Відео

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So I am attempting to do a 2.5D too down game. A cozy style game. I want to draw everything. How would you go about drawing buildings for the town. Thanks. I subscribed because you actually teach. You are wholesome and honest with everything. Thanks!

Wow I never knew you could make polly lines and edit angels in Procreate! Super helpful tip and im only 1:11 min in!

My absolute biggest tip for practicing and using reference is: draw what you see, not what you *think* you see! There ate plenty of videos and resources expanding on this concept, but it's, in my opinion, a vital skill for getting the feel of art. Once that's familiar, then you can experiment with different ways to represent what is actually there. You essentially are changing the way the viewer see what's present.

Hey! I've had a lot of this swimming in my mind for a few weeks and I finally got around to finishing up some assets to give this some practice! And I must say, as a first time developer this was one of the most straightforward projects to play with. I did run into one issue however, which is the relationship between the camera, player, and these background canvas items. Do the sizes of the assets drastically impact how they are placed in the world? Basically, the assets are "sprawled" across the map, and so in perspective view gets pretty inaccurate compared to the in-game camera. This has been awesome though, thank you so much. This is one of the best videos I've found for learning overall, and your whole channel is a goldmine for art in general, not even game dev specific crafting. Thanks, very much.

Hi! Do you have any videos on how do you downscale your high resolution assets to 128×128 without loosing definition in-game?

pixel is not a great choice as per me. Snes games on CRT TV didnt looked like that. When you played Snes games on LCD TV do tend to look more like pixel art.

Appreciate the absence of cynicism towards AI.

Great Video! A lot of good notes to keep in mind. The biggest difference I noticed between the art that didn't work and the art that did is the hierarchy of details. You can get away with a lot if you remember to maintain large areas of low detail. That way the game doesn't look visually cluttered. That's why blurring the background and shifting it all toward blue helped so much. It lowered the amount of detail.

Hi! Great explanation! I have one question. You mentioned that your animations were made in 4k, but the character is 256x256 in-game. So, how did you scaled it down without messing with its details/contours? In Unreal engine I know there is a "pixel per unit" parameter we can use to re-scale the sprites. I've tried it and could scale down a ~1000x1000 px sprite to have the same height as a ~256x256 px without loosing definition. While trying to rescale the original one either on procreate or libresprite to have 256 px hight it lost definition. However, I am not sure if changing the "pixel per unit" parameter would have impact on the gpu performance: e.g. would it require the same ammount of processing as working with the original 1000x1000 px file? Or it would required less processing?

Hello! Thanks for the helpful video, very useful, saved to my playlists to reference more in future. With regards to your file transfer problem, on my discord server I just have a little private channel where I send all my drawings to, then I can download it on my PC. Now we've helped each other :D

Thank you for making this. It's a touchy subject and I've long wanted to hear from an actual artist who doesn't just immediately put the blinders on and scream about AI stealing your lunch money! I'm bad at art and frankly I'm ok with that. I'm a programmer with a ton of hobbies and I'm ok with not having this skill (or being musical). If I could snap my finger and be a great artist and musician I would obviously do it, but I can't. One of my hobbies is games (video and board) and having the ability to use AI to generate music and art is a great thing for me. All the stuff I do is for me and a few friends, so I'm not making any money on this. Hiring an artist or musician to generate this content (and it is a LOT of content that would takes dozens of hours of a human's time) is not something I could ever afford to do. AI is not perfect but it makes the things in my head possible when they wouldn't be otherwise. Two styles I often use is photo-realistic and plastic-miniature, which is not something most artists would do anyway (I don't think). Even using AI, I've still spent well over a hundred hours tweaking prompts and manually editing the results to get closer to what I'm looking for. For what it's worth, I don't think AI will replace actual artists. It's too hard to get consistency. AI can be used to quickly generate "themes" or what not, to allow a game designer the ability to clearly express their vision, and then pass that off to artists to bring it to life. Same with music. But you'd need a human to keep everything consistent and put in the finer details and love. My biggest fear is that AI will lead to even more overcrowding of media. We already have more shows/movies/music/books/games than anyone can possibly consume in a lifetime. Indie devs pushing games to Steam mostly just get lost in the flood. AI will make this 1000 times worse, with AI garbage art/music/programmed content being slapped together on what can just barely be called a finished product and then shoved out the door by opportunists looking to make a quick buck. For what it's worth, I always thought the future of AI was to do the boring repetitive tasks and free up humans to pursue creative works, so this AI art/music/writing thing completely took me by surprise and I'm still kind of trying to wrap my head around it all. If AI is doing both the boring stuff and the creative stuff, what do we humans do with our time? 🙃

I hit creative block when it was time to use Tilemaps as I dont want my game to look pixelart and made of blocks. I wanted to know how I can make it look modern... then I came across this channel. I prefer simple looking assets with great emphasis on foundations (color, shape, lighting, gesture,etc) details just make me loose readability. cant tell what i am looking it. AI wasnt useful. I prefer human touch.

Thank you for using the correct graph to describe the Dunning-Kruger effect! It's equally funny and infuriating how many people very confidently explain it completely incorrectly with made-up graphs.

Well, yes, AI is no more than a tool. A REALLY multimodal tool, but a tool nonetheless, you need to have skill in the area that you are using it for to guide it correctly. I use AI to aid me in programing, and it solves a lot of things, I've learned a lot thanks to it too, but if I did not know what I was doing I could not obtain anything coherent from it.

There's a point that I think could be made in this video, or as the start of another video: Sometimes the technology is getting in the way of the art style. The games with bad UI are typically relying on a computer font for the text, on vector drawings for icons and buttons, and bitmap drawings for the art assets. These are three different processes: it's not that any of those processes are bad, it's that the nature of each one makes them distinctive. This also shows up when using CG effects like shaders, where it's easy to make an effect that feels artificial because it uses a different process. Each time you add another process you add one more thing to master. I've been making comic pages traditionally lately, and this has given me a lot of insight into why the results are so different there versus in digital. Digital art on its own often bears the same marks of inconsistency, where certain things are perfect, because the computer snapped it into place, and other things are not, because a human was at the wheel. If you zoom in on digital art you notice more errors, so you fix them, but then you zoom out again and realize that now you have to fix the rest of the image to match it. On the other hand, if you use traditional drafting tools to build compositions and make ruled panels and word balloons, you still make errors, but the errors are relatively consistent within the larger process.

There's this relatively older technique which is style transfer. A few years ago it was getting to the point where you could shade a ball and it would adjust a scene to the style in real time. I feel like all the full-on generative stuff kind took the whole spotlight, but style transfer is something much more interesting in my opinion.

A criticism of text prompts as an interface comes to mind, which is that it makes visual art(which is driven by our senses) into a social construction(language). We do this naturally in the process of drawing, to break things down and simplify them, but that process puts the artist "in the driver's seat" as this video aptly describes - making new language from the combination of the symbolic understanding and our senses. Prompting omits this basic connection. I believe interfaces that act to extend or stylize sketched drawings fare a little bit better, while still losing the information communicated when the artist is doing the rendering.

Is there a course that you recommend (or is well known in the art world) that will teach you the fundamentals of good art design?

thank you for this video! i’m slowly working on a game and doing some hand drawn art since that’s what i’m used to. i keep thinking that pixel art must be faster and maybe i should switch- but of course it’s another style with its own challenges and time issues. this was reassuring to watch.

The only time I find AI art anything close to useful, is just for a moodboard or first draft concept art. Like for instance, maybe I meed a monster. I prompt midjourney to give me an image of a monster. Then draw my own version of that monster with better proportions and details that are easier to read, then animate it. On one hand, it can potentially get rid of the creative block at times. On the other hand, I tend to get my ideas easily without having to spend hours on any of those tools.😅

I never plan on using AI since it can't give me the unique things I want. I tried getting AI once to make a picture of a brontosaurus with gorilla arms and a giant eyeball for a head and....yeah....it gave me a vague dinosaur with like 3 1/2 eyes, etc. It was not at all what I wanted. So, if you want unique assets then humans still need to be involved. I've heard people say it's good for programming so I tried to get it to make a spawn script on a timer and it screwed up a mere 4 lines of code. I still had to figure out the solution myself even though it did put me on the right path and I eventually got what I wanted. But that's leagues away from, "AI will make entire MMO's in minutes" claims.

I think traing and prompting ai will be its own skillset

This is actually the exact reason I've given from the beginning for why AI can't make art, in any literal sense, because an artist has discretion and a neural network doesn't understand the meaning of the word. It can spit out seemingly infinite variation on the definitions that it's culled from the internet, but it doesn't actually _understand_ it. It's like if NASA trained a computer model on information from every space mission. It would be able to dispense fixes for common problems, or fix bigger problems that NASA has probably already implemented solutions for, but it wouldn't be able to understand a truly unique problem, something outside its usual data set. It's not thinking like a human

That trick of having the AI generate greyscale mostly except maybe if you are in the idea phase, then coloring in engine is pretty great. With the example you gave for AI art the worst part is probably the ground for the platform. But if you are going somewhat high res but without too much detail anyways. You could always just lay down some paint brushy gradients and use that. And then use the AI for anything that takes a lot of detail. the example you gave of simple hand-made art looks really charming though. And for the right game would look way better while being fairly easy to do. I completely agree it is pretty much unfeasible for the character stuff. Although cartoony character ontop of a more painterly or detailed background is a classic combo that works, so if I was going for AI on a game. (which I am not.) Doing something like that would be sensible. Overall, I feel like painting skills matter a lot more now that AI is a thing. Drawing also matters but basically only fundamentals like construction and not much more. Being able to block out rough colors/areas is valuable. Since in the context of a game, the assets themselves have to be used in context anyways. And having someone think about the role each asset plays is pretty important for making the assets work together

I do agree that being coherent is valuable. Pixel art has a lot of sub-styles. But the most important thing is to have a set of consistent standards. For a beginner it also comes down to faster iteration in a similar way to working in a more impressionistic style or using a smaller canvas allows people to work faster in physical media. (Or alternatively larger brushes.) That means you can make more seperate assets in less time, so more quick iterative practice and faster improvement. But since it is viewed as less unique, Honestly going for a coherent "doodle style" Or a really simple, low detail, impressionistic painting style is probably even easier to pick up. If you do want to have something pretty detailed but still fast to reduce, then working with 8x8 or 16x16 grids or perhaps 8x24, 16x32 or maybe 16x48 for characters as a rough guide allows you to make assets and characters pretty quick. Because then your larger landscape elements fit in like 48x48 or maybe 100x100 pixel or less. Which means less room for detail. So you have to make more intentional choices about what detail to have. But I do agree with you when it comes to platformers in particular, unless you are already good at pixel art, It's sort of a bad fit. Since it's oversaturated, and 2d platformers are a hard genre. But 3d with pixelized textures, Or like a "super paper mario" like look but pixelated. Where you take 2d assets in a 3d world, can look really amazing and not too many people do it. I love pixel art and also love impressionism. I find pixel art easier to get started with for animating than a lot of other forms, But for assets and landscapes. Starting with landscape paintings then moving to making environment assets, then maybe characters is probably a better progression for learning. Portraits are really hard. Landscapes have a lot of depth you can learn, But most random people can make decent landscapes pretty quickly even with no prior art training. Classic example is Bob Ross. But more generally you can just get a photo reference, or go outside and do watercolor paintings from life and very quickly make art that looks pretty good. And for a new game artist, trying to get "pretty good" + cohesive. Or even just cohesive in a unique way. Is the goal. When it comes to animation, Honestly 3d animation is easier than 2d. Unless your characters are basically stickmen or similar. My brother has actually been learning 2d animation with stickmen. works pretty well. Literal stickmen ontop of impressionist paintings honeslty would probably make a pretty good game artstyle.

Very interesting video, it kinda put into clear words a feeling I had for a while with AI generated content. As an artist myself, I'm fairly interested in the matter, mostly from a distance, but still, interested. If I were to make a video game, which may or may not happen someday, I feel like using AI to generate bases for some assets or some variations of existing design then repainting on top of it, to clean it, add that "intent" and such, might be a decent option, especially if tackling a project like a video game on my own. Not sure I will, but, good to know it's possible and doesn't look too bad.

it's also worth noting that in their current state, generative models like "AI" image generators and LLMs are hugely inefficient, with every single prompt generating a disproportionate amount of carbon emissions compared to any other programming tool. it's an engorged version of your phone's text autocomplete suggestions, and unless you're curating a specific model from the ground up yourself, it's fed off of the labor of other artists without their consent or compensation. generative models definitely have uses, they're a powerful piece of software and have many practical applications , but they require stringent human moderation, are overhyped for what they are actually able to provide, have an incredibly destructive environmental effect when used at this scale, and honestly shouldn't really be called "artificial intelligence" in the first place. they're an early form of an imperfect, but potentially useful, set of tools that is currently being used excessively and poorly.

I agree that AI is inevitably here to stay. The worst part of AI for arts (graphical, musical, written or any creative art) right now is how it is trained by stealing the work of other artists without consent and giving no compensation for their work. All that said, AI is a tool and if they correct the legal and moral part of training it with other artists art, it can became a very usefull tool. I totally agree on that I prefer art created by humans with intention and meaning and I am also totally bias because I enjoy drawing. It is the process of creating art what is the most important, more even than the result itself. I also sadly agree on creative skillful artists will have to adapt to this new AI world. But at the same time, I think, and hope it will be a growing number of people that not only prefer but only want human created art. And I tottally agree AI is not a golden ticket on any field. If it is not guided by an skillful person that understands the specific task at hand it become mostly useless.Thanks for the video.

The more we look into it, the more we realize AI isn't really intelligent at all. Calling it "AI" is a marketing ploy and a misrepresentation of what it really is.

7:01 what game is this?

I like that you did not shoot AI down like most other artists do. Personally I use AI to help get ideas out of my head, as a starting point.

It's refreshing to see an artist have a realistic take on AI art without instantly dismissing and moralizing it. Overall, I agree with your main takeaway, although you might have been a bit limited by only using Dall-E. The process of simply generating an image using only the prompt and copy-pasting it into the game is deeply flawed, due to stylistic inconsistencies (that are going to be instantly noticed by the player, especially if it's a foreground sprite). Perhaps a more controlled approach could work, by using a local Stable Diffusion model and processing a rough handmade sketch through a pipeline i.e. sketch -> ControlNet/img-to-img -> inpainting-> background removal -> manual editing. I also think that using a specific model or model finetuning (e.g. Lora) to achieve a specific style might help in providing consistency. Maybe using AI art not to create base art, but variations of existing sprites could also be a better use case. For example, different customization options for the character or types of vegetation for different biomes. Something I would really like is AI to be able to create different poses and compositions of input character sprites (for animations too), but from what I have seen and tested that does not seem to be possible currently. As it stands, AI image generation is a tool that is greatly overrated by some people and underappreciated by others. But I don't think it is capable of surpassing us in the near future and completely replace us. And I sure as hell will not let AI take away my passion for gamedev and drawing, regardless of whether I make money with it or not. If it comes to that, I'd rather become an advocate for economic reform (such as introducing UBI), than to demonize and shun everyone who makes use of technological advancements.

Great video. The problem is that when artstyles of assets don't match, the game doesn't look good. These algorithms are not precise by nature, at least not the ones there are right now. So it's super difficult to let it create a cohesive set of assets. It's not a matter of "just train it longer on more data", it is just not in the nature of how these algorithms work.

The video really hits the nail on the head - I've been trying to work with AI to see how it can help me with my game art and have found it pretty useless so far, which definitely makes me feel more secure as an artist. The only real use for AI I've found so far is to create targeted reference images for my hand-drawn art. But I also agree that, while as AI develops it will be able to produce better art, there will always be a place for people who understand art techniques and have an eye for these things, or as you call it, taste. I've always thought that certain people are natural artists because they're able to see things in a way others cannot, and (we can hope at least that) AI is not capable of this. Or perhaps so far AI has mostly been trained by non-artists who also don't have that kind of eye?

I disagree with the central point of your thesis, which is also speculative in nature. You dont really know that people who cant draw dont have an eye for a creative process. To make an example; I cant sew anything, but i know how to dress nicely and properly. Same apply for the overwhelming majority of people who know how to dress. i'm extensively using AI and i can see when something is not working and doesnt fit the style of previously generated assets, despite the fact that i cannot draw. It seems to me that you missed the inconsistency of the point you were trying to make: you said that when people look at AI generated collage they can see it's not deliberate therefore less aesthetically pleasing. But who are this people? are they all artists? obviously not, everybody can discern good art from bad one, although it definately takes experience to discern from very good one to just good. The example you pointed out are just bad use of AI, mostly because it's an incredibly frustrating endevour, sometimes the AI dont listen to even basic instruction after 500 different iteration of the same thing, and so they might resort to give up and try the least bad attempt and mesh it together with the rest, but that's just the same as any other aspect that revolves around the creative process. Many art critics couldnt do anything even remotely close to what they criticize, yet they have the eye to discern if it's good or not, if your point was valid that wouldnt happen. I'v seen insanely good AI projects; there was a test done times ago where asked people to discern from AI images and real, and nobody could. there was a painting competition few months ago where an AI generated work won over "real" artist. Personally AI is the only tool that i can use to generate art, because i suck at drawing despite having good taste, and as much as you improve with your hands i can improve with my eyes trough AI generations.

Cool video, I am scared of AI as hell. I don't think that a non artist can produce cohesive scenes efficiently enough. But with enough research I do believe that artists can actually use AI as a tool efficiently. Combination of drawing for AI to well define the artstyle with more experienced prompting I do believe that it is possible, and that is exactly what scares me most. Artists would eventually become pressured by the time requirements and will start using AI, and that could start the downfall for all of us. I am really hoping that AI usage is somehow legally managed, but I am afraid that train has left the station long time ago.

Do you feel like creating the assets in grayscale then doing your own thing with them would save much time ? I don't really like AI art in general and the moral implications but I have thought about using it as base art if it could speed up my game art creation some.

I appreciate the use of the correct Dunning-Kruger Graph

What I don't get is why people think AI art is any better or different than using pre-made assets. Except with assets it's clear legally, they look better, and you don't get throttled looking for more. You have to pay for the good stuff, it's never quite exactly what you want, hard to get matching art styles, it looks derivative, and everyone can tell. If you can get it to give you grass tiles that means they trained it on tons of grass tiles off the internet somewhere. You can probably just find those grass tiles and they'll be better. If the AI was trained ethically they'll be free or cheap to use. If they used copyrighted material without permission, you could just do that too if you don't care about the ethics of it. If you're using it as a starting point for concepts and doing the final piece yourself that's what actual references are for. And they're better because anatomy and perspective are correct. Every time I've tried to use it for anything it was just a big waste of time and I find that I work better and faster doing things the way I've been doing for years. I don't see any way it could improve enough to make it faster for me to make something I'm actually satisfied with unless it can literally read my mind. I think the hype around it is leading new artists to discover the use of references which in itself speeds things up and makes your art better than doing it from scratch from your head. Then they think the AI is saving them time when they could just have looked at some stuff on pinterest for free. (although now pinterest is filling up with AI garbage but hey at least you don't have to pay for midjourney)

I think another problem with AI is that it gets really repetetive with its results even when you adjust prompts. Anyone can tell when its AI by just looking at it and seeing that they saw this very same style somewhere else. And the game (or anything else really) becomes less interesting in my eyes when I know there's no story behind the art, no real struggle to deliver your artistic view.Maybe they will develop new AI and results become much more diverse. We will see

I have to disagree with your point, especially your point about the Dunning-Kruger effect. I don't have to be a musician to tell good/harmonious music from bad or music produced by an amateur or beginner. Same with art. I am no art critic, yet I can distinguish a 5 year olds drawing from that of a professional painter. Of course there may be an expert level where only experts and artists themselves can appreciate certain techniques or flourishes to the art. But that's not the main demographic of ... well, anything. I think A.I. art won't take over, it's not smart enough. However it will equalize and liberate people. Sure, bespoke and custom art will always be better and allow you to realise your vision with pinpoint accuracy - for a price. On the other hand even hobbyists will be able to create something with A.I., though the trade-off might be that it won't be as pretty and cohesive as with bespoke art.

Damn I guess it's over for this channel huh. AI is just bad, there's nothing good about it.

I've been telling people who say 'AI art is crap' that it's not about AI, it's about the knowledge and attention to detail of the person behind the AI. If you think the images look bad, it's often because the person doesn't know why it's bad or how to fix it, rather than because AI can't be used to make decent looking images. But my voice lacks weight because I myself don't know art very well. Glad to see your take is rather close to mine. Anyway, even if you lack the skill to draw over the bad stuff from the AI yourself, you can still draw over it badly and then make the AI use it as a reference to fix what you drew. I'm not sure if Dall-E can do this, but Stable Diffusion can.

wait for yhe improve of the ia or draw it your self, is more satisfaying

I just hate it when I'm trying to do a search for some real life references and all im getting from google nowadays is some AI generated garbage

AI images look really impressive until you've made your first asset by yourself. No matter how crummy it might look, it'll be and feel 100 times better.

I used to think AI art is also art but i've done a 180 on that take. Art is deliberate, there's thought and meaning behind every minute detail. There's no art without an artist and AI is not an artist, it's just that, an algorithm. I hope that AI doesn't improve further that CEO's of AAA studios lay of their artists in favor of AI to chase more profit. It would suck ass

As a teacher, I have run into similar problems with ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a great tool, but it has a distinct writing style that is quite easy to spot. Sometimes it fails to understand the inputs. If you are a good writer and know what you are looking for, you can save a lot of time with it, but if you are bad at writing, you can only go so far.

its similar to when someone just takes a photo and traces it or comor picks. without art skills it looks really bad. same thing with rotoscoped animation without knowledge of 12 principles of animation - it always look bad. same thing with just copying code from stackoverflow/ chat gpt. you need to know what you are doing even if ure just supervising it