[COM] notMiceElf Summer School Q&A - Part 2

We hope you enjoyed last weeks Habbo pixel art Q+A with notMiceElf because we're continuing this week with another round! We've fueled the guy up on coffee and swedish fish (only the red ones) so we're hoping to get another gloriously ramble-filled response. If you've got a question you'd like to pose keep an eye out for the poll in game and ask away! Ok, Q+A time, GO! GO! GO!

How do you begin to transform your vision into pixel art… where do you start first? (question posted by Unposted)

Another great question, thanks Unposted! You'll be receiving a years supply of marshmallow peeps for your question… huh? Oh. We aren't giving away peeps. Probably for the better because those things are pretty gross. Great question regardless. The process of taking the initial idea to final pixel art can vary a little between artists but we do give gold stars to those that stick to the "certified two step method of furni making"™. Ok that's not really the name but the process does consist of two steps. And it is certified… ok fine it's not certified! Sheesh. Lets just move on shall we?

STEP ONE:
Habbo artists royally freak out. No, just kidding. Step one starts with sketching out the idea for an item. We always start with sketches first because they're typically faster to produce than a full set of pixel art furni but still give us the ability to look at what the full set might look like and make design decisions early on. This step can either be done on paper (and later scanned), or digitally. It's really up to the artist and what they're most comfortable with. The sketches are made so that they are around 2x-4x scale and can be easily utilized later in the process. This example from the mystics line is 2x.

After the sketches are completed all the artists get together and chat about the items and what they'll do. At this point one or two of the artist's color choices and/or design embellishments are selected to carry through the set (this could take us right back into the previous question about consistency! Or a discussion about obsessive compulsive artists…). The whole sketch step is really exploratory foundation laying and prep work for step two. The pixel part.

STEP TWO:
The aforementioned "pixel part" can be completed a few different ways but I'll first go through the way I prefer our artists use and then briefly talk about the other methods. There's not a wrong way here, just one that I believe works better for our finished products and timelines. Plus, I like to see our artists use the same method I use. Because ego.

Alright, with sketch in hand (on… the computer) the artist can start on the outlines which are like the bone structure of a furni. Yep. Furni has an exoskeleton. Really though, the outlines help give a kind of rigid structural support to furni so the meaty insides sit nicely and… I can hear Hannibal Lecter licking his lips… moving on. The sketch is often scaled to the correct furni size which is either to 50% or 25% if the sketch was at 2x or 4x scale. Once it's been scaled the sketch can be set to a low opacity and outlines drawn over it on a new layer (we all use Photoshop).

Or the sketch is set off to the side and used only as reference as the outlines are drawn from scratch. You might be shouting at your screen, "Well, notMiceElf, that way sounds retarded! The sketching phase would be pointless if you're just going to redraw it anyway!", but I say to you very loud doubters, "nah". The sketch is mostly a loose guide and redrawing gives us a very clean base to work from later. It also gives the artist a chance to fix oddities present the sketch, so that the design falls more in line with the "Habbo look", and works better in game. The end result has a similarity to the sketch but can also be drastically different because of the correction process. Furni that has a lot of bits and trinkets (like a skull, book, and potion thing for example) benefits from being redrawn this way because each part can be drawn separately and then combined later for better control over the shape and readability of a design. Imagine if you drew a table top with loads of stuff on it all in one layer and then you realize you needed to make it longer. "Oh, SHhhhhaving cream!", you'd say. But if you have everything as separate parts you just fix the underlying table part and move on. Easy as pie. No, cake. Eh, we'll stick with pie.

The inner rendering for the furni is where the volume and color is added to flesh it out and give it more substance. Artists select a small set of colors ranging from dark to light which are used to render each element within a furni. This set of colors is called a color ramp and all those ramps together give us the overall palette. Pixel artists often employ a technique called "dithering" to bridge multiple colors in their ramp together when they're dealing with a restricted palette (limited amount of color). Essentially dithering is a kind of pattern that makes the artwork appear to have more colors than it actually does. Lots of Habbo furni uses dithering to help render volumes but with newer items we tend to use dithering more for texture rather than bridging colors together. That's not to say we use millions of colors per furni though. Furni is still rendered with a relatively small palette because it's easier to keep track of what colors are used across a line if it's a small number. But you might notice that we'll opt for adding an extra color or two these days instead of jumping right into dithering.

Items get a final look-over and small edits are made before they're sliced up (a topic for another time!) for use in the game, but essentially this is the full drawing process! We've reached the end of the amazingly wordy two step process. Phew. As I mentioned earlier though, the second step can be done a few different ways, so I'll briefly lay out the alternatives for you to ponder. By the way (yes, I fully wrote that out instead of using an acronym), there are furni in the game that were made using both of these alternate methods. Can you guess which ones?

VARIATION ONE:
The first variation starts out the same way as before with scaling the sketched art to size. From there the artist takes the scaled sketch and uses it as is. The volumes get cleaned up until it's all readable and the edges are fixed with black outlines. This method has a tendency to have random semi transparent pixels and often takes just as long to complete as fully redrawing so it's not used all that frequently. In addition the sketch needs to be pretty much perfect for this method to work well so when it is used it's often used on very simple non-animated items. You can see from my example that it will take a lot of cleaning up to reach the same level of cleanliness as the examples that used the preferred method. Interestingly though, this method is how we make the small size furni. Basically scale the big size, clean up, done!

VARIATION TWO:
The second variation is a little more extreme and it's barely ever used in Habbo (but you'll see it used in some NDS games as well as a few other console titles). It involves making the item in 3D and then exporting a render at size and cleaning it up *shudders*. The example image is pretty crude, but you get the idea. Definitely more work than is needed for most items we make but it's a pretty neat process!

There's a pretty interesting (and short) article from SNK about the 3D to 2D process used for the sprites in KOF XII which I fully recommend if you're interested in that sort of thing.

kofaniv.snkplaymore.co.jp/english/info/15th_anniv/2d_dot/creation/index.php
Well, that covers it! My swedish fish have stopped swimming around my blood stream as has the coffee so I'm calling this one done and done! I hope you all enjoyed the answer and the small glimpse into the furni production process! Catch you next week with another mind numbing and most likely overly longwinded Q+A!

-Thank you notMiceElf for another fascinating look into the design process behind the furni we love. you may have a look at this article on our blog too: blog.habbo.com/

Fonte & Foto: http://www.habbo.com/articles/3323-notmiceelf-summer-school-qa

Quello in 3D non mi piace molto.. le bozze sono fantastiche, bello!

Quel Frank è qualcosa di favoloso...

Nico-Idv ha scritto:

Quel Frank è qualcosa di favoloso...

Vero!

Complicata la realizzazione! Però carino

Carino :O

Carino!

Bene

Che immagini incredibili!