The trend towards computer-generated art

It seems to me that it is becoming more and more difficult to find games (especially created by indie/ameteur programmers) that use mainly hand-drawn pixel art.

In the retro days, 80's, 90's, before the advent of texture mapping and 3D, it seems almost all games were (generally 2D) pixel-art based, with sprites and tilemaps and cut-scenes and animated intros. Lots of pixel art, lots of frames of hand-drawn animation, etc.

Nowadays everything is moving towards `how can I make the visuals as quickly as possible and have the computer do it for me` which tends to mean computer-generated, texture mapping, glowing lines, wireframe, flat-shaded polygons, vector graphics, 2D art made in 3d packages, 2D art made in vector drawing programs with gradient fills, etc.

Is 2D pixel art a dying breed in games? What about the humble platformer, the side-scrolling shootemup, the graphic adventure?

Modern technology could be misused when having all these sterile graphics all the way. On the other hand, the whole concept of non-destructive and scalable graphics editing is also very interesting and might save preciou$ time. It has to be done well however, and not everyone does. Also keep in mind that today's generation audience except a certain realism, while the older generation would be happy enough with a blocky Boulderdash-Rockford with an anatomy that's quite a joke. Also, yesteryear's computers usually had a single fixed res for their gaming screens, which means that one can pixel a single set o' graphics. These days there're insanely high resolutions. If you don't want your 2d gfx to mimic ants then they'll have to be scalable. Whenever things need to be scalable, a vector format is usually a good solution. As for texture mapping, glowing lines, wireframe etc. these are all just tools. I wouldn't want to manually try to dress a texture of some cloths around a person, it would look crap, let alone animating all that. The glow would be unpractible had it been manually pixeled.. what if you want more or less (or your boss wants that)? You'd need to adjust the whole shebang from scratch again, while it could take a simple slider to adjust the glowness.

The whole discussion is comparible with the famous Photoshop Lenzflare. We witnessed n00b-advertisements with their default Photoshop lenzflare for years in the 90's. Does that make Photoshop bad? Of course not, it's not Adobe's fault that ppl have overused lenzflares and thus 'doing it wrong'. Likewise one can blame those who make dull sterile gfx for a 2d game, but not the tools if they could as well have been used in a more creative way.

It's not very practical or efficient to create pixel art for high resolution games.

Good points. The lense flare thing did come to mind for me also, since as soon as software like lightwave came about there was a sudden influx of very poor quality 3d modelling with lense flares all over the place. Seems we shifted quite strongly from a nice artistic hand-drawn company logo to dodgy 3d models.

I also agree, if you're going to do it in 3D you have to do it well otherwise it looks worse than if you drew stuff by hand.

The issue of resolution is also a good point - it's certainly going to be a lot more work to even do a 640x480 game with custom-drawn graphics, where each pixel is a detail.

So, is there now a big gaping unfilled hole between all-pixel-drawn graphics and computer-generated, whereby once you move to computer generated you totally lose the `look and feel` of hand-drawn? Is it possible to `generate` graphics that look as artistic as hand-drawn and not suffer the resolution problem?

For 2d-games I'd place my bet on superb 3d models (high poly count), rendered as 2d sprites. One can render them for any res and easily do alternative poses, while animating is a cookie (incorporating cloths-movement and hairs).

2D art is not dead.

Think of all the textures that go into making a good 3d model. If you want it to look great, you cant rely on stock textures, or simply banging in more pollys.

Also, have a browse through CG Talk's 2D sections and tell me 2D art isn't getting better.

Saying that, there are less and less 2D artists in the games industry. As many of you on here have found, its not such a big step to bang out an un-textured spaceship but to texture it and make it look something special is another thing entirely.

Soz, sermon over.

I agree with Big&, i dont think its dying out, its just evolving.

I guess I'm just missing all those platformers and shootemups with great 2d pixel graphics.

It's all very well doing it in 3d and posing it and then making it into a sprite, but then all your graphics still look like 3d objects. With pixel art this was not always the case and in many cases was the very thing that was attractive about it - you could create much more atmosphere and do things that would be quite hard to replicate with 3d models.

I just don't enjoy doing 2D art that much, get very little sense of achievement from pixel pushing. Was fun in the 80's and 90's, but I'd rather use natural media and forget about the computer all together for anything two dimensional.

The fun in 3D art is partly blending science and engineering with art to make something interesting, but its also making it come alive and control it. 2D is much more fun in traditional wet media than on a computer and connects with me in a far more personal way than a computer ever can.

I released my last pixel art game two years ago. It used rendered images in the backdrop...

When I make a game, which I accept I havn't made one for a while (sorry i've been busy making stuff nobody here cares about), what i'm setting out to do is make the best game I can.

Graphics, whilst I despise the commercial trend of being graphics 10 gameplay 0, is a key area of a game that must shine through as being at least 'acceptable'.

Games have to look as good as they can be made, a few days ago I was showing somebody my old projects - I showed him one with the best graphics but gameplay so bad that it flopped even as freeware (I preffer to say missunderstood gameplay ;) ) but where the effects where of a high standard - because it gave the best demonstration in the shortest time of what I can do.

Therein lies the problem with graphics orientated games, when you make a game you have to entice people to play more than the opening level - and nothing makes a first impression better than good graphics as they are immediately tangeable.

Pixel art does not necessarily result in poor graphics, but at todays resolutions they can be very hard to do well, it's also tricky to work in 3D with tools like Blitz3D and 'the other one' when half the language is geared to 3D.

There is still a place for pixel art, and pixel art games can still do well, but no matter how good you make a pixel art game it will look dated the moment you fire it up - and when you've got under 2 minutes to impress a potential player and get them hooked, nothing says 'wow' better than a beautiful explosion and a bit of specular lighting.

This guy is one of the best pixel artists I have ever seen:

http://www.henknieborg.nl/

Stunning work with so little colours.

Pretty nice collection of work he's done.

I'm not sure how I feel about someone saying that when people look at 2d graphics they are instantly turned off. Is that really true nowadays? Does the glory of 3d make all 2d games look boring?

It depends on the type of game, I s'pose. Games like Metal Slug look delightful, rendering with pixel art.

To an extent I think it is, the problem now is that even if you do pixel art well the game looks dated, and the frank truth is that most indi developers can't do pixel art well - it always was a specialised skill only now people who can do it are very hard to find.

On top of that, but traditional game genres that lend themselves to pixel art like platformers and the traditional 'zap the aliens' type scrollers are in themselves hugely dated outside of the mobile telephone and flash games arena.

On the other hand puzzle games remain the stable of shareware indi developers, and these are prime candidates for pixel art still.

As I said earlier, I think there is still a place for pixel art, but doing it well for anything other than a retro remake is extremely difficult.

Yeah. I suppose most `2d` side-on platformers/shootemups these days basically use 3d models for everything with texture mapping.

It does seem people are experimenting with new forms of graphical art. For example the games Sony is coming out with - the one that's all like a big `flash` game with flat-filled polygons in 2d, bezier curves etc. .... and then that other Sony one where you run around in a side-on 3d environment jumping around on various objects and moving things around, making your own environments to play in, etc. And then you have the trend toward using glowing lines, and something of a re-growth of flat-shaded polygon environments in 3d with no texturemaps (or that look like Tron). Maybe we need to come up with a new graphical style on par with these kind of approaches.

was messing arround with shaders for a new revamped aerial antics game, and came up with a norma mapped cell shader that looks a bit like pen and ink with marker pen coloring.



We will probably end up going for a more traditional pixarish toon look though.

It still takes an artist to make all this computer generated art, the pc doesn't just come up with it all its own.

That's true, although in order to be computer generated it has to be that the computer does most of the work, which means the artist just sets some parameters and loose boundaries and the computer improvises the rest. So the artist really isn't exercising that much control, they just guide the graphics rather than control them.

Evak - that's sort of interesting, for a green doughnut. ;-)

That's true, although in order to be computer generated it has to be that the computer does most of the work, which means the artist just sets some parameters and loose boundaries and the computer improvises the rest. So the artist really isn't exercising that much control, they just guide the graphics rather than control them.

Evak - that's sort of interesting, for a green doughnut. ;-)