Practical 2: Pixel Art Project: Post 1

 Within my last project and learning agreement, I set out to explore the topic of art styles and all the different things that encompass that. I've explored Sea of Thieves and League of Legends styles previously, but this time, I want to explore something relatively new to myself and a kind of style that I've found in the past to not particularly enjoy doing nor find a lot of appreciation in compared to the other, previously mentioned styles.

Pixel Art.

Now... I'm going to explain a bit about why I want to explore this style and it will sound extremely nerdy and embarrassing. Within the past year or so I've been playing on this Minecraft server with a group of friends called 'Lord of the Craft'. It is a DND/roleplay-esque kind of server with hundreds of people on at a time with a fantasy, medieval theme. There's cities, villages, dungeons, villains, magic, and so much more all solely player-driven. 

It is very cool! And it has its own sort of economy. Since I've joined, I've joined in the major art and skin commissions surrounding it. And this is especially booming; people love to get all sorts of art and skins for their characters. 

But Minecraft skins usually look quite different than what these ones look like on this server...

These are the default Minecraft skins anyone who owns the product can apply to themself.

And below, are some of the skins I have made and sold to players in this community:

Now... This community has been around since 2011 and is constantly evolving in so many ways, including the kind of 'skins' that people like. Every 'skinner' has their own style, sure, but there is a certain level of detail that should be present in every skin for it to actually sell or for that skinner to be frequently commissioned... 

As you can see above though, there are a LOT of different kind of characters people play that all look quite different. There are a lot of different playable races and creatures, so, for context, just think of your typical fantasy DND type media and convert it to be playable but in Minecraft. That's all you need to know, really!

Each of the skins above were commissioned or sold for 20 pounds, and on average, can take from 15 minutes minimum or perhaps 3 hours to make maximum. After all, there's only a certain amount of pixels even available to work with.

But when it comes to making these skins, compared to software like Substance Painter, it can be quite lacklustre in some areas. But, it has its similiarities too - I prefer to use the program 'MCSkin3D' which allows me the option to view and work on the skin in 3D, as opposed to purely 2D. Some people do actually work in purely 2D but after becoming a 3D artist... I feel like I don't want to downgrade to that. 

But, like I said in my intro, I for some reason didn't really like pixel art that much. I really despised whenever I had to do it in projects years ago for whatever reason. However, since joining this community and making all these skins for myself and others, I've grown to like it and see a certain beauty in it -- and oddly enough, I used to think pixel art was a sort of 'lower art form', discrediting it. There's truly something special about wandering around this massive online world full of real, individual players, and finding people that have commissioned you wearing your skin just going about their own life in-game. 

HOWEVER. There has been another phenomenon that appeared lately on the server within the last couple of months: the use of a mod called Figura. What this mod allows you to do is apply a 3D model onto yourself, and if anyone else uses that same mod in their game, they can see this too. 

These models are usually made externally with a software called Blockbench. Mojang, the creators of Minecraft, actually use this software to create some of their models too.

Here are some of the models created in Blockbench by my partner Rob (who was also on the BA last year!) for his own characters and my own on the server:

These additional models customised for a player's custom skin in a lot of cases really make them stand out from the rest, and add an additional level of detail unobtainable in ONLY Minecraft skins. You can model absolutely whatever you want, given Blockbench is its own modelling software anyway (just specialised for Minecraft). 

Above, I made a collage for you to see the difference between the original skin without any model applied and with a model. I made the skins shown above, but Rob did the models. (Once more, Figura is just the in-game mod that allows you to see the models made and imported from Blockbench, but the community has just ended up dubbing the entirety of these things 'Figura'.)

My Project.

Firstly, I started out with making a Lorraine cross necklace actually in Blockbench, before I am to take this objective to other programs like Maya and Substance Painter. 

I thought that, given I want to do a project to explore pixel art, I should at least try out the program that Mojang uses and form an opinion. 

So, I made a little necklace to be used on the server by believers of Canonism, the equivalent of Christianity on the server.

In Blockbench, all of the parts of a model are individual cubes. There, to my knowledge, isn't anything like extruding... So, as you can see on the outliner above, there are tons of individual cubes. This feature I really do not like. It feels very silly going from Maya to this, I will be honest. 

It is relatively easy to use and I doubt anyone that uses Maya would find it too difficult to navigate, but, there are just so many noticable things missing that make it just a pain to use in my opinion -- To the point where I feel like making something in Blockbench, even something small, would take considerably more time than just doing it in Maya. 

And when it comes to UV's... I really do not like this programme. You cannot make cuts, and since everything is made out of individual cubes, all of these have to be individually UV'd by hand. There are very little features here too, and you cannot seem to select multiple things to UV at once -- so I had to actually guess where I was placing my eventually UV'd objects on the texture. It was a lot of fiddling and moving UV's by like one or two pixels because of that. There are certainly no options like Planar UVing like Maya has. 

These UV's are determined by, as you can see the buttons above on the 'top', 'north' 'east' 'south' 'west', and 'up' and 'down'. I thought this was an odd choice rather than just being determined by XYZ etc but that bit didn't matter too much.

The biggest part I didn't like was manually resizing every, EVERY, single cube to get the amount of pixels I wanted on the texture. You literally have to drag the edges of the UV'd cube to what you desire. 

It is really, really odd. There are so many things about this software I just remember thinking: "why is it like that?" 

It was do-able, yes, but certainly not optimal or enjoyable to me. Maybe I'm entitled and just love Maya too much, but, whatever -- I genuinely think this program could be made so differently. 

Maybe this is why Minecraft takes months for an update that only adds two new things (joke!)

This is what the model looks like in-game anyway. My partner Rob added physics. I think it looks alright, but, I feel like it also seems quite out of place in Minecraft since my resolution must've been too big/ I have too many pixels. I think that the texturing seems too noisy, and I should've gone for a less total amount of pixels. When you compare it to my Minecraft 'skin' in the video, I feel like you really do notice the differing amount of pixels between the two. This is something, when I look back on it now, I would change. Going forward I will definitely keep this in mind though, so, the endeavour isn't entirely fruitless at all - I know what works and what doesn't within this style a bit better now, I think. 

I think the problem could've been that I was closely zooming in too much when I was texturing, which made the object feel bigger than it actually was in reality, which made me think I should put in more detail than needed. I also wasn't particularly doing checks along the way to made sure the model looked good in context to the skin it was being placed on as often as I should've been doing, I think.

However, if there is something I have learned from this whole thing in general, is that I feel like you REALLY need to stick to Minecraft's pre-established style for any Figura to look good in game. 

This means avoiding circles and making things just in general TOO detailed, with curves and such.

I don't know who made this from the image on the left, but, I find that this 'style' really results in immersion-breaking. Ultimately, this cannot be a good practise I feel like, and is a lesson that should be kept in mind for generally any art process that involves pixel art. It may look good on its own possibly, but, in the context of the Minecraft world it is in, I think it isn't suited. 

You know the term 'uncanny valley' used to describe things that look human but aren't and it freaks us out? I feel like this is the same thing as when you see circular things in Minecraft like this. 

It's just wrong and unsettling.

I'm all for breaking boundaries within art and art styles in general, but, in this case... Please don't. 

What have I learned?

Well, I know that I don't like using Blockbench. I'd like to say I'm a pretty adaptable person and I know I 100% love to learn new things, but, I really do feel like this program is just poorly made at the moment or at least needs a couple features added in updates. The process was just too frustrating at times, when all I could think about was: "If I had used Maya I would've been done by now" -- and I definitely would've enjoyed it more. 

So... Moving on, I started to think about how this process COULD be transferred to Maya, and eventually Substance Painter. 

I knew from the start I didn't want to feel like I was backtracking in technology. I didn't want to go back to texuring things in 2D purely in Photoshop like I did at the start of the Bachelor's in year one... 

I considered it, and I would if I had to, but, I wanted to figure out my own solution that I think would be optimal for both comfort (as I think this will result in better art in less time overall) and art style. 

So, I want to figure out how I can get the intended art style without using Blockbench. Firstly my tutor James suggested simply just toning down the texture resolution in Substance Painter, but, I thought that this wouldn't give me the particularly clean and crisp pixel art I was looking for, and just look unintentionally blurry. 

...And yeah, even turning the texture resolution down to the smallest (128), everything still just looked blurry. Sure it was sort of pixelated, but, it just looked more like a mistake more than anything. Even using a sharpen filter didn't really fix it, even though we thought it would literally sharpen the edges.

James also suggested simply making and using a pixelated shader in Unreal, but while this is really cool and I'd like to try it, my point of exploring art styles is to learn and compare the literal process of creating art FOR an intended art style. I thought that applying a filter/shader/post processing effect after the fact would essentially just be putting a bandage on at the end to tie it all together.

 PIXEL8R

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4brm5l

So... I got researching. I knew I wanted to use Substance Painter, and I ended up finding this tool created by Victoria Holland. She originally made it for the game ULTRAKILL to help on her work, but, was made available for purchase publicly. 

It is something that can be applied on top of your layers and instantly turn everything beneath it to pixel art, with tons of options. 

I thought that this was particularly appropriate for my goal because it doesn't exactly do all the work for me. I do feel as though I could get the same results manually, but, obviously doing it in 2D instead of 3D in Substance Painter. 

You still have to completely keep in mind what and where you are placing your pixels, akin to doing pixel art anyway. 

I took to testing Pixel8r by placing it on top of one of my models from my third year, my flare gun. 

I don't know why this wasn't obvious to me at first, but, it doesn't effect the normals/roughness/etc; purely just the base colour.

As my flare gun was textured completely realistically, it retained a lot of previous information, like scratches and engravings that looked very out of place.

In this video above, you can see all the different kind of pixel art options that are available.

In this video, you can see all the dithering options available in Pixel8R on my pistol very quickly. They all seem to have their own options beyond that too, for full customisation. 

Here is a before and after comparison between my original pistol model and with Pixel8R applied on top. I didn't change many parameters as it was just a test, but, I think it looks pretty good.

Of course, the textures are still in a 4k resolution (as the pistol was intended to be) and it seems incredibly redundant to have such a big file size for a pixel art styled texture. Nonetheless, it was a cool test!

However, I think this also demonstrates the need for intention behind creating assets. Which is the purpose behind what I want to explore on the MA.

I feel as though you can definitely see, even in the image above after I tweaked a few things, that this flare gun was not intended to be textured in the pixel art style. Because it was originally a very realistic high resolution texture, there are many, many small little details that perhaps make the original gun look good, BUT, when Pixel8r is applied, all meaning and information is simply lost. 

Particularly, scratches and bits of mold or rust and highlights just disappear. From this test, I can gauge that when creating a texture to be in the pixel art style, there are things I will have to intentionally draw to imply the detail I want; like lines of highlight.

Highlight is a important thing because, as the pixel art style is 99% seen to be used with only base colour and no other maps, your placement of light and shadows on a model has to be drawn by yourself. You cannot just apply reflections and glossiness in the areas you want using the usual maps, like I did to create my realistic flare gun textures. 

So yeah! My point is that even though you can apply Pixel8r on top of pretty much any model/texture, this doesn't mean it looks the best or optimal. I think in this case you can definitely tell this wasn't the intentional final look for the flare gun, though, it does look fine. But it doesn't look perfect. 

And, of course for the obvious note; the flare gun is way too high poly than what's needed. It works surprisingly well for what I expected, though.