Depixelizing Pixel Art (2011)
Meanwhile, over in r/gamedev, someone just released a tool that does a good job of pixel-arting regular images.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/7ylvt9/pixelator_a...
The longest discussion about this article on hacker news so far: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578706
I wonder why Microsoft payed him to do develop this kind of algorithm.
waifu2x (http://waifu2x.udp.jp/) is another often-posted superresolution approach, focusing on upscaling low-res anime images instead of extremely tiny pixel art. It uses a totally different learning-based approach - however, their approach would not work with pixel art because it depends on having a set of high resolution ground truth images, and downsampling them to generate training data pairs. No such high-resolution examples exist for pixel art.
Something incredibly similar is already built into the latest versions of Snes9x.
hq4x and the #xBRZ algorithms are amazing and fast and look nearly identical to these results.
Video is quite neat. http://johanneskopf.de/publications/pixelart/supplementary/v...
Reminds me of some old newgrounds flash animations and games
This page is where all the fun is. But it's also very slow.
http://johanneskopf.de/publications/pixelart/supplementary/m...
It looks...weird? Cartoony and almost Picasso-y.
Boo and Bowser look great. Mario and Yoshi look terrible. The detailed pixel art and gradients just don't carry over. The shapes of the outlines do, however.
Scanlines IMO look the best for video games, because it also tries to simulate the medium they were originally presented in, not just the graphics data behind the images
A real-world example of this technique shows up in ColorDMD, an LCD to replace DMD displays used in pinball machines from the early 90's until just recently. Most of the displays were 128x32 with 4 (and later 16) brightness levels.
ColorDMD first had artists create color overlays for the images and animations, and then emulated the display with colored dots instead of the red/orange color from the original DMD.
A later firmware release included upscaling, with some impressive results. This thread on Pinside (a pinball discussion site) shows some examples from the game "The Simpsons Pinball Party". I've linked directly to a comment that shows an original rendered DMD frame along with colorized versions with and without upscaling.
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/colordmd-unveils-new...
I like the aesthetic of hq4x in a lot of them, it’s a little less loopy.
Every time I see this paper I'm always disappointed that there doesn't seem to exist a usable (open source or otherwise) implementation of it anywhere.
My favourite all time game is Heroes of Might and Magic III. It was released in 1999, and the art is still good, but that maybe because I'm so used to it. Ubisoft did a great job, enhancing it for the HD release in 2015, there is video showing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX_h3RIbSKk
Though, one lesson I've learned (as a game developer myself), was that enhancing may introduce more visual problems. On a port of a game I worked (Playstation1 -> PC) we hired an artist to enhance the eye textures, but once the team behind the original game saw this, they told us that since there was no EYE animation in the game, and having such high-fidelity texture (for it's time, back in 2000) made all the characters look like toys.. Now if we left (and we did) the eye textures blurry, then your own eyes can't focus, and accept this better (without eye animation). I'm not an artist (just a coder), but this taught me "less is more".
Is there an implementation of this anywhere?
The biggest advantage of pixel art is that it takes up less resources to create a solid retro type game. Animations suddenly become a lot easier as it relies on the abstract nature of putting the imaginative efforts to the users.
By removing these artifacts, you essentially defeat that purpose. Animating vectors would take a lot more time to create something that seems professional, mostly because you have to be far more detail - analogous to moving from 2d to 3d. I personally don’t see the use cases for this in gaming.
How does this compare to XBR? https://github.com/Treeki/libxbr-standalone
This site has a great page that compares various algorithms: http://johanneskopf.de/publications/pixelart/supplementary/m... While none of them really produce usable results, I love the artistic quality of the Vector Magic algorithm.
Many type designers deal with this as part of their workflow if they work with traditional drawing tools like pen and ink. My understanding is that for classically designed fonts its often easier to redraw vector objects over the scan than to clean up what the automatic tools produce. However, for certain types of "distressed" fonts its a kind of necessity.
Does anyone have an open source implementation of this algoritm? Or a just a demo? I would love to play around with it!
As long as using the pixel art as-is remains an option.
So many classic games have been destroyed in this process.
Is there something that gets a really good result going the opposite direction?
Could you take this a step further? For example, a human knows this thing isn't supposed to be lumpy. What would it take to make this look more like it was interpreted by a human?
For the like pixel art, click here and scroll way down: http://noirlac.tumblr.com/archive
Is it included into DosBox already?
hq4x is included I guess, but unfortunately when you get your games from e.g. GOG, you have to tune DosBox manually every time.
I love this paper ! Has anyone come up with an interactive pixel art tool using this algorithm ?
Take an image, Resize 500% so you see the pixels. Save. Run it through the algorithm. Repeat.
Is this work been already used in emulators filters?
I want to go through the research paper but am unable to load or download it. If anyone has managed to do the impossible please share a drive link. BTW which journal is this published in?
A fantastic classic paper (but ancient history)
Isnt that called "anti Aliasing" :-)
(just kidding)
(2011)
Gotta say, I really like those PhotoZoom 4 results, aside from some of the fringing artifacts. They seem to preserve a lot more of the detail, whereas the presented approach focuses more on eliminating noise.
Sounds promising for my JAV collection!
(2011)
I was excited about this when it was all the rage. It speaks to me as a programmer. Some years later, I stumbled upon this excellent article by an artist considering the problem from the art perspective: http://www.dinofarmgames.com/a-pixel-artist-renounces-pixel-...
It points to the problem with these upscaled versions: They aren't any good. In the end, the artist demonstrates how to get good results, draw it again: http://www.dinofarmgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/yosh...
Of course, the algorithmic approach lets you upscale any number of preexisting games. However, I have concluded that I like the original art better.