8-bit Animation
Grimarlon Varner
Like Mr. Meeseeks himself, if someone asks you to do an 8-bit pokemon recreation for Adult Swim you are forced to oblige. Is that too specific of a reference?... This piece is a masterclass in Character Animation, Storytelling, and Design. Just check out those anime-style dust and light explosions.
Converting any Motion Graphics sequence into an 8-bit style animation is incredibly easy. All you need to do is use the mosaic effect in After Effects. Essentially the effect will break-up your entire composition into tiles so you can control the width of your 8-bit animation.
After that all you really need to do is adjust your color and stylize. I like using the posterize effect because it reduces the number of colors in your scene. In fact if you crank that slider down to 8 you will get exactly 8-bits worth of color. Did your mind just explode?
i see in other topic that say use the pixelate fx to make pixel art animation.
Use the pixelate fx seems to be a good way (im thinkin in after effects way) but, there are someone that actually has made some animation in toon boom with the pixelate fx and create a pixel style (8bit or 16 bit) animation?
I found that some people recommend to render sequence of images as 16 bit png if later this animation will be edited in photoshop? Once i render my animation i will export sequence of images in photoshop and apply dust and scratches filter to my animation (to remove some speckled type of noise) and also will use animated mask inside of the photoshop to define area of influence for this filter. Also maybe a bit of color correction. So for that should i render in blender my sequence as 8 bit or 16 bit and how render time will be increased?
Anyone remember Color cycling from the 90s? This was a technology often used in 8-bit video games of the era, to achieve interesting visual effects by cycling (shifting) the color palette. Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time, so a palette of selected colors was used. But the programmer could change this palette at will, and all the onscreen colors would instantly change to match. It was fast, and took virtually no memory. Thus began the era of color cycling.
If you want to do something like team colors or possibly mega man / shovel knight sorts of things, you can use a mask texture to indicate where to colorize and use a vector parameter instead of the source texture in the areas the mask indicates. You can then animate that color and do whatever you want.
Mark obviously has a amazing sense of lighting. The one you can learn, but also the one you build with repeated efforts from the 80s constraints: 8 bit, 256 colors and saving space at any corner of the computer memory.
He argued that nowadays tools are not what they used to be in order to create such pictures, but he also mentionned that Joseph Huckaby currently is working on such a tool, hopefully out next year (2017). Yes. Photoshop is great, but many 8-bits tools (mostly context aware pixel gradients) are just not there; of course, who would want such tools in Photoshop?
Some more modern 2D games like the Rayman games are using interpolated skeletal animation with frame swaps such that the motion is a full 60 fps, but the sprites only change when needed. Again, not likely at a regular framerate.
This video goes into good detail on the topic.
If you will take a moment and find out how many fps the human eye can read, it might help your design. I would tell you that low number, but have forgotten what it is. Because the human eye is so slow, we are unable to see the scan lines displayed on a monitor screen.
So, again, it comes down to what you want it to look like. Many 2D games get away with quite low animation frame rates, but 30 or 60 fps camera and sprite motion. Like I mentioned before, Cuphead is animate at a constant 24 fps. Some other games out there, like Fancy Pants Adventures or Ori and the Blind Forrest, are animated at 30 fps and are noticeably smoother in appearance, but also a ton more work. Aladdin on the Genesis, famously one of the best animated games of the time as it was actually animated by Disney animators, has the main run cycle animated at roughly 12 fps with an extra frame or two when needed. Lion King, another contender for best looking, is 30 fps.
I would actually suggest having more than one loop if your speed is variable. Two or possibly three might be necessary, along with a few frames for starting from zero motion. This might sound like a lot of work, and it is, but consider the walk / run likely to be the animation most frequently seen in the game.
First, create an Adjustment layer above all of the other layers in your composition. (This can be above motion graphics, animation, footage, etc.) Then, apply the Posterize effect to the Adjustment layer. The Posterize effect will limit the number of color tones on your image. For a retro game look, I prefer to set the Level between 5 and 15. (15 if you are creating a full-color look, and closer to 5 if you are creating a monotone look, like an original Game Boy screen.)
Now, to create the blocky-pixel look on our image, we need to apply the CC Block Load effect to the Adjustment layer. Make sure the Completion setting is set to 0. Then, set the Scans value to 3 and uncheck the Start Cleared option. You should now see a pixelized version of your image. The great thing about the CC Block Load effect is that it always creates perfectly square pixels, regardless of the aspect ratio of the composition.
Next, you can apply the Tint effect to the Adjustment layer if you want to limit the color-palette to something more black and white. This is an option for stylistic choice. Set the Map White To option to a dull green tone to replicate the original Game Boy Screen.
Finally, I recommend limiting the frame rate to better emulate the appearance of a retro video game. An easy way to do this is with the Posterize Time effect. Apply Posterize Time to the Adjustment layer, then I recommend setting the frame rate between 6 and 15. This will add a little bit of stutter to the movement onscreen. (Using Posterize Time is optional, depending on the look you are going for, and may not be necessary for more modern 8-bit animations.)
When applying the 8-bit look to video footage, you may encounter a lot of pixel flickering. You can reduce this using blur effects. Apply the 8-bit look to an Adjustment layer above your footage. Now apply a Gaussian Blur to your video footage. I recommenced a blurriness value between 4 and 8. This will help reduce the flickering, but it will also reduce some contrast. Alternatively, you can substitute Smart Blur in place of Gaussian Blur. Smart Blur will preserve more contrast, but it will take a lot longer to render. I recommend setting the Smart Blur radius to a value between 3 and 6.
If you are going to apply the 8-bit game look to footage with an alpha channel, I recommend applying the effects (or preset) directly on the footage. Then, in order to not have the pixel grid appear on the alpha channel part of the footage, navigate to the Blending Mode option for the Grid effect. Set it to one of the following four blending modes: Darken, Lighten, Difference, or Exclusion. The blending mode you choose will depend on the final look you want. I recommend viewing each one, then selecting the one that looks best.
I recently got my first arduino and this is my first project (so you can guess am pretty new to this stuff). It's a 8 bit Mario running from the left to the right end of the display. I used the real 8 bit Super Mario run animation as reference. My LCD is meant to be a digits display but i thought it would still be pretty funny to get a animation working. I had to draw every pixel-state for the animation in bit code to make it work. (pretty time killing)
Due to the growing popularity of 8-Bit Theater since it's debut in 2001, various Flash artists have created tributes, developing a cornerstone of the archetypes that we know today in the first Final Fantasy game. Cartoon remakes of the comic strips have also been made, as well as a few guest cartoons for the Nuklear Power site.
Five Flash videos were created in a span of 2002 to 2005 by a Flash artist under the pseudonym, TLF. The last two were a joint project between him and Meddros, another Flash artist and 8-Bit Theater fan. The project has since been abandoned and the two artists have never been heard from again.
An "in-the-making" animated version of this comic, it was another Flash project created by Meddros. An early version of the animation was sent to Clevinger to post on Nuklear Power at the end of 2004. Four years later, he remade and added extras to the project, and posted it to Newgrounds, with the rest of the 8-bit Theater Flash animations.
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