8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box
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- Опубликовано: 15 окт 2024
- In this GDC 2016 talk, Terrible Toybox's Mark Ferrari discusses and demonstrate some of his techniques for drawing 8 bit game graphics, including his celebrated methods for use of color cycling and pallet shifting to create complex and realistic background animation effects without frame-animation
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Animations using palette cycling: mind-blown.
Day/night cycle using palette cycling: Mind melted
Encoding 3 entierly different scenes into one picture using palette cycling: mind vaporized
zelda wind waker did its day/night cycle the same way iirc
He is the last pixel-bender.
In a world where the anti-aliasing nation rules, one man stands ready to bend pixels.
@@Shockszzbyyous he might control the pixels but he seems to be pretty lost when it comes to using a computer,
@@youremybiggestfan Well, if it were true it would be just that, and it isn't wrong by any means
not the last bender
but the last MASTER pixel bender, for sure
I'm sure there are people trying out this stuff, after seeing his talk, but none anywhere on the horizon of THE master ;P
🤣🤣🤣
It's amazing to have the privilege of an in-depth view of a master's process. He seems incredibly humble for someone who is undoubtedly an important figure in the development of artwork, media culture, and video games as we see them today. I'm so glad we live in a time where we can still have conversations with artists and creators that formed such a crucial part of our culture.
Ikr? That city palette part... wow!
I worked with him for several years and you are spot on in every regard. This guy is a master, and just a really nice man.
Michael Krekelberg I didn't get the humble vibe.
Yeah, he definitely sounds pretty full of himself at times...
He did not come off to me as feeling superior to others.
This was amazing, gave a whole new insight into the work and thought that goes into designing 8 Bit art.
I agree :D
(PS I love your music, and I hope you have a wonderful day)
@@LuchM m
No applauding? I'd be loosing my balls if I was watching this live haha. This is amazing.
They're too shocked and amazed to react.
1:00:52 - He ended somewhere in the middle, and then went over time because he is waaaaaaay to awesome for only 1 hour.
Most people had probably left the room for other seminars, he was only supposed to speak for an hour but since the room was free he went over
The microphone only picked up his voice and went silent at other times, sometimes you can hear a bit of applause or laughter before it cuts off. Pretty sure it wasn't that silent in real life
The mics aren't picking up the audience. There are a few bits where you can *barely* hear some applause or laughter, but in general we're just not hearing it.
Those 8 bit animations of the waterfalls and such are AMAZING!
They're not actually animations, which is the amazing part. One picture with only the colors changing, making it look like it moves.
I think technically it is an animation. It's just not with moving pixels. XD
I think it’s actually closer to a gif then a video or animation or whatever you want to call it
It has been my Linux wallpaper for years... Glad I found the creator.
@@lucamateipintilie7006 I actaully made GIFS when i was a kid. Guess what we called them? Animations.
I would pay five times my tuition if I could get art teachers as nice and factual as this guy.
I’m not a visual artist, but watching this presentation was a delight. Always a special occasion to hear a master discuss their craft.
Likewise, I'm not a visual artist either and this presentation made me wish so hard that I was, so I could be directly inspired by him. Mindblowing and beautiful
This is awesome.
Thank you, GDC, for putting this up online!
And thanks to Mark for giving the talk that's so chockful of information!
Grand master of CGI.
Double thank you
triple thankssss
This guy's mind is terrifying. Unbelievable.
That pallette shifting is AMAZING - from trees to a cityscape by only changing the pallette? I'm sure it's basic, but still!
Once you learn a trick, push it further than what you think it can do.
Can i use it to plant subliminal messages in order to recruit an army of brainwashed peeps for when shit hits the fan?
the idea of changing palettes is easy, but actually figuring out what ones to change and how to get those effects isnt easy to do.
Mark's art is so atmospheric. I love the warmth and lived in feeling he brings to some of these scenes from Thimbleweed Park.
Being 40 yo now, i played most of those games, and this guy is a genius.
Holy shit, some of that 8-bit art from the slide show is just gorgeous. I'm focused on pixel art myself, and you just blew my mind, sir.
This is very interesting and all, but I read the title as "8 British Graphics" and kept waiting for him to explain what the fuck he meant
+Matt Dingo, LMAO. No he didn't explain what "8 British Graphics" is. Read OP's comment again. XD
Lol he did, its not "British", its "Bit-Ish", its what is new work is about (the kickstarter project), painting in higher resolution, not in a restrainted 8-16Bit palette, but with the "sense" and "feeling" of an 8bit art. Its around the middle of the talk show.
LOL I thought the same thing when I saw the thumbnail. I was disappointed when I saw no British graphics. But overall the talk was brilliant.
maybe it would only be working with red white and blue :)
I am continually impressed at how everyone who worked on Lucasfilm Games is just an amazing person and a joy to listen to. Probably the reason why their games were so amazing as well.
" I don't know why that's happening but it's really annoying"
-Anyone who ever used Photoshop.
-Anyone who's ever coded
-Anyone who's ever used a computer
-Anyone
-A
-
My eyes can't believe what they're seeing.
This man has produced some of the most beautiful art in gaming I've ever seen.
Not just 8-bit, but in general. So much color and movement.
Creating environments like these in a 3D space would take unbelievable amounts of resources and wouldn't be as high quality.
Mark Ferrari is TRULY AN INSPIRATION for game artists. Thank you GDC for having him talk at the event.
Wtf? Is he a wizard? Must be.
a pixel wizzard
It's actually pretty simple.
everything is simple after you know how to do it. and everything is magic until then. ;)
+Ashaira not trying to start anything. but I've been doing this long before watching this video. I've been a game artist for many years and most of game development if critical thinking. you just gotta know your tools.
that said, I'm not at all undermining the accomplishments of this, he's been doing this long before me, and much better. just saying the process is simple.
13:50
That just completely blew my mind.
Someone needs to tell Mark Ferrari about Graphicsgale! Its got a dither pattern brush, you pick a pattern, two colors and go nuts! Saved me so many hours of tedious dithering work. So much more handy than a dither fill tool, its more like actually painting the pattern.
Lol I've been using graphicsgale for years and didn't know that!
It's so rare to see someone who's not only insanely talented but also a great speaker! It's such a pleasure to watch this talk.
Jesus christ, not a single applause or cheer during those mindblowing reveals on the first 15 minutes...
This is truly not just "commercial work". This is art grown out of limitation and necessity.
51:40 - 59:57 Waterfall color cycling tutorial
38:18 Everythhing except the sky is 3-7 colors, whatever the structure is.
39:21 Sky is 16-32 colors max; Half the palette is used for color cycling FX
46:12 This was really inspirational, actually. One of the best presenters I've ever seen, even with the technical difficulties. Incredibly engaging, charismatic, and knowledgeable. I only wish I had teachers like this when I was in school
Give this man a million dollars.
after paying attention for 40 minutes i was hooked. inspiration started flowing all over me. i just *sobs* love youtube.
i hope this art style never dies or is at least regarded in the future, it is really quite amazing
Deluxe Paint has a spiritual successor, grafx2, and it's pretty cool. But this art style doesn't really exist in the modern day. Modern 'pixel-art' is 32-bit, has flat blocky styles and old Japanese inspired styles, and rarely dither.
Student: I feel like we're watching a Master of his time!
Mark: WHERE???
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
For anyone that enjoyed this talk and hasn't checked out his demos yourself, I highly encourage you to do so. Load up those color cycle demos on your own PC - they're pretty wild. There's a few more tools for understanding them than shown in the talk.
Hands down best talk I've ever seen at GDC.
I like that people still have love for this Artstyle. personally i was mesmerised by the sheer dedication, creativity and love from this person for the 8-bit art.
What a priceless gift it is to have such a lecture(specially one this long!) avaible on youtube, thanks GDC and MarkFerrari!
questions in the middle is awesome. sometimes questions are super valuable for these talks
I love this man! This was so fascinating. I've never had a clear idea of how old 8 bit pixel art games were made. There's a certain quality of fantastical realism to this art style. My mind gets drawn into the pictures and starts to imaging and feel what the place must be like, in a very different way that newer graphics can't do.
Man, what do I say? This is a treasure to watch all these techniques. This is the pinnacle of pixel art.
13:55 Was the audience really quiet or did they fail to understand what they where seeing? How can there be no reaction to that?
I think they were quiet because they knew exactly what they were seeing. The compliment at 1:18 sums it up.
probably expecting hipster pixelated Zelda clones and Shovel Knight type stuff and felt awkward when they got actual 8-bit graphics ;)
It actually broke my mental box
tbh i missed it the first time and then read your comment. i was watching this at 2x speed
this palette shifting art is gorgeous, especially while animated, and garners incredible value from an unbelievably tiny file size. however it reminds me a bit of kansasfest (an apple II development convention)... it's cool that this guy can do this, but you have to understand the technology to fully grasp how impressive it is, so it's really best suited for a talk at a convention such as this.
There was a reaction, but there is no ambient mic, so you can't really hear it. Unless you were expecting a standing ovation :/
You are an inspiration Mark, I returned to that video accidentaly, and want to rewatch it, amazing work, and amazing approach and lesson, Thanks.
This video should have more videos. This is actually amazing to see the skills applied to the pixel art.
Inception
**Wipes a tear** Mark, if it's not already obvious, you're my hero.
What a great presentation! It was very interesting to learn how Mark Ferrari works (and worked).
I'm also a very big fan of the Pro Motion software from Cosmigo, but I'd like to share a tip for how to dither-fill areas in Photoshop:
1) Fill the area with a perfect gradient, as smooth as possible with any number of colors.
2) Copy the area and create a new image from it.
3) Convert the new image to indexed color, selecting your preferred dithering method and exact amount of colors.
4) Convert the new image back to true color, and copy-paste the area into the original picture.
Cheers
or the realtime way without duplicate images danfessler.com/blog/hd-index-painting-in-photoshop
Such a likable person, i enjoyed my 80 minutes here a lot!
That artwork is insane. I can't believe those pictures are possible to exist.
Dithering might have started as a work-around for technical limitations, but for me it has become part of a style. I love dithering.
Wooooooow! I thought I was fairly talented with 8bit... Damn.
Gonna go rethink my life real quick.
done rethinking? :D
i thought i was alright but now i am thinking i am just a toddler with a mouse . this stuff is just grand
This color palette swamps blew my mind, ill take an artists effort with 8bit any time over high fidelity computer rendering ANY DAY. (ive made alot of chiptunes so i know the scene well) As for the question early in the film; Its not esthetic alone.. its also better for the mind, we are bombarded heavily with changing optics and it wrecks your energy so fast, look at all these modern movies that use 5 camera positions a SECOND.. its almost epilepsy inducing. Games with calmer scenery also makes it more recogniceable. Not that long ago i looked at some very old mario art still consisting of blocks (mario 1 till 3) and it suprised me how i could remember drawing these things as a kid just from memory because it was so easy to imprint on my memory. Recognicabillity!. All the modern renders are nearly impossible to remember, they are too externally sourced (light, ambience, position etc). Ill keep it at that for now.
Thank GOD for OLD backups! I still have a lot of my DOS stuff, including Deluxe Paint 2E! :D Love that program. Still works well. I only wish I could tell him... ALT+ENTER for full screen and just tap the Windows key to free the mouse pointer up. ;)
Came back here after searching about that mans' life and the color cycling tool. What a beautiful journey and story. So many cool and unknown stories out there. Thanks for sharing your art and your love for it.
Did a tree once that went through all the seasons with palette shifting.
For me, it's the limitations of a medium that makes it an art-form. A true artist transcends those limitations to create something special. This man is a true artist.
Great talk! I've been on the website and admired the palette cycling. Now I know who the guy who made it is, so that's great
MIND BLOWN! Next level pixel art
Mindblowing! I've seen devs pull off incredible things to save space/processing power but never something this beautiful. And while of course VGA is technically superior, I still can't get over how gorgeous Loom is with its 16 colors. Even though when I got my first PC, SVGA was slowly becoming the standard, I have a soft spot for EGA - so much so that I used it in one point&click game I made (although at a resolution of 800x600). The response I got was... hm... mixed ;) -- my artistic ineptitude also being to blame, but still, people are not used to such strong colors. For me, though, it was helluva fun to make, and I continue to experiment with EGA and find new ways to trick the eye.
This dude is a true artistic master. A modern-day genius. A beautiful inspiration to work harder and be better.
One of the patron saints of digital graphics. I spent a lot of time reverse engineering his techniques for a project I was working on two years ago ("Bone Rattle", it's on Tumblr). 8-bit color is absolutely more fun to work with, but color cycling is still a relevant technique for animation today. It makes animating fluid volumes so much easier (water, gas, fire, etc.). You can actually cycle 24-bit images in After Effects using the Colorama effect, which is basically a circular gradient map with keyframable color rotation. I wish more people saw the utility in this technique.
Good on that one guy for mentioning Grafx2- Pro Motion is my go-to program for indexed color art, but Grafx2's feedback painting feature combined with looping in shade mode allows you to paint cycles in realtime, which is super fun. Gotta run that by Huckaby to make sure it gets into whatever he's working on. SO hyped for that.
Thanks Mr Ferrari, I come back here often, to both admire the mastery of the tool, and to just watch the sun rise over the canyon. Pushing one angle so far, can get one very far.
He makes such a good point about the tools and how vast they are. It's that idea of paralysis by choice. When starting a project, if you give yourself all the tools in the world, chances are, you'll get hung up deciding and fiddling and everything will look mixed up and incongruent, but if you limit yourself to one medium, you focus more on the art and how to bring that medium to life
44:00 Basically you can easily create dithers in Photoshop if you work in greyscales and go to Picture>Mode>Bitmap. If you now overlay the resulting patterns in defferent colors you're almost there. You can go flat out crazy and try different patterns and screen widths for your purposes.
I love that he's as organised as I am when it comes to presentations.
I LOVE the way these look! I went to that website with the 8bit art and have not been disappointed. I wish there were more 8bit games with this level of art in them! Incredibly impressive!
This is a great talk and although I'm not a graphics designer, I still have great appreciation and fascination for this art form. This is why I highly recommend getting involved in creative media industries, because although you must know your area inside out and backwards, job seeking can be difficult and the stress levels can get extraordinarily high due to time constraints, everything is intertwined and it opens up your mind to creativity and culture.
I studied audio production as a Bachelors degree and initially I wanted to work in a recording studio. Near the end of my studies I have developed a great interest for cinematography through post-production and on-set audio recording, and 8-bit graphics art like this through studying sound for games and electronic music production (how sound was generated and its limitations through different bit depths and oscillator availability). Now I work for the BBC as a location sound recordist and I'm teaching myself digital art, things I would never expect to do only a few years ago.
This is the third time I'm beginning to watch this (not in row obviously, throughout a span of 1 year) And this time I realised I actually recognized that Spyro forest, man that game was quite fun to play. First 2 times I was too stunned by the art to even realise it was a game familiar to me. So amazing work.
I keep coming back to this one. It's so good.
5 minutes in and I can tell this will be a great video. Love the bit about limitations and creativity. The presenter is the palette master!
Holey moley the change from trees to city near 14 minutes - wow
What an amazing talk... The best of these are the ones that help me realize how insanely brilliant the artists were that made the games from the early years with the limitations they had. While modern games are incredible, and the achievements are no less great, it's these early pathfinder who truly made the gaming world what it is today. We are blessed that they existed and put their genius to work in scenes thst might babe literally been seconds on screen.
Your palette shifting method is designing the image to have a specific color kit and making it look like you are using layers, when in reality it's all one image. Genius.
That man just making games art again. So cool
So this is the guy who made those old games incredible waterfalls- OMG I've been seeing it for quite some time here and there and they always made my jaw drop. This is so impresionistic. Your eye see just pixels but brain keep refining this image.
This is absolutely incredible. I'm so blown away by what you were able to accomplish, truly breathtaking work.
This art is amazing. I am an artist who grew up with computers (though I've done some drawing on paper too) and nowadays work with 3D game art. I think that some of the ideas presented here could be used to achieve very interesting effects using textures and shaders. I think that pixel art and 8-bitish art can be augmented with shaders for great effect, doing things solar to the pallet cycling as demonstrated.
Amazing. Kudos to Ferrari and GDC for the upload. Please add subtitles.
Great talk, for the retro art and also for the mention about how too much choice can slow you down.
many many valuable advices. Loved what he says about the background light
There's always a lot of confusion when the term "8-bit graphics" is used. In the context of this video, it obviously means "8 bits per pixel", a very objective description of 256-color images.
However, this has nothing to do with "8-bit graphics" like those of an NES game, for example. In the case of 8-bit consoles and computers, the "8-bit" part refers to the CPU and is not directly related to graphics, so the term "8-bit graphics" becomes much broader, and doesn't imply any specific amount of colors or other graphical restrictions, since each 8-bit machine had different video processors with different restrictions. 8-bit machines would typically have much more primitive video than the 256-color art discussed in this video though.
Yes, most of what people call "8-bit graphics" is actually 4-bit graphics running on 16-bit systems. I guess on average they got the bitness right. :P
There's "confusion" when using any term with people who aren't familiar with it.
Anyone outside of expertise in any area is likely to incorrectly use terms from those areas.
8-bit machines could technically run 32-bit graphics too (with a special smart graphics unit and be very slow at it, but still) , so that's saying nothing more than "retro console graphics"
it's the difference between "8-bit graphics" and "graphics from 8-bit systems" which are not the same thing, 8-bit image means always the same thing
I have so many of those color cycling art pieces as my wallpaper using wallpaper engine! I never knew they were all made by the same guy!!! That’s amazing
Thought I would only watch the first 5 minutes, stayed to watch the whole thing. Amazing artist.
31:00
This is very, very insightful, definitely the most useful part of the talk for me.
Excellent talk from one of the masters. What many younger artists don't understand is that there's more to 8-bit graphics than just a lower resolution and colour palette. The way things are drawn are not just a reduction of something larger with more colours. So many 8-bit games these days are not really.
This guy is so humble and is really fun to listen to.
To the guy who said chill bumps, ditto and kudos for saying exactly what I was thinking. It's really wonderful watching artists like this work, I'm only sad it only lasted an hour and a half.
OMG! This is so interesting!
I've seen these piece of art a long time ago, but seeing Mark Ferrari discussing the process is wonderful!
Dude! Mark Ferrari!! Someone I was not expecting to see come up in my random game dev browsing....but maybe I should have been.
this is the only gdc talk that needs a 4K remaster
By far my most enjoyed GDC talk. Glad I subscribed and I'm glad to see this on here. Thanks!!!!!
this talk is superb. my mind is blown and the inspiration is flowing hard.
I am learning pixel art and this vide is GOLD. Thank you very much, Mr. Ferrari, and thanks to GDC for uploading it.
What an incredible artist. So glad these people exist
This is the most amazing and insightful GDC talk I've seen.
Wow the day- and nightlight effect with the palette shifting is awesome!
It sucks so much games are still largely not taken seriously. Like there are no Oscars or Grammys or Pulitzers or Nobel prizes for games. This guy should get all the prizes.
Wow! Those limited resources really resulted in some great ideas. Using palette shifting as animation device or daytime-to-image mapping itself is absolutely brilliant.
Really good talker too.
such beautiful artwork.
Thank you so much for carrying the torch of detailed pixel art.
I've been using photoshop for 28 years and I have no idea what the hell he's talking about with 90% of this video. So impressed! :)
ive always loved these art pieces, I'm glad this guy got to do a talk on them
came here from a tumblr post featuring his palette shifting landscapes and am delighted to learn he's responsible for the look of beloved thimbleweed park one of my very favourite video games
Beautiful art! The process of making it is really interesting. I have a new appreciation for it - I had no idea how much work went into this stuff.
A thought about the difference between computer graphics and console graphics came to me when watching this.
On 8-bit consoles, where most of us probably know 8-bit art from (computers were expensive), the picture processing units were usually somewhere in between EGA and VGA.
For example, NES had theoretically over 400 colors, but there were issues with duplicate colors and the fact that you had to choose only a limited number of those colors available to use in your scene at once.
And even within those colors there might be rules like "first color of a pallet has to be the same for all background graphics pallets". Or "sprites can have four 4-color pallets." Etc.
And mostly it is these quirky limitations that create what we can immediately call "8-bit graphics".
EGA was limited, for sure. But it was a color pallet chosen by engineers, not artists (unlike NES or SEGA consoles pallets) and there was this hard limit of 16 colors at once which was surpassed even by NES (13 BG + 12 for spites). VGA has 256 colors _at once_ unlike NES or SEGA master system. so it's already almost in 16-bit console era if you think about it :)
So when I see EGA graphics, sure it is 8-bit... but for me it's 8-bit _computer_ graphics to be exact and that 25 color pallet is propably forever for me a standard for what 8-bit art looks like :)
An absolute beast. I played all the monkey islands and I can vouch that this man's art in combination with everything else was one of the reasons I kept coming back.
So much to learn.