Merkros' Pixel Art Adventures

[merkros]

So one thing that I've always wanted to do since I was a teenager was to get into animation. However, i was never that...great at artistic endeavors, and while you can animate things that you don't draw...it's not really super practical. In this modern era though, there is an alternative that has gained traction...even in the porn community. Pixel Animation.

So I thought, what the hell. I bought Asperite on Steam and decided to poke around and see what I can do. So the first thing that came to mind was obvious: Can I make a pair of breasts and make them jiggle. It should be fairly straightforward. Two circles with a dot in the center and make them bounce.

So i spent about 10-15 minutes making a pair of breasts.

Spoiler

I was extremely happy with the results. They look like boobs, they have nice shading...the nipples might be a little big, but that's a restriction on the size that I made the boob. If I made the breasts a little larger or smaller ,then I could have centered the nipples with only a single pixel in the middle.

Next came the animation....This is the first time that I've animated anything since College. I do have an associate's degree in Web Design where I learned how to use...er...Flash. May the Internet Gods rest its soul. So for those unfamiliar, animation is a frame-by-frame process. It takes a lot of time to do even the simplest things. The entire time I was working on this, I didn't pay any heed to the scale that I was working with. I was just hellbent and determined to make these boobs jiggle. My inspiration for the motion was someone pulling their boobs together and up before letting them go and overall it took about 30 more minutes to animate that into a loop of sorts(It needs an extra frame to be perfectly smooth). So i did that, I ran it and it looked great! So eager to show it off, I exported the .gif and shared it on Discord and...er...well...

Spoiler

They're tiny. Really tiny...

Anyway, I don't really know what the purpose of this topic is other than to post my adventures in learning how to do this "art" form. I think my next step is to scale things up a little....Of course, more pixels take more time....Who knows?

I don't. That's for sure.

 

[SeriousBrainDamage]

Flash, that brings back memories.
Now that is dead I feel a little better for not having committed to it seriously back in the day, but I did love it.

 

[merkros]

Flash, that brings back memories.
Now that is dead I feel a little better for not having committed to it seriously back in the day, but I did love it.

Haha, My skill in Flash was largely Theory over practicality. Lots of button programming and text animation. Not much of actual animation of "things".

speaking of Animation of Things, we have Take two on my little project.

This one, I scaled up a little bit. That was my primary goal. do the same thing, but do it bigger. The original image was a 32x32 pixel image that held two breasts which were about 14 pixels in length and width. The new ones are about 24 pixels in length and width which puts them at...not quite double in size. These boobs took a fair bit longer to draw. I don't think it's a huge increase in difficulty, but i was a bit distracted by watching a film on the other monitor. Callgirl of Cthulhu. It's...not the best film, but it held my attention, so that means it wasn't the worst film I've ever watched either. Regardless. here were the (non-animated) results:

Spoiler

I wasn't quite content to just do the same thing. I also wanted a background so that they weren't just floating in nothingness. So I also put a background. This is kind of a big deal, because it means I have to shade underneath the breasts as well.

This is a good time to start mentioning scale when it comes to Pixel Art. The more you scale things up, the more detailed you have to get. In a smaller image...You don't see some of the potential oddities that might occur from the lack of details. You don't notice weird shading or the shaping of certain objects. However, if you scale things up, then the detail needs to be there, or things will look weird. I did this a little bit, but it's largely just adding areolas in.

It's probably the upper limit that this "style" for lack of a better word could handle. Even at this scale, there are some oddities that could be cleaned up if it was a serious project and not me just learning some basics. With the increased size, the breasts look a little weird. The edges should definitely be curved more and maybe sagging slightly. It's rare to have perfectly round breasts unless they're implants. The shading should probably have multiple shades and be a little bit more(two pixels instead of one pixel in places, or two "lighter" shadows and one "darker" shadow in places that are even darker(like between the breasts). A little bit of "Brighter" shading on the top wouldn't have hurt either.

So what was the final result? Well...

Spoiler

It's still not huge, but definitely noticeably bigger. I wanted to use the same "Motion" as the first part. That of a woman pressing her breasts together and up before letting go. Overall, I have two criticisms of the animation. The shading isn't super accurate and I knew this going in as I was distracted by watching a film and a few interruptions of IRL stuff. however, it's also not really super noticeable at this "distance". At this point, the shading is still something that isn't going to be supercritical. The second criticism is that I need about two more frames in there. The animation has the exact same number of frames as the previous one and you can kind of tell. When the breast is "Pulled up" and "Let go", there are about three frames between the nipple being in the top right of the breast and going to the bottom left. There should probably be two more, or at least one more, and split the difference in the placement of the nipple during that middle frame. However, I took a shortcut there and I can tell.

Two hours of work and much of it was spent distracted...

So what's next? Well, I'm still having a hard time visualizing the exact size of the final product. The other thing is that the edge of breasts tends to be fairly close to the sides of the body and you should probably be able to see that. It might be time to give these floating breasts a body to be on... Even if it's just a torso...

 

[Zingiber]

Not all of the pictures are coming through on my Brave browser, so it's possible that "shields up!" mode is holding them back.

But I do see the little bouncing breasts.

Do keep us updated, Merkros. I have at least some particular interest because I also have a copy of Aseprite, fetched with the notion that I might contribute to #PixelDailies on Twitter, but I haven't really dug in.

 

[Zingiber]

Update: I can see the big pictures now. What was I doing wrong? No idea, I didn't change anything, I think.

 

[merkros]

Do keep us updated, Merkros. I have at least some particular interest because I also have a copy of Aseprite, fetched with the notion that I might contribute to #PixelDailies on Twitter, but I haven't really dug in.

Thanks! I do hope to do fully animated things at some point...However, it's going to take a while to get there. I have a lot going on right now and I've only been working on learning how to use Aseprite in my spare time.

Someday, hopefully I'll be able to do something like this:

Spoiler

But, it's going to take a lot of time to get that far.

 

[merkros]

Hah! You thought i was done with this pixel stuff?

Well so did I.

So it's been nearly a year since i even loaded up aseprite. August 2021 according to Steam. Real life has just not been very kind to me over the last year and I've been using a lot of my spare time for other endeavors as well, but I'm extremely glad that I haven't completely forgotten how to use the program!

where I left off with my experimentation was mostly with booba. Probably the most important part of a female's anatomy(what? I'm a boob guy) but I was getting a little tired of playing with round circles and was planning on moving onto more of the body. With my next experiment, I wanted to move away from boobs...I've already made jiggly boobs twice and onto something a little more enticing.

Who likes hips? Well, I don't mind hips, or an exposed belly button. So why don't we try that instead?

Spoiler

I had a few takeaways from this experiment that I feel are important. The first thing was just how fast I managed to put this together. From start to finish, it probably took me about 30 minutes. It's important to keep in mind that coloring and shading probably would have taken another 30 minutes to 1 hour, but when you compare it to my last experiment with the larger-scaled booba which took over two hours(with a distraction) and this is a larger scale than that was. I found it extremely surprising.

This animation only has nine frames. That's a bit of a surprise to me considering the last one had double that and (to me) doesn't look quite as smooth as this "Hip Wiggle" one. While the fact that more frames tend to lead to more fluidity in your animation remains; more frames don't always help you. In fact, to a certain extent, fewer frames can lead to hiding drawing errors that would otherwise become more apparent the more frames that the error appears in.

Keeping in mind that of the Nine frames only three(!) of them are unique*.. In a way, it's kind of encouraging. Yeah, there's a lot of work that goes into each frame and the more overall details, the longer it would take, but fortunately Sex is quite a rhythmic action and reusing the same frames or removing frames to give the feeling of an increased pace...One could see how an NSFW animation would actually have not many frames in it compared to how one might think.
*Frame 1, 5 and 9 are the same "at rest" frame. 2 and 4 are the same, 6 and 8 are mirror's of 2 and 4. 3 and 7 are mirrors of one another.

The actual "art" part of this image is extremely rough. There are random bumps all over that I probably could have taken the time to smooth out, but it just goes to show how forgiving pixel art is when it comes to drawing errors. This is something that appeals to me as someone who isn't really any kind of artist or skill with line drawing. I don't have a tablet or pen for drawing on my computer. It's all freehand with a mouse and you know what? I think it still looks okay. Obviously, there are some parts that I would clean up if I was doing a real project instead of just experimenting and slowly getting more complex, but the pixelation of the...pixel...art covers a lot of the errors that would be pretty obvious in more "smooth lined" artistry.

So after this little experiment, what's next? Well, I'm not quite sure yet. More details are extremely important and at this point, I could probably do a whole torso with boobs...It would probably be worth doing just to effectively bring the two projects together. There are lots of other things that I need to do in order to get a feel for it...

If the eyes are the window to the soul, then the face is the Gateway to the Personality. At some point, I'm going to have to bite the bullet and try and make a face, but that's also what scares me the most. Faces are the most detailed and the hardest to get right and the margin for error between making a face look sensual and completely derpy is not very large.

Clothes could be fun, but animating clothing is likely going to be one of the hardest things to do. It's basically the opposite challenge compared to faces. Faces are hard to draw but easy to animate...Clothing is easy to draw, but hard to animate. At least, in a way that doesn't make them feel like they're made of cardboard.

I don't really worry about drawing a dick and balls...But it's something that should probably be done just as a proof of concept. Butts are kind of in the same category, but also something I should work on just to say that I did.

Realizing how relatively easy repetitive motion like this is..even animating a short NSFW scene isn't really out of the question. There's be no leadup or conclusion and not a lot of detail. Just some hips bouncing on a dick, but it's an important step!

 

[merkros]

New Gif just dropped!

So i did something a little bit differently with this one. I started with a 50 pixel by 50 pixel canvas and scaled it up 300%. I wanted to see if it would retain fidelity and I was rather impressed with the results. Obviously the pixel count is the same, so the higher you scale it the more pixelated it'll be, but it still did pretty well.

As always, I also wanted to try something different and i looked back at my previous options and decided something. I wanted to do some clothing. Specifically, the "scenario" that I had in mind was a lady wearing a blouse that was a bit too tight and when she breathed deeply, she lost a button. The first iteration took about two hours to draw and shade(granted it was a white shirt, so that made it a little easier, but i don't think a different colored shirt would have been too much more difficult). One thing i did have some trouble with was visualizing the shading on the shirt. I've never done anything with clothing before though, so I figured that would be something i would have a hard time doing. I also couldn't quite get the shading on the neck right, so i just gave up. I guess people just don't have heads in the world.

Anyway, here's the first iteration.

Spoiler

Yes, so I mentioned First Iteration. That's because i spent about 10 minutes staring at it and trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Then i realized...While I didn't intend it at the time, the way that her bit of outline is drawn makes her look like she's...uh....quite a bit overweight.

I thought i fucked it up. I'm like "Whelp. I just spent 2 hours on this project and fucked it up at the end." This would have been the second experiment in a row that i screwed up. I'm not even going to talk about the derpy centaur that will never see the light of day! Fortunately, it was actually a rather easy fix and that led to the final version of this project:

Spoiler

It probably shouldn't surprise me at this point, but two lines make a world of difference when you're doing something like this. I am mostly happy with how it turned out. I only have a few things that i would change in retrospect that was outside of the scope of what i felt was necessary for the project. I should have shown more of her shoulders and upper arms. This is about the first time that i actually managed to get what kind of looks like proportional arms in one of these projects. Obviously i also needed some shading on the neck and area above the breasts and i don't think the shading on the upper part of the boobs is quite right.

But most importantly....I forgot completely about the nipple bump! This gif is just screaming for a nipple bump and I failed to provide. She's not wearing a bra, it's a tight shirt, her nipples are probably erect....And I failed. I screwed up on the nipple bump. I could go in and replace it, but i just don't have the drive. I don't have the energy to provide the world with the nipple bump that they needed.

Time spent on this project: 2 Hours and 10 Minutes +10 Minutes for the Second Iteration.

 

[Wolfinnoclothing]

I encourage your progress. The last time I did sprite animation, it gave me a migrane. I agree, two lines can make a huge difference. Also, what resolution are you working at? I find 32x32 pixels is a great sort of starting point.

 

[merkros]

I do have my next little project done, but I ran out of time before work, so I'll try to elaborate on it more once I finish work.

I encourage your progress. The last time I did sprite animation, it gave me a migrane. I agree, two lines can make a huge difference. Also, what resolution are you working at? I find 32x32 pixels is a great sort of starting point.

The sizes vary depending on how much I want to show. The gif above was made at 50x50 and most of what I make over 100x100 tends to rely too much on artistic ability and just comes out badly. There's an argument for keeping things in 16-bit integers, but since I'm not really making any of this for any real project I don't really see the need of framing things in such a way as a requirement.

 

[Zingiber]

I've been appreciating your updates!

 

[merkros]

So when starting my next project, I ran into a problem. Allow me to paint a hypothetical. say we had a ball.

I can do all sorts of things to this ball and don't have to worry about how its movements affect anything else. I can expand it, stretch it, twist it, roll it, and do all sorts of things and still keep it as a ball without having to warp anything else.

This is all well and good as long as we're only dealing with a single object doing a single movement and a single motion without anything else, but there's a problem. What happens...if there's more than one object? Let's say a Red Pipe?

How does one manipulate an object on a plane with multiple objects that don't necessarily move with the same motion?

Throughout the entire length of my time playing around with Aseprite, all of my projects have focused on a single thing doing a single action in a repetitive motion where the movement of one part of the body moves in tandem with most of the rest of the body (Mostly breathing.). so for the most part, I've been able to get away with using the Marquee tool to just kind of stretch and warp the body and keep things relatively in proportions to itself.

However, in order to actually do some animation that has more than one object, then I'm going to have to learn...re-learn some basic stuff. See, I learned years ago in my college classes about Layers. With layers, you can lock, hide, and adjust one specific object without influencing any other objects in the project. I was taught some pretty simple stuff: everything should always be on its own layer. Of course, I completely forgot about this and more problematically, I didn't realize that Aseprite even had layers.

So with the power of layers, we can resolve this conundrum and send the ball through the pipe, or at least give the illusion of such. The world of art is creating the illusion of Three Dimensions using only two.

Now, I don't know what we could use the ability to slide an object through another object while making porn of smut, but I'm sure that there's something that we could find some use for it. So here's the project that i was working on today that involved an object sliding through another object(or two)

Spoiler

Now one thing that I will say about this project. I'm not super happy with it. I wanted more fondling to be involved and I didn't do any touchups that I probably should have done before proclaiming it finished because I was really running up against the clocks because I had to go to work (In fact, I was about 10 minutes late to work).

One thing that I was messing with that got away with me a bit was the timing on frames. So not only was I experimenting with Layers with this project, but I was also foraying into experimenting with the timing on the frames. One of the options you can adjust in aseprite is how long you stay on a single frame. So if you wanted to stay on one view for longer, you could set a frame to last 200ms instead of putting in two frames that last 100ms(the default). In a way, it kind of worked out for me, because it made the thrusting a bit more natural and slightly less rhythmic. It also worked out pretty well with the climax which I used the timing to create the pulsing effect. The climax itself turned out better than I expected. I finished that bit literally in the last 20 minutes and I was sure it was going to turn out awfully, but at least with the scale of that gif, it worked out okay.

utilizing Layers also actually managed to allow me to use a background..even though you barely see it for most of the gif.

Overall, I would say the project was a marginal success.

Time spent on this project: ~4 Hours.

 

[Wolfinnoclothing]

Layers are super helpful in compositions. I would also get in the habit of naming your layers. If you ever walk away from a project and come back to it, you will be glad you did!

Also, great work on the animation! 4 hours is really impressive for that.