So I’ve been demoing some art style stuff and I like the idea of a cel shaded pixel art aesthetic with a chunky outline. I’ve figured out a lot, like how I want to colour the models and keeping them simplistic.
However when it comes to the pixelatedness, I’m struggling.
I first started off with a generic toon outline and pixelizing shader, then I realised it looks super messy and it’s hard to make it look good at any kind of pixelated amount, and at high enough amounts it doesn’t look like pixel art. So I’m having to wonder, am I approaching this the right way?
Is there a correct way to “pixelate” the screen, so that it’s possible to add a pixel perfect outline to actors? The resolution of the screen is the same with the pixelizing shader, it just makes it blockier, so it seems harder to add a pixel perfect outline when you’re not actually placing the pixels in the right place.
Please ask if any of this doesn’t make any sense, I’m struggling to explain what I’m imagining.
Hmm, do you have any reference art for what you want ‘your look’ to be?
There are many, many different ways to create a pixel art aesthetic. The chunky outline isn’t too hard, there are plenty of stencil techniques. But how you want to pixelate has a lot of different options: nearest-neighbor sampling, changing your base art itself, etc.
In my understanding of it, the core of pixel art is high visual legibility at low resolution. If you’re just trying to pixelate 3D art, that creates challenges. 3D art leans on depth and parallax and in some cases lighting that traditional pixel art doesn’t.
Coming from my workflow, I would first download PureRef (amazing free concept art resource) and develop a moodboard to figure out what your look is, if you haven’t already. I don’t know how experienced you are, so let me know if any of this are things you already know.
Also, how would this compare to your ideal aesthetic?
I don’t have an entire, 100% look for the game down yet, mostly a “base look” in mind. The closest would be this:
(other videos on this channel show that all of the environments are full 3D).
I’m hoping to get that down, and then I want to play with lighting and colours more myself. I’ve been looking around at how I can convert the screen colours to a colour palette but there seems to be little on this. I saw LUTs, but I didn’t see if there was a way to generate a LUT from an existing palette of say 32 colours.
My difference is I’m going for more of a cartoony, cel shaded look, which is a lot easier for me to get the hang of making. You’re right about simply pixelating 3D art would make for challenges but that’s exactly the look I’m trying to achieve, so I know I’m not making it easy for myself haha
I get that about the colours and depth etc too, this is still very WIP for me, but I’ve made a start. I have a lot of experience in using Blender coming from a hobbyist background, having made a few assets for my own Unity prototypes and a lot of other random renders and things. I plan to keep a very simple style for the models with blocky colours to help with readability, as detailed models with a cel shader + pixelated look are going to look ugly no matter what without some very clever solution.
I fixed up the pixelated shader and played around with the camera some more, set it to conserve aspect ratio and that’s helped a ton. It becomes blurry when I enlarge the viewport but I’m assuming that’s some upscaling/anti-aliasing issue I want to disable. It also helped clean up the outline a lot.
A lot of the games I’ve made in the past have been very abstract looking, usually shapes and things, Geometry Wars style graphics etc. This is because I was never great at making a game with a proper fleshed out art style like this, but I’m hoping to change that here.
After playing around with a lot of settings some more, I’ve came to this. Finally got colour LUTs to work using Aseprite - I forgot it’s possible to set the colour mode to indexed in most programs.
