that uh my style is similar to bob ross recently so i'm kind of leaning into that here we'll see if you guys like that in this video okay just lovely flat strokes keeping it nice and simple and just laying down some different colors for the sand nice i'm going to start breaking this out now into a different layer so you can just select everything that's in like the lower half you can cut it add a new layer paste it easy as that then if we want we can hide this top layer and then just work on the background i'm actually going to go ahead and take this and make it also a new layer and this will be the water so i'm gonna bring the water a little bit darker here underneath the sky and i like playing with this idea of having there be kind of like the same it's the same color ramp but because we're playing with contrast and just uh proportion like how much of one color we're using in a certain spot we get this effect of you can really sort of tell it apart even though they're all blue you can see some structure here and that's what i'm focusing on at this point so just thinking about the wash of the ocean here i'm gonna make some really lovely foam and i know that as we get towards the shore and the water gets more shallow it brightens up a little bit so we're going to take advantage of that maybe even put some of this brightest color right here just working them back so it's probably time to start naming these layers we'll name the first one sky what i'm going to do is see if i can just layer on a brighter green here and that will be our layer where we stand where the character is going to stand something like that then i'll just merge this down so now that's our foreground beautiful it should come as no surprise to you that here in australia it actually is summer it's so hot today which is why the hair is up i'm just trying to stay cool right now let's not forget to tile on our x-axis here and i'm going to start here at the seam make this really beautiful ocean clouds really flat off on the horizon and bring it right down to the waterline do you know i watched the um the new pixar movie soul the other day and it really changed my my thinking i've been a very anxious person for a long time even today i get very anxious but i'm trying to this year commit to i guess two new year's resolutions the first one is to uh sleep earlier and the second is to be less anxious starting to look pretty good now let's work back that second color and we're going to use a nice big brush here what i'm gonna do is try to create a sky of clouds like last time and i'm gonna make the sizes so these uh sort of cumulus formations much rounder at the top and this will give the effect of the clouds approaching us kind of like a blanket above the sky so during this phase what i'm mostly doing is just trying to find some shapes that i like this process can be destructive as well as creative sometimes i just work things back because i don't really like where they're headed but overall i think the key thing to think about here is that as long as we're actually moving forward right as long as we're making choices that we like as we move we're going to reach a destination that is a good one i'm going to disagree with bob ross on this one i think it's okay to call a mistake a mistake it's actually totally totally okay just because you don't like something doesn't mean that you have to stay in that same state and it doesn't mean that it was a waste of time either sometimes it means that you've grown sometimes you recognize something as bad because you've grown to have a higher standard or you've yeah just got a better eye for things your perspective has gotten better so it's coming along i think i want just a little less contrast and and noise in these shapes but i wouldn't have known that i wanted them to be less modeled if i hadn't made them modeled in the first place that's what i'm trying to say there is something about having the darker colors contrast the light colors which gives it a a greater sense of structure you you can understand and appreciate the blues more when you see a bit of variety in the lighting we perceive this as more saturated when it's in the same space as this okay let's turn our attention to the ocean now i'm going to try to get rid of some of this banding that's going on here in the sand by just thinking about the makeup in terms of pixel counts so what proportion of this space is you know a given layer of sand if they're even then it's it's a bit of a problem what i'll do is keep this uh you know reasonably consistent but as we did with the alpine background the other day it's a good idea to yeah create some organic diversity maybe some suggestion of waves keeping it keeping the ocean nice and still will allow this to loop a lot better but we can still have a little bit of diversity here in the water just this idea of i like the idea of the calm ocean kind of glistening and we do that by creating you know shorter and shorter lines here horizontal lines to fade off onto the horizon and to our eyes as far as the perspective goes these are kind of like equivalent lengths you know we're telling the eye that hey you know this line here it's kind of the same as this line here but this one's further away it just struck me as i was drawing this thinking about the ocean that it actually could be a good idea to animate one of these backgrounds one day i think that would be a really interesting experiment okay and i also want to try creating some more contrast here between the sky and the clouds maybe make it look like the clouds are casting a shadow on the bottom of the ocean there not so bad maybe just one line or where the clouds are more dense we can create a deeper line to make it look like they're casting the shadow down and i most definitely want to separate this cool what i'd like to do is create some beach grass just little tufts that are going to stick up over this hillside and drawing these bushes it's kind of interesting because there's definitely a logic where the bush itself is darker in the center because there's a lot of layering going on but you don't want to forget that there are some grass blades that are going to be closer to the camera and so those will be as a result picking up more light so it's actually kind of noisier in the center as well which means this area it's very difficult to um at least if you're trying to simulate something you know realistically it's very difficult to get something that looks realistic instead you could go for a more stylized approach where you know you either keep it one layer like this i think that the diversity helps or you can just ignore the fact that it's a 3d object and just give it a uh an internal shape a lot of pixel art is making creative choices that are for aesthetic gain where realism is just not possible with the impressionists being painters it was the application of the paint in their strokes here in pixel art it's all about repetition repeating shapes you can do that with brushes too actually i was talking during the previous video about creating repeating shapes with a certain sized brush so this three size brush you know we were doing alpine trees and you can get interesting shapes just spreading out horizontally because we have that natural point at the end that's single pixel so brushes do come into it for sure i wonder if we are obscuring the ocean just a little too much there granted we can always tackle this uh in unity we can always change this i'm gonna add some grass now and i'm going to take a leaf out of owlboy's book here i can remember a screenshot in our boy that was used in the promotional art quite frequently that it's a beautiful it's a beautiful screenshot but the technique that they use for the grass is particularly interesting and i'm going to try to replicate that here where we've got grass that's in the background okay and we actually show depth on one layer alright so we have grass sort of coming forward here until it reaches our actual layer so it's the same color scheme but you'll see what i mean in a bit and this process will take you a little while especially if you're using a mouse instead of a tablet but it's it's kind of one of those tasks that's monotonous enough that you can just enjoy enjoy it so the blades of grass right can go from anywhere from a single pixel to two pixels to three single pixels to three with one on the side you can even have a stair step one like this and just mixing up these few shapes is enough to give the impression that you know all of these blades of grass are as detailed as the biggest ones that's the kind of that's the trick your eye likes to find rules and then apply those rules mentally to things that it can't make out to kind of assume you know you assume detail it's like oh okay well if i can't if these are only a single pixel that must be because they're smaller versions of this thing which is a much bigger shape right so i'm actually i'm actually creating you know the same shapes just in front in a darker color to soften the transition between this color and this color i've said this before on camera in the last video and as i've been re-watching because i always rewatch my videos just to make sure i don't say anything silly uh i use this term dithering to describe what's happening here just to clarify that dithering is the uh it's a technique that we use to create a transition between two colors and there are a different series of formulas that we can use to create that dither and so if i was to just draw one now between say these colors this is what it looks like right and so there's really only two colors here but it's the density of which color we're using which creates this you know appearance of one two three four five different shades you could say so what i like to do is it's the same principle but it's applied using shapes so i say you know we're dithering between this color and this color with the shapes softening the transition with a pattern basically i'm really liking this scene i i'm getting kind of like caught up in it i like it a lot i think this foreground is going to be where it's all going to have to come together [Music] i can sort of see it but you always leave room for a bit of experimentation right so far so good let's go ahead and begin to export this into the different layers and try it out in our parallax scene i think what would be really nice is to see uh at least one more break in the ocean between this layer and that blue way off on the horizon or perhaps a better way to think about this would be to take the clouds that are here and make them their own layer of sky and we'll call that horizon so uh there we've got our this we're gonna go back just a little bit bring this forward and this is going to be our horizon see if that changes it there we go okay let's create some stuff that's going to sit on the sand maybe some stone formations you can see already just creating any kind of formation because it's going to be repeated we have to be very careful unless we create these as objects that will be spawning in at random which is an option for sure i love rocks i love drawing them i don't know why i think it's just fun they're simple shapes you know you don't really have a lot of constraints that you have to stick to and i think i've realized that i want to create some more shapes here just in the sand just little variances okay cool let's take uh all of that and export it as a layer i'm thinking the grass is maybe a little big or a little obstructive this stuff here if i bring it down just a tad that might make this a little easier i think i also want to bring these rocks up pretty good so uh the next question is what does our foreground look like i think what we'll do is something similar to what i've done in the past where we've got this edge that defines the cross section of the terrain sort of like a lip just got to make sure i don't screw this up too much i don't usually want to go straight down into this darkest color it would be nice if we had something that we could sort of blend into it this dirt is very it's a bit cliche it's a little bit uh minecrafty but i think that's what the people like so as i was saying i i was watching seoul the other day [Music] and um i really enjoyed it i thought it was a top movie probably one of pixar's best in a long time actually maybe since like wall-e or up and i really appreciated the subject matter you know it's about death and accepting it and and also life you know and how to live it and i think that's something that we don't really stop and ask ourselves very often is you know are we living the life that we want to live and other things that we think are important to us like really the things that that are going to make us happy at the end of the day it's very easy to chase a goal expecting to be happy once you reach the finish line and um look personally you know i'm not really at that place yet so i can't tell you whether whether my goal is the thing that i'm expecting to make me happy and whether it will or not but i guess the the old adage of you know it's it's the journey not the destination is something that at least in this case in the movie is something that's um that's the message and i think it's a good message still we spend so much of our life working on goals if you wait to achieve the goals to be happy you're going to be waiting a long time if you're doing anything worth doing the game that i'm making i've been making it since 2017 working on it full time and i know that i still have a couple of years to go you know still and it may even be more than a couple and to to know that and to still expect happiness to come after is kind of the same as committing myself to you know more than half of a decade of unhappiness which it's not a very nice prospect nobody wants that but if you can find happiness in the journey then you can actually be happy while you're making something you don't have to sacrifice happiness in order to be productive or to achieve your dreams i would say though it's very easy for me to allow pressures outside of working on the game to make me feel like i'm not allowed to be happy until i've completed it things like money and you know outside factors that don't really have anything to do with the game itself i wonder if this is too many layers of grass what i want is like a flat platform that the player can think of as the level i wonder if it would be better if i darkened this instead of brightened everything else probably not too dark i think we definitely want this shade and probably in the proportion that we've got it right now [Music] just a little concerned that we've hit a lot of noise here all of a sudden yeah i think this these two layers are so close together they might as well be one layer and if they're going to be one layer well we can try experimenting with spreading them out but that's actually not so bad now that we look at it what do you think we could have some birds actually circling that would be they would be like animated but we could have them still hmm i wonder if that would be really weird to look at let's just try i mean it kind of works almost like they're flying against the wind i wish i could animate this i think i will animate it like i think i will approach some method of animating this stuff at some point but i don't think that i'm going to do that for this video because i use such a such a different technique for animating in unity i guess one thing we could do if we wanted to be really clever you know what i'm gonna do it actually check this out so keep this that color select this copy paste down down down down down down down down one layer lighter paste that was a bit easier yep that was the way to do it sometimes those cheap tricks uh they they feel cheap and sometimes they feel right and just then i think that one felt right there's maybe one more thing we could do which was for the extreme foreground if we want to add that so you don't you only want it to just come right up against [Music] your layer so that you don't obscure the gameplay but you want it to know that it's in front and i'm actually going to give it quite a lot of space and then i'm going to bring it down this is mostly just so that the asset itself has a lot more control like the player the user of the asset can do more with it but it'll be lower down in the actual uh in the actual scene just trying to take a bit of a lesson from last episode the ground the lowest level or like the very foreground was too close to the bottom of the canvas for me to give it much height pretty good where are we at now i think if i just bring this in you'll you will see that it looks good there we go a beach that's it for today i think i'll leave it there i could see myself adding to this at some point maybe uh taking away some of the complexity on some of these layers but i'm really happy with where this is at right now i had a lot of fun i hope you had a lot of fun too i will see you in the next one [Music] hey pal thanks for watching and thanks most especially to the patrons and twitch subs who support this channel and my gamedev project insignia to find out more click the links in the description below and uh if you like this video tell youtube by clicking the like button and then youtube will tell me and then i'll make more videos that's nice thanks again and until next time

Channel: AdamCYounis

Views: 31,684

Keywords: game development, pixel art, game dev, game, video game, indie games, stream, beach, tutorial, animation, parallax, background, ocean

Id: TWAvAXV2MLo

Length: 27min 33sec (1653 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021