introduction

This was an experiment to achieve convincing pixel art with Blender at multiple resolutions.

The primary focus was to look convincing at a fighting game resolution, but also be able to do good looking close-ups for character portraits.

Fighting game inspired idle animation.

Portrait style closeup render with no LOD changes whatsoever.

...unfortunately clean-up is required at a small enough scale, at least for the face.

model

Turnarounds

shader

Outlining

One of the hardest aspects of pixel art to achieve when rendering 3D is maintaining true 1-pixel outlines.

Native Blender outlining through Freestyle is unreliable for authentic-looking 1px outlines, due to the creation of what pixel artists call "doubles". Even when convincing at one freestyle line thickness, it frequently breaks immersion at different angles or scales. I developed a custom approach to this, using Blender's compositor and cryptomatte masking to define which portions of the model should have lines.

Cryptomatte is used to separate each segment of the model that should have outlines.
This is strategically layered so that the right outline color is on top of the right piece.
Then a final silhouette outline is applied.

Specular

In many anime-like illustrations, skin is given a tight specular shine. I wanted to attempt this using specular masking and a dynamic matcap material that changes in both the size of the shine and the angle.

Vertex colors are used to fine-tune shading. Red channel determines permanent shadow, green determines specular,
and blue determines areas that are never shaded. (Similar setup to Arcsys AO maps).