u/quantum-elle

Just something funny/stupid that popped into my head.

A short screen recording of a tool I just started creating to be able to create consistent and editable sprites for my game. Right now just a demo of the UI and the basic concept.

---

I'm working on a game project, Ardentryst, and it's really a large project of putting all the pieces together from a creative and engineering standpoint. I want to keep this short so I won't go into all the details about all the things I've been thinking about regarding the workflow I want to settle on for the sprite workflow, but this is my latest idea.

Starting with a 3d base (which you can generate with AI), you'll pose/animate your character. Then, it'll go through a rendering process to create the final frame. However, this isn't meant to simply be a 3d -> 2d converter. The rendering process will incorporate style and pixel art rules to help create the final image--the final product is a pixel art game sprite, not a render of a 3d model. The 3d parts are just there in service of generating that sprite, to make it easy to manipulate in 3d space.

It's reminiscent of Smack Studio's editor (which allows you to edit your sprites with a skeletal-type animator with fake 3d rotations) in the way that you're editing based on what the final sprite looks like, and philosophically how Guilty Gear's 3D models work in service of creating the 2d look of the characters using 3d models as the base.

Technically this project doesn't need to involve the use of AI, since you can create your own meshes and go from there, but the way I'm going to use it is with AI generated assets; and then pose the animations myself.

It's late, so sorry if I'm not making as much sense as I'd like ^^; feel free to ask questions though.

here are the lyrics:

>[v 1]
Born a little quiet,
and easy to miss
You saw the colors
that no one else did
and that's why you stood half a step out
from the rest of the world

>[pre]
You gave it all away
Went without
Hungry at the table
You set for the rest of us

>[chorus]
Little paper moon girl
you're burning through the night
Little paper moon girl
the world runs too rough for something made so fine
Little paper moon girl
where did you go

>[v 2]
You carried the rain
a thousand miles in
and never once
set the weather down

>Couldn't picture a morning
that came any softer
Couldn't reach for the door
when the room had gone hollow

>[pre]
So you folded it small,
what was left of your warmth,
and held it like something
you knew wouldn't last

>[chorus]
Little paper moon girl
you'll burn through the night
Little paper moon girl
the world's just too rough for something made so fine
Hold on, hold on
the night isn't long
Little paper moon girl
Lemme finish this one song

>[musical interlude]

>[bridge]
I won't say it was a gift
I won't make it mean well
You were tired in a way
I could never quite tell

>And now there's a quiet
where all of you was
a shape in the air
that won't fill back in

>[final chorus / coda]
Little paper moon girl
you burned through the night
and you went so quiet
No one noticed the light fade out
Little paper moon girl
You belonged.

I've been working on an (automated) workflow that can use completely AI generated images to create pixel art sprites with a lattice-fitting algorithm to do the downsampling into crisp, clean pixel art. I got it basically identical to a ground truth that I hand-redrew in one example. The lattice based approach works better than any uniform grid fitting approach because of global alignment inconsistencies despite areas looking locally consistent and on a grid. It's been an interesting problem to solve but I'm hoping this is a useful tool to have for generating sprite work. I know there's other things out there, and I haven't tried them all, but they seem to have shortcomings or don't end up producing crisp outputs. I haven't tested it on AI generated images from other image generators but it has been doing well with outputs from gpt-image-2 which produces pretty well-formed AI pixel art.

lately my iphone has been autocorrecting perfectly correct things into the wrong thing. like why would i have gone out of my way to type a symbol here if I meant “well”. is there a way to have it change what I typed only if it’s an actual typo?