I need a hint for graphics editing

[AmatorPhasma]

Hi,


I hope someone can give me an hint of how I get smoother graphics, especially the low res variants.

First I'm a bloody-noob in this topic, the tools I have and use are Blender and GIMP (If necessary I would even buy new a program)

I render my sprites with Blender, then use montage to create the spritesheet load this into GIMP and save it as hr-image, after this scale it by 50% and save it as normal image... "sounds not really professional to me " I have no clue where I should start for searching the right / a good methode.

I know my models can not win a prize against other models I see in mods from Angel, Py or Earendel (and anyone who I forget ...)

But there must be a way that they at least look smoother and not so pixelated...


I added an example of one:

[Arch666Angel]

Image2.png (40.33 KiB) Viewed 2306 times

If you scale it down being to crisp it may end up looking blocky, bit of blur might help. Also if you scale down details get lost, so the only way would be to render them twice each in their desired resolution to prevent losses. It's also with the model, details that are too thin and fragile might not get rendered or look odd in the end.
As an afterthought: None of my entity sprites are HR

[danielbrauer]

How are you scaling your images down? It looks like interpolation is set to Nearest Neighbour, which is not really interpolation at all. In GIMP, under Image>Scale Image..., make sure you've selected Cubic, LoHalo or NoHalo Interpolation.

With all due respect to Arch666Angel, I would not recommend blurring anything since you lose information that way.

[darkfrei]

You can try to make this scaling with paint-dot-net, it can scale images in various qualities, one of then is "best quality" and looks good.

[AmatorPhasma]

Thanks both of you,

...so the only way would be to render them twice each in their desired resolution to prevent losses

I will make a test render directly to the low resolution and look at the result, why did I not come up with the idea yet? It is the closest thing.

How are you scaling your images down? It looks like interpolation is set to Nearest Neighbour, which is not really interpolation at all. In GIMP, under Image>Scale Image..., make sure you've selected Cubic, LoHalo or NoHalo Interpolation.

With all due respect to Arch666Angel, I would not recommend blurring anything since you lose information that way.

I think the right answer to this question is: I used "None" interpolation
All other option make it on downscale to much blury, except from Cubic thats looks okayish

And now I see indeed that some of my details are too thin and fragile, like Arch666Angel wrote, I'll take that into account for future details anyway.

As an afterthought: None of my entity sprites are HR

I could swear they are ... but then I would guess that your models look more detailed because they are mostly larger than the vanilla ones. (or because I see only a forrest of advanced chemical plants with your petrochem mod)

[Deadlock989]

Under Film on the Render tab in Blender, there is a pixel filter setting, by default the Blackman Harris algorithm set to 1.5 pixels. You can adjust this to change the spread of rays per pixel - a setting of 1 will make things look very sharp (too sharp really), 2 will be pretty blurry. But Arch666Angel is right, a bit of blur actually helps. If you look at a lot of the Factorio sprites, they are quite fuzzy, even in HR. I only change the pixel filter setting for small objects (1x1 tiles) or icons, and even then I don't go lower than 1.25.

A lot of it is actually in the models though. Try bevelling the edges, or if you're using cylinders and spheres, bump the number of faces up when you make them.

I scale everything in Blender to the pixel and overlay a grid of pixels so I can see how much space features actually cover. That way, when you move or scale or bevel something, you know how many pixels it will translate to on-screen.

I don't ever scale things post-render. I render everything twice in different resolutions, using a Python script which changes the render resolution and output folder.

[AmatorPhasma]

Thanks!

@darkfrei
That program looks good, I didn't know it before, I'm testing it.


@Deadlock989
I will look into this settings.


Yes, rendering directly to target resolution will give the best result to my eyes, but first I have to replace some elements that are too thin at the moment, a little bit more and it looks a lot better.


At the moment I make small parts that look more steampunk like to use this on all machines, here and there