Creating Assets For My Game

[AmOrPhIsSs]

I really want to create the assets of my game using the same art technique as in old school Adventure games like "Monkey Island".
I'm using 3ds Max to model all my environments, objects & characters. But can anyone help me on how to achieve such quality "The Pixelated Artwork with the Cartoonish look" ?

[Gilbert]

There are links to a number of tutorials in this thread which may be of help.

[Khris]

I just want to point out that in Monkey Island 1, everything was hand-pixeled in DPaint.
MI 2 used scanned and touched up oil-paintings for the backgrounds, while characters and objects were again hand-pixeled.
In MI 3, everything was hand painted, I assume digitally.

If you're talking about Tales of MI, that's a different story of course.

[Babar]

I'm not sure I've ever seen 3D characters work with pixel art or even cartoony 2D.

[AmOrPhIsSs]

I've actually started to render the first background & my character, but i kindda need an old school look.
Maybe some rendering settings for 3ds Max would come very handy if anybody could advise me.

Take a look at the sample I rendered so far (I tried to get a cartoonish look):



But at the end, i need it to be downscaled and pixelated like the old adventure games.

[Retro Wolf]

Quick and dirty in Graphics gale: I shrunk the image to 320x200 then applied mosaic filter.
It needs tidying up though.

Personally I would trace over the shrunken image in art software degined for pixel artists (such as Graphics Gale) using the line tool.
I did this with a photograph of a kitchen in Summer Woes.

Your best bet is to post in the critic's lounge, the guys that hang around in there are brilliant.

[Snarky]

I shrunk the image to 320x200 then applied mosaic filter

But why?

[Retro Wolf]

To make it even more pixelated!
Edit: I didn't think about what it would look like fullscreen...

[Babar]

The trick would've been to apply the filter FIRST, THEN shrink it down (except you'd want 320x240, not 200). It still doesn't look nice, though, because 800:320 is 2.5, and you can't apply a Mosiac filter of size 2.5. If you do it to a size of 5, and then shrink it down to 160x120, it looks more appealing, but then it is 160x120 .
Some (technically quite useless) experimentation (with all of the images zoomed into ~640x480 for comparison:


Simply shrunken down to 320x240:

The aliasing and stuff is quite jarring, and not in a nice, pixel-art sort of way


Shrunken down to 320x240, with a 2x Mosaic filter applied:

Since the ratios don't match, it still doesn't look good.


Shrunken down to 160x120 with a 5x Mosaic filter applied:

Ratios match now, so it looks slightly better, despite being small


Shrunken down to 267x200 with the 3x Mosaic filter applied:

Ratio matching, slightly smaller, but you could probably fill in the rest to bring it up to 320x240


...or you could just render out to 320x240?

[Scavenger]

Okay, so here's the thing: You can't render a 3D scene to look like it was pixel art. It is way too different an art form to mimic in polygonal 3D. There are ways you can make a 3D scene look "old school" pixelised. Mostly by using flat textures with pixel art on them. But that's not what you're seeming to want here. If you want real oldschool backgrounds, that look like they're painted at low res and not 3D, you can't cheat. You can, however, use your 3D work as a baseline.

By making a base mesh (like this), you can use it to do most of the legwork of the final piece. You can then paint over it, like this.

The important thing when creating the base mesh isn't detail - you're going to render it out at 320x200 anyway, and you don't want to waste time texturing. The most important thing is /lighting/. You want a good contrast - light up the important bits, leave the unimportant in shadow. And you're doing it in 3D, so you can mess around with how it'll look. Ignore the small objects that'll be in the scenes... the ones that don't give much of an impact.

Render the scene out, and then start painting over it (I suggest a group with the blending set to Overlay). When it gets to the small details, you can paint them in, and you'll have a background that has both consistent lighting and hand painted low res qualities.

Note that Monkey Island 2 and 3 used more of an expressive, less technically accurate way of rendering their scenes, so the 3D you use may look dead if you're not careful. For outdoor scenes, I recommend doing only the main foreground pieces in 3D, and paint the background in 2D.

Texture mapping is also something you need to avoid doing too much of - unless the textures are incredibly big, like a tiled floor. That vent, when rendered out for 320x200, will become muddy and indistinct, so it's best to pixel that in over the top of the render rather than try to make the scene render perfectly the first time.

When creating backgrounds like this, and stretching what you can do with the tools you have, you can't rely on the render alone to create what you want.

So in short: Big forms in black and white, with the kind of lighting you want for the render, and when you're happy with how it looks, paint over it with progressively tinier brushes to create the small props and textures.

[Problem]

The old Monkey Island style is hand-pixeled, so if you want to imitate that style, you'll have to do it the same way. However you can try to fake an "old school" look by scaling the image down (e.g. to 320x240). Then you get the low resolution of these old games (and don't need a mosaic filter by the way).

Some color reduction might also help:

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1891681/fake.png[/imgzoom]

But of course this will never look exactly like a hand-pixeled background.

[AmOrPhIsSs]

Thank you all so much for your help, all of yr advices and support are deeply appreciated.

@Scavenger: I'll proceed accordingly by rendering my scenes with a low resolution and no textures applied "Only a basic color & lighting effects", then I'll paint over them using Photoshop "and I'll make use of my Wacom Bamboo Tablet as well", I think it will come very handy.

@Babar: Thnx for the illustration, really it's very helpful and made me open to new ideas.

@Iceboty V7000a: Thnx for the links, they'll help me a lot specially after deciding that I'll be applying digital painting to my art style.

@Oldschool_Wolf: I'll check "Graphics Gale"...Thnx man

@Khris: I was looking forward to heading to almost the same graphics as MI 2, thnx for the clarifications.

@Problem: This color reduction trick also helps to achieve a lot in a simple step.

Thanks all and i'll try to finish at least one sequence with all coding and everything and i'll send it to all to try it out and give me your opinions on everything

[qptain Nemo]

You can't render a 3D scene to look like it was pixel art.

I know this is utterly off topic, but I have a dream of proving that statement wrong one day.

It is way too different an art form to mimic in polygonal 3D.

That's, however, perpetually true.

[Scavenger]

I know this is utterly off topic, but I have a dream of proving that statement wrong one day.

That isn't to say there aren't ways of doing three dimensional pixel art. I love voxels. They're the best.

[Khris]

There is a really cool way of combining 3D models and pixel art, usually called low poly:


More here: http://www.kennethfejer.com/lowpoly.html

Not sure how feasible that is for an AGS game though.

[kconan]

It is love at first sight with that car   Hey low poly car with gatling gun attachments, did your suspension hurt when you fell from heaven?

Holy cow I just checked out the page, what a super-talented artist.

[qptain Nemo]

That isn't to say there aren't ways of doing three dimensional pixel art. I love voxels. They're the best.

I love voxels too, and they're very close to pixel art look, but they have their own inadequacies at representing 3D objects and displaying raw voxels in the most plain way doesn't exactly produce the same look as good pixel art. So I'd say it's still a tricky issue.

There is a really cool way of combining 3D models and pixel art, usually called low poly:

That's very cute. Though I suspect relatively high poly models with pixel art textures displayed with nearest neighbour interpolation instead of any texture filtering would look fairly decent as well. I don't have any 3D games with pixel art textures lying around unfortunately, but here are the best illustrations I could provide offhand of some games with texture filtering turned off: Cognition (only the characters are 3D and there's cel-shading going on but whatever) and The Bard's Tale.

Edit: I guess The Witcher 2 looks nice as well. ^_^

[AmOrPhIsSs]

Considering the Cartoonish look, I've managed to manipulate some rendering options in 3ds Max as well as adding some textures and i've come to this satisfying result:



What do you think...shall i proceed with this quality rather than pixelating my work? or if anybody knows a cool stunt to perform on this image?

[dactylopus]

My suggestion, if you're trying to achieve the old school pixel look, is to paint over what you've got.  Your renders are good, but the 'look' isn't quite right.

[Anian]

It's up to you, what you want your game to look like, but if you're going for 3d into pixel art, I'd use the method Scavenger suggested (of painting over renders. In any other you're not really getting the pixel art look, but just a pixelated look and it will be noticeable. In this case it's also advisable to draw your characters in PS or Gimp, because they will look better with the backgrounds, but you can still use the 3d models as a basis for a paintover.

If you want to proceed in resolutions like 640x480px, that is fine too, but be sure to add more stuff into your backgrounds after you finish testing. The render looks rather nice as well, but you'll probably see  how it behaves when you try out more objects and textures. Be sure to keep the level of detail on all things consistent.