Hey all you vergers! Sashiburi, naa~!

Okay, I love to do the Verge-y. But I hate having to make tilesets because they always come out looking like crap. I'm sure some of you are dirty talented monkeys and don't have this problem, so you can go sit in the corner while we normal people chat. :D

I read sites on the internet periodically about making pixel art, but it requires a good deal of practice that I don't want to bother with. So, here is a discussion about shortcuts to make garbage look like fine art with nothing but some poster glue, red paint, and a Martha Stuart video.

Hmm... I suppose the shortcuts I have might not help everybody, since not everybody uses Gimp. But you should! *wags finger*

First off, I found a great shortcut for making wood and brick textured walls/floors/furniture. In Gimp, you can use the Noisify filter (under 'Filters -> Noise') at strength 5 to get a good color randomization (you could do the same thing with the Add Noise... filter in Photoshop, I think.). Then, to fake a wood grain, you add a Motion Blur at the correct angle at a strength of 2 pixels. :P Brick and stone masonry is the same except leave out the blur. I've also managed to use this to fake tree foliage. All in all, much easier with an acceptable outcome, as opposed to doing it by hand one pixel at a time.

*I'll post pics as soon as I figure out where to upload these pics to.*

Anyone else?

Add noise will work better if you convert the image to greyscale and then back to rgb afterwards, unless you want really strange, randomly colored stars. =D Which I'm told are randomly colored, but they all look white to me.

You want to make it super sexy, toss a soft layered scan of something with blue or redish tones, the fade it a bit and you've got an instant nebula.

Example

On that page, I did a noise filter, then scaned the fucking pants I can on with my hand scanner, and used that for the nebula. Levis makes for good nebulae. =D

Neat. And yeah, it *does* look pretty good. I'm gonna have to try that one, once I get myself a decent bloody camera.

Add Noise is one of the filters I use the most. It adds a sort of intangible 'real' look to whatever you've been doing. Hardly anything is ever a solid color or perfectly smooth gradient. It's usually got a bit of random perturbation in it. Of course there are exceptions. Keep it to a low percentage (like 6-15%).

Add Noise + Motion Blur will get you some decent-looking wood-grain effects. You'll have to adjust the contrast (and most likely the brightness) to get it perfect.

... lesbian

Ah, I just remembered; I figured out how to make a half-decent looking tree without trying too hard. That cheap way that will have you drawn and quartered if you ever mention it in one of those 'purist' pixel art forums: Drawing it Big and Shrinking It.

I found that you can make a great tree by just paining in a brown tree skeleton, setting a moderate-to-small sized brush to have random size and a high scattering value, painting in dark leaves, then painting over those with bright leaves, then adding some half-assed bark texture and grass with a fadeaway brush, and then touch it up with the burn and dodge. Shrink it down to 32x32 and it looks pretty decent.

I'm also going to try to experiment with some large-scale texturing in the verge game I'm working on right now; you know, adding a subtractive or additive layer here and there to break up the monotony of my sprites. I dunno, it'll be interesting to see if I can make anything look really good. What I should really do is just render backgrounds in 3d and play on top of them (as in StarOcean and others), but I'm not that good with lightwave yet.

Add Noise eh? I can really use that tip. =]

It's commonsense.

And oh yeah, GIMP rulz!