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-Pixelation Concepts- Chapter 1: A Simple Isometric Miniature by LeeYiankun (May 04, 2004) Note: Be warn though, you should have quite a bit of basic skills in traditional rendering. People who dove head first into pixelation, shall find that their results are... Less than satisfactory. If you must practice shading, you can do so at any Oekaki or Picture BBS board. There you can grapse the concept of how to handle miniture space that is presented in Pixelation. Try picking your own colors there, it'll help you determine what colors you want & what's not. ------------------------------------- We will now return you to our regular broadcast. ^_^ |
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We'll only use the following tools in Pixelation. 1- 2- 3- 4- 5- Any anti-aliasing tool such as The Paintbrush should be avoided. You can use Layers to fufil your goals, But should be avoided if nescessary.
Starts out with a plain space, any size will do. Fill it with 50%Gray.
This will lessen the strain put on your eyes for the time being. (This
Example uses 300x300 space, you can choose anysize.) Bump up the scales
to 300% or more with the Zoom Tool Open a new layer. Use the pencil tool to scribble white planes on the gray space like so. The Diaganal line is for you to issue the x ,y of the plain. It's degrees determine what perspective you are currently drawing. In this example, The degree estimate here is between 28-35 degrees. The Intended degree is 30. We can pretend that it is so, for the moment. |
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Rough out the Character on the plane. The white outline will help you visualize the space easier. To make things better, you can try sketching the idea out first. It is best to have a clear vision of what you're doing at all times. As Drawing blindly will leads to troubles later on. In This example, I use The Reference from Wizard of the Coast's Fiend Folio, that I found online at it's website. Since What I'm doing is to Miniturize the character. When I'm drawing, The head will be the most important aspect. Next the Legs, and the Stance. The body & tail can be change accordingly. |
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Time to render the colors and see if that concept is as good as you've imagined. You should not over -render though. The Next step will be resizing, and there the final rendition will be done. To overrender, you will risk the horrid of the resizing engine, which is not very bright, I'm afraid, When it comes to Pixelation. Note: What you see here is somewhat over-rendered, I spent my time honing my skills on Oekaki boards, Where my favorite style there is Solid shading. To me, the penalty cost of shading is actually quite low. If you have perfected you rendering skills to this degree, you can handle the cost that comes with it. Resizing is still a pain at this stage though. |
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Resizing to 150x150 leaves us with quite a lot of Anti-Aliasing. Normally that is a good thing, only in Pixelation, where we LIKE pixel, It is not.
And Around the Edges, you can see the product of Resizing, That leaves pixels that are less than 100% fill around.
If you were to leave them like so, when you output your gif, it would leave artifacts around in it's place. Not a nice thing to see, huh?
The Resizing also left another legacy. Too many shades and color are used, But since you remembered to not have collapse the Layers. You can start over at this level, with the resize lineart. OR you can try and simplify the resized color that you did. |
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And there you have it, how to do pixel concept. If there's any question, you can drop me an e-mail. And I'll try and update a Q&A at the Back of this tutorial. Until next time, Bye! ^_^ |
Eraser (set to block) 
Pencil 
Fill Bucket.
Selection Tools (AA off)
Eyedropper (it helps keep the colors to a minimum)
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Pixeling is done best at 300-400%, Difficult manipulations are best
at 600-800%.
