Pixel Trouble

[wander]

I've owned Anime Studio for a while and have played around with a few different animations. I thought it might be fun to do an animation with pixelated characters such as old 8 bit video game characters.

The animation looked awesome in the editor and I kept working on it for a while, but when I got to export it, all the pixellated images are completely blurry.

This is something to do with the fact that I scaled pixelated images a ton. (obviously if I didn't scale them they would only take up a few pixels)

Is there some way i can get my animation to render exactly as it appears in the application itself before it is rendered?

Is there any way to get rid of the blur?

I worked really hard on this, and if I can't get rid of the blur I'm going to have to find a screen capture software and just capture the video straight from the application.

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

[dueyftw]

With out looking over your shoulder seeing what your are doing, my best guess is that the codec is blurring your images. Export to image sequence and add sound and effects in a editor. Then when done try using a losses codec. Which one? All according to what your doing and computer you use (mac ,windows)

Dale

[wander]

Thank you for the response, I wasn't clear enough with the problem. Let me try and explain it a little better.

In phototshop, if you have a very small picture and stretch it to make it a lot bigger it will blur the image slightly so it doesn't look really bad quality. In other words it's not an exact replication of the original image, it's a blurred one. In most cases this is good and prevents scaled pictures from looking really bad, but for pixel art it's really bad. My characters only take up about 20 pixels so if I were to scale him in photoshop, he would look extremely extremely blurry.

The thing about anime studio is, it does the blurring when it renders.

so that's the problem

thanks,

-Wander

[neeters_guy]

I'll take a stab at this.

I don't see a setting for this, so apparently AS automatically antialiases images that are scaled up. The more you scale up a low-res image, the more blurry it appears. I can suggest 2 solutions, but both will require significant rework.

1) Resize (upsample) all your low-res art without antialiasing (in Photoshop, Resample Image: nearest neighbor) to the correct size BEFORE you import into AS so you don't need to scale the image. It should still look like a blocky pixelated image.

Or

2) Restore all your pixel images to 100% scale and use the zoom camera to make your images look bigger.

Of course, you still have the option of video capture.

Early test renders are recommended in any project. I'm surprised you didn't do a single test render the whole time you worked on your project?

[Genete]

Your approaching to do a pixel style animation is not correct. It will be always blurred unless you show it in its original size. What you have to do is use a bigger pixel size (ie. 10 real pixels by imaginary pixels.) then you have a non blurred image at larger size (10 times larger)
The way to obtain that effect is diverse.
You can draw the images in a image editor (Photoshop) by using a premade single pixel layer and duplicating and placing it as many times you need, using the grid snap feature. Same thing can be done with Anime Studio. The trick is use the grid snap.

That's how I guess that Mikdog did this awesome video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAdX_nwXlrY
-G

[wander]

Thanks a lot for the responses!

I'm going to do what neeters_guy suggested and rescale my pixellated images to 100 %, zoom the camera, and then rework from there.

Thanks a lot guys, this was my first time doing animations with pixel art and I got really excited and went for many hours straight without test rendering. That was stupid.

Anyway, thanks!

-Wander

btw that Mikdog vid is SICK

[slowtiger]

The "pixel animation look" relies heavily on sharply defined corners on each pixel. The best result is achieved when nothing ever is scaled and all elements are created within the same grid. A bit of planning helps a lot.

Possible ways to do this are:

- don't scale anything, and set the project dimensions to something that fits the characters. If your character is 20 px high, a project size of 24 px hight would be correct - as long as you don't do any rotation, or a transition other than in whole pixel increments!

- create your images in PS, then scale them in PS to whole multiples
with resample set to "nearest neighbour". A 20px high character will become 200 or better 2000px high. Rotations and stuff will look fine now in AS.

- build your characters as vector layers in AS, using the grid.

[JumboCracky]

The guys above me are incorrect, but I assume this post was created in regards to an earlier Anime Studio version. But if you're up to date somewhere, you don't have to manually scale in some editing software nor do you have to zoom in or out with your camera.

Just double click the image layer, go to the "image" tab, then check the box that's beside "Nearest Neighbor Sampling"! I can't believe it took me far too long to find this post, but it literally is possible to prevent a pixelated image without the blurring effect and enabling the Nearest Neighbor Sampling box fixes it. But if you render it, you may want to move the layer a little bit and then render each time to see how that goes.