Spriting

Abstract: Pixel art is a style of digital art in which images are edited on the pixel level This art form emerged in the 1980s in many computer and video games as a way to make the best use of devices with limited graphics capabilities As digital displays improve in resolution and colour range, digital art is no longer bound by these restrictions However, pixel art remains popular, particularly in the gaming community, due to its retro charm

Abstract: Creating pixel art is a laborious process that requires artists to place individual pixels by hand. Although many image editors provide vector-to-raster conversions, the results produced do not meet the standards of pixel art: artifacts such as jaggies or broken lines frequently occur. We describe a novel Pixelation algorithm that rasterizes vector line art while adhering to established conventions used by pixel artists. We compare our results through a user study to those generated by Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, as well as hand-drawn samples by both amateur and professional pixel artists.

Abstract: Pixel art is a modern digital art in which high resolution images are abstracted into low resolution pixelated outputs using concise outlines and reduced color palettes. Creating pixel art is a labor intensive and skill-demanding process due to the challenge of using limited pixels to represent complicated shapes. Not surprisingly, generating pixel art animation is even harder given the additional constraints imposed in the temporal domain. Although many powerful editors have been designed to facilitate the creation of still pixel art images, the extension to pixel art animation remains an unexplored direction. Existing systems typically request users to craft individual pixels frame by frame, which is a tedious and error-prone process. In this work, we present a novel animation framework tailored to pixel art images. Our system bases on conventional key-frame animation framework and state-of-the-art image warping techniques to generate an initial animation sequence. The system then jointly optimizes the prominent feature lines of individual frames respecting three metrics that capture the quality of the animation sequence in both spatial and temporal domains. We demonstrate our system by generating visually pleasing animations on a variety of pixel art images, which would otherwise be difficult by applying state-of-the-art techniques due to severe artifacts.

Abstract: Systems and methods described herein relate to creating or modifying multimedia content using sprites. In accordance with some implementations, a method can comprise the operations of: accessing foundational content; receiving a request to apply a sprite effect from a sprite sheet to the foundational content; retrieving the sprite effect from the sprite sheet; and applying the sprite effect to the foundational content according to the request. A sprite sheet can include two or more sprites each of which can be used as an effect in multimedia content, and each of which can be retrieved from the sprite sheet based on coordinates in the sprite sheet. A sprite effect can be an image, an animation, or some other visual-based effect applicable to multimedia content.